The languages spoken by those steppe tribes, around 4000 BCE, probably included archaic Proto-Indo-European dialects of the kind partly preserved later in Anatolian. The steppe people who spoke in that way probably already rode horses. Were the Suvorovo sites in the lower Danube valley created by Indo-European invaders on horseback? Did they play a role in the destruction of the tell settlements of the lower Danube valley, as Gimbutas suggested? Or did they just slip into an opening created by climate change and agricultural failures? In either case, why did the Cucuteni-Tripolye culture survive and even prosper? To address these questions we first have to examine the Cucuteni-Tripolye culture and its relations with steppe cultures.
WARFARE AND ALLIANCE: THE CUCUTENI-TRIPOLYE
CULTURE AND THE STEPPES
The crisis in the lower Danube valley corresponded to late Cucuteni A3/ Tripolye B1, around 4300–4000 BCE. Tripolye B1 was marked by a steep increase in the construction of fortifications—ditches and earthen banks—to protect settlements (figure 11.2). Fortifications might have appeared just about when the climate began to deteriorate and the collapse of Old Europe occurred, but Cucuteni-Tripolye fortifications then decreased during the coldest years of the Piora Oscillation, during Tripolye B2, 4000–3700 BCE. If climate change destabilized Old Europe and caused the initial construction of Cucuteni-Tripolye fortifications, the first phase of change was sufficient by itself to tip the system into crisis. Probably there was more to it than just climate.
Only 10% of Tripolye B1 settlements were fortified even in the worst of times. But those that were fortified required substantial labor, implying a serious, chronic threat. Fortified Cucteni-Tripolye villages usually were built at the end of a steep-sided promontory, protected by a ditch dug across the promontory neck. The ditches were 2–5 m wide and 1.5–3 m deep, made by removing 500–1,500 m3 of earth. They were relocated and deepened as settlements grew in size, as at Traian and Habaşeşti I. In a database of 2,017 Cucuteni/Tripolye settlements compiled by the Moldovan archaeologist V. Dergachev, half of all fortified Cucuteni/Tripolye sites are dated just to the Tripolye B1 period. About 60% of all the flint projectile points from all the Cucuteni/Tripolye culture also belonged just to the Tripolye B1 period. There was no corresponding increase in hunting during Tripolye B1 (no increase in wild animal bones in settlements), and so the high frequency of projectile points was not connected with hunting. Probably it was associated with increased warfare.
The number of Cucuteni-Tripolye settlements increased from about 35 settlements per century during Tripolye A to about 340 (!) during Tripolye B1, a tenfold rise in the number of settlements without a significant expansion of the area settled (figure 11.3b).13 Part of this increase in settlement density during Tripolye B1 might be ascribed to refugees fleeing from the towns of the Gumelniţa culture. At least one Tripolye B1 settlement in the Prut drainage, Drutsy 1, appears to have been attacked. More than one hundred flint points (made of local Carpathian flint) were found around the walls of the three excavated houses as if they had been peppered with arrows.14 Compared to its past and its future, the Tripolye B1 period was a time of sharply increased conflict in the Eastern Carpathians.
Figure 11.2 Habaşesti I, a fortified Tripolye B1 village. After Chernysh 1982.
Contact with Steppe Cultures during Tripolye B: Cucuteni C Ware
Simultaneously with the increase in fortifications and weapons, Tripolye B1 towns showed widespread evidence of contact with steppe cultures. A new pottery type, Cucuteni C ware,15 shell-tempered and similar to steppe pottery, appeared in Tripolye B1 settlements of the South Bug valley (Sabatinovka I) and in Romania (Draguşeni and Fedeleşeni, where Cucuteni C ware amounted to 10% of the ceramics). Cucuteni C ware is usually thought to indicate contact with and influence from steppe pottery traditions (figure 11.4).16 Cucuteni C ware might have been used in ordinary homes with standard Cucuteni-Tripolye fine wares as a new kind of coarse or kitchen pottery, but it did not replace traditional coarse kitchen wares tempered with grog (ground-up ceramic sherds). Some Cucuteni C pots look very much like steppe pottery, whereas others had shell-temper, gray-to-brown surface color and some typical steppe decorative techniques (like “caterpillar” impressions, made with a cord-wrapped, curved pressing tool) but were made in typical Cucuteni-Tripolye shapes with other decorative elements typical of Cucuteni-Tripolye wares.
