The Suvorovo graves around the Danube delta always were marked by the erection of a mound or kurgan, probably to increase their visibility on a disputed frontier, but possibly also as a visual response to the tells of the lower Danube valley (figure 11.11). Suvorovo kurgans were among the first erected in the steppes. Back in the Dnieper-Azov steppes, most Novodanilovka graves also had a surface marker of some kind, but earthen kurgans were less common than small stone cairns piled above the grave (Chapli, Yama). Kurgans in the Danube steppes rarely were more than 10 m in diameter, and often were surrounded by a ring of small stones or a cromlech (retaining wall) of large stones. The grave pit was usually rectangular but sometimes oval. The Sredni Stog burial posture (on the back with knees raised) appeared in most (Csongrad, Chapli, Novodanilovka, Giurgiuleşti, Suvorovo grave 7) but not all graves. In some the body was laid out extended (Suvorovo grave 1) or contracted on the side (Utkonosovka). Animal sacrifices occurred in some graves (cattle at Giurgiulesti, cattle and sheep at Chapli, and cattle at Krivoy Rog). The people buried in Novodanilovka graves in the Pontic steppes were wide-faced Proto-Europoid types, like the dominant element in Sredni Stog graves, whereas at least some of those buried in Suvorovo graves such as Giurgiulesti had narrow faces and gracile skulls, suggesting intermarriage with local Old European people.42
Figure 11.11 Suvorovo-type kurgan graves and pots. Most Suvorovo graves contained no pottery or contained pots made by other cultures, and so these few apparently self-made pots are important: left, Suvorovo cemetery II kurgan 1; right, Artsiza kurgan; bottom, sherds and pots from graves. After Alekseeva 1976, figure 1.
The copper from Suvorovo-Novodanilovka graves helps to date them. Trace elements in the copper from Giurgiulesti and Suvorovo in the lower Danube, and from Chapli and Novodanilovka in the Pontic steppes, are typical of the mines in the Bulgarian Balkans (Ai Bunar and/or Medni Rud) that abruptly ceased production when Old Europe collapsed. The eastern European copper trade shifted to chemically distinctive Hungarian and Transylvanian ores during Tripolye B2, after 4000 BCE.43 So Suvorovo-Novodanilovka is dated before 4000 BCE by its copper. On the other hand, Suvorovo kurgans replaced the settlements of the Bolgrad group north of the Danube delta, which were still occupied during early Tripolye B1, or after about 4400–4300 BCE. These two bookends (after the abandonment of Bolgrad, before the wider Old European collapse) restrict Suvorovo-Novodanilovka to a period between about 4300 and 4000 BCE.
Polished stone mace-heads shaped like horse heads were found in the main grave at Suvorovo and at Casimcea in the Danube delta region (figure 11.5). Similar mace-heads occurred at two Tripolye B1 settlements, at two late Karanovo VI settlements, and up the Danube valley at the settlement of Sălcuţa IV—all of them in Old European towns contemporary with the Suvorovo intrusion. Similar horse-head mace-heads were found in the Volga-Ural steppes and in the Kalmyk steppes north of the Terek River at Terekli-Mekteb.44 “Eared” stone mace heads appeared first in several cemeteries of the Khvalynsk culture (Khvalynsk, Krivoluchie) and then somewhat later at several eastern steppe sites contemporary with Suvorovo-Novodanilovka (Novorsk, Arkhara, and Sliachovsko) and in two Tripolye B1 towns. Cruciform mace heads appeared first in the grave of a DDII chief at Nikol’skoe on the Dnieper (see figure 9.6), and then reappeared centuries later with the Suvorovo migration into Transylvania at Decea Mureşului and Ocna Sibiului; one example also appeared at a Tripolye settlement on the Prut (Bârlăleşti).