Figure 11.3. Tripolye B1-B2 migrations. After Dergachev 2002, figure 6.2.
The origin of Cucuteni C ware is disputed. There were good utilitarian reasons for Tripolye potters to adopt shell-tempering. Shell-temper in the clay can increase resistance to heat shock, and shell-tempered pots can harden at lower firing temperatures, which could save fuel.17 Changes in the organization of pottery making could also have encouraged the spread of Cucuteni C wares. Ceramic production was beginning to be taken over by specialized ceramic-making towns during Tripolye B1 and B2, although local household production also continued in most places. Rows of reusable two-chambered kilns appeared at the edges of a few settlements, with 11 kilns at Ariusd in southeastern Transylvania. If fine painted wares were beginning to be produced in villages that specialized in making pottery and the coarse wares remained locally produced, the change in coarse wares could have reflected the changing organization of production.
Figure 11.4 Cucuteni C (bottom row) and standard Cucuteni B wares (top two rows): (1) fine ware, Novye Ruseshti I1a (Tripolye B1); (2) fine ware, Geleshti (Tripolye B2); (3–4) fine ware, Frumushika I (Tripolye B1); (5) Cucuteni C ware, Frumushika II (Tripolye B2); (6–7) Cucuteni C ware, Berezovskaya GES. After Danilenko and Shmagli 1972, Figure 7; Chernysh 1982, Figure LXV.
On the other hand, these particular coarse wares obviously resembled the pottery of steppe tribes. Many Cucuteni C pots look like they were made by Sredni Stog potters. This suggests familiarity with steppe cultures and even the presence of steppe people in some Tripolye B villages, perhaps as hired herders or during seasonal trade fairs. Although it is unlikely that all Cucuteni C pottery was made by steppe potters—there is just too much of it—the appearance of Cucuteni C ware suggests intensified interactions with steppe communities.
Steppe Symbols of Power: Polished Stone Maces
Polished stone maces were another steppe artifact type that appeared in Tripolye B1 villages. A mace, unlike an axe, cannot really be used for anything except cracking heads. It was a new weapon type and symbol of power in Old Europe, but maces had appeared across the steppes centuries earlier in DDII, Khvalynsk, and Varfolomievka contexts. There were two kinds—zoomorphic and eared types—and both had steppe prototypes that were older (figure 11.5; also see figure 9.6). Mace heads carved and polished in the shape of horse heads were found in two Cucuteni A3/A4-Tripolye B1 settlements, Fitioneşti and Fedeleşeni, both of which also had significant amounts of Cucuteni C ware. The eared type appeared at the Cucuteni-Tripolye settlements of Obarşeni and Berezovskaya GES, also with Cucuteni C ware that at Berezovskaya looked like it was imported from steppe communities. Were steppe people present in these Tripolye B1 towns? It seems likely. The integration of steppe pottery and symbols of power into Cucuteni-Tripolye material culture suggests some kind of social integration, but the maintenance of differences in economy, house form, fine pottery, metallurgy, mortuary rituals, and domestic rituals indicates that it was limited to a narrow social sector.18
Other Signs of Contact
Most settlements of the Tripolye B period, even large ones, continued to dispose of their dead in unknown ways. But inhumation graves appeared in or at the edge of a few Tripolye B1 settlement sites. A grave in the settlement of Nezvisko contained a man with a low skull and broad, thick-boned face like those of steppe people—a type of skull-and-face configuration called “Proto-Europoid” by Eastern European physical anthropologists. Tripolye, Varna, and Gumelniţa people generally had taller heads, narrower faces, and more gracile facial bones, a configuration called “Mediterranean.”19 Another indicator of movement across the steppe borde
r was the little settlement near Mirnoe in the steppes north of the Danube delta. This is the only known classic-period Tripolye settlement in the coastal steppe lowlands. It had just a few pits and the remains of a light structure containing sherds of Tripolye B1 and Cucuteni C pots, a few bones of cattle and sheep, and more than a hundred grape seeds, identified as wild grapes. Mirnoe seems to have been a temporary Tripolye B1 camp in the steppes, perhaps for grape pickers.20 Some people, though not many, were moving across the cultural-ecological frontier in both directions.