Polished stone maces were typical steppe prestige objects going back to hvalynsk, Varfolomievka, and DDII, beginning ca. 5000–4800 BCE. They were not typical prestige objects for earlier Tripolye or Gumelniţa societies.45 Maces shaped into horse-heads probably were made by people for whom the horse was a powerful symbol. Horse bones averaged only 3–6% of mammal bones in Tripolye B1 settlements and even less in Gumelniţa, and so horses were not important in Old European diets. The horse-head maces signaled a new iconic status for the horse just when the Suvorovo people appeared. If horses were not being ridden into the Danube valley, it is difficult to explain their sudden symbolic importance in Old European settlements.46
The Causes and Targets of the Migrations
Winters began to get colder in the interior steppes after about 4200 BCE. The marshlands of the Danube delta are the largest in Europe west of the Volga. Marshes were the preferred winter refuge for nomadic pastoralists in the Black Sea steppes during recorded history, because they offered good winter forage and cover for cattle. The Danube delta was richer in this resource than any other place on the Black Sea. The first Suvorovo herders who appeared on the northern edge of the Danube delta about 4200–4100 BCE might have brought some of their cattle south from the Dnieper steppes during a period of particularly cold winters.
Another attraction was the abundant copper that came from Old European towns. The archaeologist Susan Vehik argued that increased levels of conflict associated with climatic deterioration in the southwestern U.S. Plains around 1250 CE created an increased demand for gift-wealth (to attract and retain allies in tribal warfare) and therefore stimulated long-distance trade for prestige goods.47 But the Suvorovo immigrants did not establish gift exchanges like those I have hypothesized for their relations with Cucuteni-Tripolye people. Instead, they seem to have chased the locals away.
The thirty settlements of the Bolgrad culture north of the Danube delta were abandoned and burned soon after the Suvorovo immigrants arrived. These small agricultural villages were composed of eight to ten semi-subterranean houses with fired clay hearths, benches, and large storage pots set in pits in the floor. Graphite-painted fine pottery and numerous female figurines show a mixture of Gumelniţa (Aldeni II type) and Tripolye A traits.48 They were occupied mainly during Tripolye A, then were abandoned and burned during early Tripolye B1, probably around 4200–4100 BCE. Most of the abandonments apparently were planned, since almost everything was picked up. But at Vulcaneşti II, radiocarbon dated 4200–4100 BCE (5300 ± 60 BP), abandonment was quick, with many whole pots left to burn. This might date the arrival of the Suvorovo migrants.49
A second and seemingly smaller migration stream branched off from the first and ran westward to the Transylvanian plateau and then down the copper-rich Mureş River valley into eastern Hungary. These migrants left cemeteries at Decea Mureşului in the Mureş valley and at Csongrad in the plains of eastern Hungary. At Decea Mureşului, near important copper deposits, there were fifteen to twenty graves, posed on the back with the knees probably originally raised but fallen to the left or right, colored with red ochre, with Unio shell beads, long flint blades (up to 22 cm long), copper awls, a copper rod “torque,” and two four-knobbed mace heads made of black polished stone (see figure 11.10). The migrants arrived at the end of the Tiszapolgar and the beginning of the Bodrogkeresztur periods, about 4000–3900 BCE, but seemed not to disrupt the local cultural traditions. Hoards of large golden and copper ornaments of Old European types were hidden at Hencida and Mojgrad in eastern Hungary, probably indicating unsettled conditions, but otherwise there was a lot of cultural continuity between Tiszapolgar and Bodrogkeresztur.50 This was no massive folk migration but a series of long-distance movements by small groups, exactly the kind of movement expected among horseback riders.
The Suvorovo Graves
The Suvorovo kurgan (Suvorovo II k.1) was 13 m in diameter and covered four Eneolithic graves (see figure 11.11).51 Stones a meter tall formed a cromlech around the base of the mound. Within the cromlech two smaller stone circles were built on a north-south axis, each surrounding a central grave (gr. 7 and 1). Grave 7 was the double grave of an adult male and female buried supine with raised legs, heads to the east. The floor of the grave was covered with red ochre, white chalk, and black fragments of charcoal. A magnificent polished stone mace shaped like the head of a horse lay on the pelvis of the male (see figure 11.5). Belts of shell disk beads draped the female’s hips. The grave also contained two copper awls made of Balkan copper, three lamellar flint blades, and
a flint end scraper. Grave 1, in the other stone circle, contained an adult male in an extended position and two sherds of a shell-tempered pot.