Figure 11.5 Eared and horse-head maces of Old Europe, the Suvorovo migrants, and the Pontic-Caspian steppes. Stone mace heads appeared first and were more common in the steppes. After Telegin et al. 2001; Dergachev 1999; Gheorgiu 1994; Kuzmina 2003.
During Tripolye B2, around 4000–3700 BCE, there was a significant migration out of the Prut-Seret forest-steppe uplands, the most densely settled part of the Tripolye B1 landscape, eastward into the South Bug and Dnieper valleys (figure 11.3c). Settlement density in the Prut-Seret region declined by half.21 Tripolye, the type site first explored in 1901, was an eastern frontier village of the Tripolye B2 period, situated on a high terrace overlooking the broad, fertile valley of the Dnieper River. The population consolidated into fewer, larger settlements (only about 180 settlements per century during Tripolye B2). The number of fortified settlements decreased sharply.
These signs of demographic expansion and reduced conflict appeared after the tell settlements of the Danube valley were burned and abandoned. It appears that any external threat from the steppes, if there was one, turned away from Cucuteni-Tripolye towns. Why?
Steppe Riders at the Frontiers of Old Europe
Frontiers can be envisioned as peaceful trade zones where valuables are exchanged for the mutual benefit of both sides, with economic need preventing overt hostilities, or as places where distrust is magnified by cultural misunderstandings, negative stereotypes, and the absence of bridging institutions. The frontier between agricultural Europe and the steppes has been seen as a border between two ways of life, farming and herding, that were implacably opposed. Plundering nomads like the Huns and Mongols are old archetypes of savagery. But this is a misleading stereotype, and one derived from a specialized form of militarized pastoral nomadism that did not exist before about 800 BCE. As we saw in the previous chapter, Bronze Age riders in the steppes used bows that were too long for effective mounted archery. Their arrows were of varied weights and sizes. And Bronze Age war bands were not organized like armies. The Hunnic invasion analogy is anachronistic, yet that does not mean that mounted raiding never occurred in the Eneolithic.22
There is persuasive evidence that steppe people rode horses to hunt horses in Kazakhstan by about 3700–3500 BCE. Almost certainly they were not the first to ride. Given the symbolic linkage between horses, cattle, and sheep in Pontic-Caspian steppe funerals as early as the Khvalynsk period, horseback riding might have begun in a limited way before 4500 BCE. But western steppe people began to act like they were riding only about 4300–4000 BCE, when a pattern consistent with long-distance raiding began, seen most clearly in the Suvorovo-Novodanilovka horizon described at the end of this chapter. Once people began to ride, there was nothing to prevent them from riding into tribal conflicts—not the supposed shortcomings of rope and leather bits (an organic bit worked perfectly well, as our students showed in the organic-bit riding experiment, and as the American Indian “war bridle” demonstrated on the battlefield); not the size of Eneolithic steppe horses (most were about the size of Roman cavalry horses, big enough); and certainly not the use of the wrong “seat” (an argument that early riders sat on the rump of the horse, perhaps for millennia, before they discovered the more natural forward seat—based entirely on Near Eastern images of riders probably made by artists who were unfamiliar with horses).23
Although I do see evidence for mounted raiding in the Eneolithic, I do not believe that any Eneolithic army of pitiless nomads ever lined up on the horizon mounted on shaggy ponies, waiting for the command of their bloodthirsty general. Eneolithic warfare was tribal warfare, so there were no armies, just the young men of this clan fighting the young men of that clan. And early Indo-European warfare seems from the earliest myths and poetic traditions to have been conducted principally to gain glory—imperishable fame, a poetic phrase shared between Pre-Greek and Pre-Indo-Iranian. If we are going to indict steppe raiders in the destruction of Old Europe, we first have to accept that they did not fight like later cavalry. Eneolithic warfare probably was a strictly seasonal activity conducted by groups organized more like modern neighborhood gangs than modern armies. They would have been able to disrupt harvests and frighten a sedentary population, but they were not nomads. Steppe Eneolithic settlements like Dereivka cannot be interpreted as pastoral nomadic camps. After nomadic cavalry is removed from the picture, how do we understand social and political relations across the steppe/Old European frontier?
A mutualist interpretation of steppe/farming-zone relations is one alternative. Conflict is not denied, but it is downplayed, and mutually beneficial trade and exchange are emphasized.24 Mutualism might well explain the relationship between the Cucuteni-Tripolye and Sredni Stog cultures during the Tripolye B period. Among historically known pastoralists in close contact with farming populations there has been a tendency for wealthy herd owners to form alliances with farmers to acquire land as insurance against the loss of their more volatile wealth in herds. In modern economies, where land is a market commodity, the accumulation of property could lead the wealthiest herders to move permanently into towns. In a pre-state tribal world this was not possible because agricultural land was not for sale, but the strategy of securing durable alliances and assets in agricultural communities as insurance against future herd losses could still work. Steppe herders might have taken over the management of some Tripolye herds in exchange for metal goods, linen textiles, or grain; or steppe clans might have attended regular trading fairs at agricultural towns. Annual trading fairs between mounted hunters and river-valley corn farmers were a regular feature of life in the northern Plains of the U.S.25 Alliances and trade agreements sealed by marriages could account for the increased steppe involvement in Tripolye communities during Tripolye B1, about 4400–4000 BCE. The institutions that normalized these cross-cultural relations probably included gift partnerships. In archaic Proto-Indo-European as partly preserved in Hittite, the verb root that in all other Indo-European languages meant “give” (*dō-) meant “take” and another root (pai) meant “give.” From this give-and-take equivalence and a series of other linguistic clues Emile Benveniste concluded that, during the archaic phase of Proto-Indo-European, “exchange appears as a round of gifts rather than a genuine commercial operation.”26
On the other hand, mutualism cannot explain everything, and the end of the Varna-Karanovo VI–Gumelniţa culture is one of those events it does not explain. Lawrence Keeley sparked a heated debate among archaeologists by insisting that warfare was common, deadly, and endemic among prehistoric tribal societies. Tribal frontiers might be creative places, as Frederik Barth realized, but they often witnessed pretty nasty behavior. Tribal borders commonly were venues for insults: the Sioux called the Bannock the “Filthy-Lodge People”; the Eskimo called the Ingalik “Nit-heads”; the Hopi called the Navaho “Bastards”; the Algonkian called the Mohawk “Maneaters”; the Shuar called the Huarani “Savages”; and the simple but eloquent “Enemies” is a very common meaning for names given by neighboring tribes. Because tribal frontiers displayed things people needed just beyond the limits of their own society, the temptation to take them by force was strong. It was doubly strong when those things had legs, like cattle.27
Cattle raiding was encouraged by Indo-European beliefs and rituals. The myth of Trito, the warrior, rationalized cattle theft as the recovery of cattle that the gods had intended for the people who sacrificed properly. Proto-Indo-European initiation rituals included a requirement that boys initiated into man
hood had to go out and become like a band of dogs or wolves—to raid their enemies.28 Proto-Indo-European also had a word for bride-price, *ŭedmo-.29 Cattle, sheep, and probably horses would have been used to pay bride-prices, since they generally are valued higher than other currencies for bride-price payments in pastoral societies without formal money.30 Already in the preceding centuries domesticated animals had become the proper gifts for gods at funerals (e.g., at Khvalynsk). A relatively small elite already competed across very large regions, adopting the same symbols of status—maces with polished stone heads, boar’s tusk plaques, copper rings and pendants, shell disc beads, and bird-bone tubes. When bride-prices escalated as one aspect of this competition, the result would be increased cattle raiding by unmarried men. Combined with the justification provided by the Trito myth and the institution of male-initiation-group raiding, rising bride-prices calculated in animals would have made cross-border raiding almost inevitable.
If they were on foot, Eneolithic steppe cattle raiders might have attacked one another or attacked neighboring Tripolye settlements. But, if they were mounted, they could pick a distant target that did not threaten valued gift partnerships. Raiding parties of a dozen riders could move fifty to seventy-five head of cattle or horses fairly quickly over hundreds of kilometers.31 Thieving raids would have led to deaths, and then to more serious killing and revenge raids. A cycle of warfare evolving from thieving to revenge raidsprobably contributed to the collapse of the tell towns of the Danube valley.
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World Page 27