The Suvorovo cemetery at Giurgiuleşti, near the mouth of the Prut, contained five graves grouped around a hearth full of burned animal bones.52 Above grave 4, that of the adult male, was another deposit of cattle skulls and bones. Graves 4 and 5 were those of an adult male and female; graves 1, 2, and 3, contained three children, apparently a family group. The graves were covered by a mound, but the excavators were uncertain if the mound was built for these graves or was made later. The pose in four of the five graves was on the back with raised knees (grave 2 contained disarticulated bones), and the grave floors were painted with red ochre. Two children (gr. 1 and 3) and the adult woman (gr. 5) together wore nineteen copper spiral bracelets and five boars-tusk pendants, one of which was covered in sheet copper (see figure 11.10:h). Grave 2 contained a late Gumelniţa pot. The children and adult female also had great numbers (exact count not published) of copper beads, shell disc beads, beads of red deer teeth, two beads made of Aegean coral, flint blades, and a flint core. Six of eight metal objects analyzed by N. Ryndina were made from typical Varna-Gumelniţa Balkan ores. One bracelet and one ring were made of an intentional arsenic-copper alloy (respectively, 1.9% and 1.2% arsenic) that had never occurred in Varna or Gumelniţa metals. The adult male buried in grave 4 had two gold rings and two composite projectile points, each more than 40 cm long, made with microlithic flint blades slotted along the edges of a bone point decorated with copper and gold tubular fittings (see figure 11.10:n). They probably were for two javelins, perhaps the preferred weapons of Suvorovo riders.
Kurgans also appeared south of the Danube River in the Dobruja at Casimcea, where an adult male was buried in an ochre-stained grave on his back with raised knees, accompanied by a polished stone horse-head mace (see figure 11.5), five triangular flint axes, fifteen triangular flint points, and three lamellar flint blades. Another Suvorovo grave was placed in an older Varna-culture cemetery at Devnya, near Varna. This single grave contained an adult male in an ochre-stained grave on his back with raised knees, accompanied by thirty-two golden rings, a copper axe, a copper decorative pin, a copper square-sectioned chisel 27 cm long, a bent copper wire 1.64 m long, thirty-six flint lamellar blades, and five triangular flint points.
A separate (about 80–90 km distant) but contemporary cluster of kurgans was located between the Prut and Dniester valleys near the Tripolye frontier (Kainari, Artsiza, and Kopchak). At Kainari, only a dozen kilometers from the Tripolye B1 settlement of Novi Ruşeşti, a kurgan was erected over a grave with a copper “torque” strung with Unio shell disc beads (see figure 11.10:k); long lamellar flint blades, red ochre, and a Tripolye B1 pot.
The Novodanilovka Group
Back in the steppes north of the Black Sea the elite were buried with copper spiral bracelets, rings, and bangles; copper beads of several types; copper shell-shaped pendants; and copper awls, all containing Balkan trace elements and made technologically just like the objects at Giurgiuleşti and Suvorovo.53 Copper shell-shaped pendants, a very distinctive steppe ornament type, occurred in both Novodanilovka (Chapli) and Suvorovo (Giurgiulesti) graves (see figure 11.10:j): The grave floors were strewn with red ochre or with a chunk of red ochre. The body was positioned on the back with raised knees and the head oriented toward the east or northeast. Surface markers were a small kurgan or stone cairn, often surrounded by a stone circle or cromlech. The following were among the richest:
Novodanilovka, a single stone-lined cist grave containing two adults at Novodanilovka in the dry hills between the Dnieper and the Sea of Azov with two copper spiral bracelets, more than a hundred Unio shell beads, fifteen lamellar flint blades, and a pot imported from the North Caucasian Svobodnoe culture;
Krivoy Rog, in the Ingulets valley, west of the Dnieper, a kurgan covering two graves (1 and 2) with flint axes, flint lamellar blades, a copper spiral bracelet, two copper spiral rings, hundreds of copper beads, a gold tubular shaft fitting, Unio disc beads, and other objects;
Chapli (see figure 11.10) at the north end of the Dnieper Rapids, with five rich graves. The richest of these (1a and 3a) were children’s graves with two copper spiral bracelets, thirteen shell-shaped copper pendants, more than three hundred copper beads, a copper foil headband, more than two hundred Unio shell beads, one lamellar flint blade, and one boars-tusk pendant like those at Giurgiuleşti; and
Petro-Svistunovo (see figure 11.10), a cemetery of twelve cromlechs at the south end of the Dnieper Rapids largely destroyed by erosion, with Grave 1 alone yielding two copper spiral bracelets, more than a hundred copper beads, three flint axes, and a flint lamellar blade, and the other graves yielding three more spiral bracelets, a massive cast copper axe comparable to some from Varna, and boars-tusk pendants like those at Chapli and Giurgiuleşti.
About eighty Sredni Stog cemeteries looked very similar in ritual and occurred in the same region but did not contain the prestige goods that appeared in the Novodanilovka graves, which probably were the graves of clan chiefs. The chiefs redistributed some of their imported Balkan wealth. For example, in the small Sredni Stog cemetery at Dereivka, grave 1 contained three small copper beads and grave 4 contained an imported Tripolye B1 bowl. The other graves contained no grave gifts at all.
WARFARE, CLIMATE CHANGE, AND LANGUAGE SHIFT
IN THE LOWER DANUBE VALLEY
The colder climate of 4200–3800 BCE probably weakened the agricultural economies of Old Europe at the same time that steppe herders pushed into the marshes and plains around the mouth of the Danube. Climate change probably played a significant role in the ensuing crisis, because virtually all the cultures that occupied tell settlements in southeastern Europe abandoned them about 4000 BCE—in the lower Danube valley, the Balkans, on the Aegean coast (the end of Sitagroi III), and even in Greece (the end of Late Neolithic II in Thessaly).54
But even if climatic cooling and crop failures must have been significant causes of these widespread tell abandonments, they were not the only cause. The massacres at Yunatsite and Hotnitsa testify to conflict. Polished stone mace heads were status weapons that glorified the cracking of heads. Many Suvorovo-Novodanilovka graves contained sets of lanceolate flint projectile points, flint axes, and, in the Giurgiuleşti chief’s grave, two fearsome 40-cm javelin heads decorated with copper and gold. Persistent raiding and warfare would have made fixed settlements a strategic liability. Raids by Slavic tribes caused the abandonment of all the Greek-Byzantine cities in this same region over the course of less than a hundred years in the sixth century CE. Crop failures exacerbated by warfare would have encouraged a shift to a more mobile economy.55 As that shift happened, the pastoral tribes of the steppes were transformed from scruffy immigrants or despised raiders to chiefs and patrons who were rich in the animal resources that the new economy required, and who knew how to manage larger herds in new ways, most important among these that herders were mounted on horseback.
The Suvorovo chiefs displayed many of the behaviors that fostered language shift among the Acholi in East Africa: they imported a new funeral cult with an associated new mortuary ideology; they sponsored funeral feasts, always events to build alliances and recruit allies; they displayed icons of power (stone maces); they seem to have glorified war (they were buried with status weapons); and it was probably their economic example that prompted the shift to pastoral economies in the Danube valley. Proto-Indo-European religion and social structure were both based on oath-bound promises that obligated patrons (or the gods) to provide protection and gifts of cattle and horses to their clients (or humans). The oath (*h1óitos) that secured these obligations could, in principle, be extended to clients from the Old European tells.
An archaic Proto-Indo-European language, probably ancestral to Anatolian, spread into southeastern Europe during this era of warfare, dislocation, migration, and economic change, around 4200–3900 BCE. In a similar situation, in a context of
chronic warfare on the Pathan/Baluch border in western Pakistan, Frederik Barth described a steady stream of agricultural Pathans who had lost their land and then crossed over and joined the pastoral Baluch. Landless Pathan could not regain their status in other Pathan villages, where land was necessary for respectable status. Tells and their fixed field systems might have played a similar limiting role in Old European status hierarchies. Becoming the client of a pastoral patron who offered protection and rewards in exchange for service was an alternative that held the promise of vertical social mobility for the children. The speakers of Proto-Indo-European talked about gifts and honors awarded for great deeds and loot/booty acquired unexpectedly, suggesting that achievement-based honor and wealth could be acquired.56 Under conditions of chronic warfare, displaced tell dwellers may well have adopted an Indo-European patron and language as they adopted a pastoral economy.
AFTER THE COLLAPSE
In the centuries after 4000 BCE, sites of the Cernavoda I type spread through the lower Danube valley (figure 11.12). Cernavoda I was a settlement on a promontory overlooking the lower Danube. Cernavoda I material culture probably represented the assimilation of migrants from the steppes with local people who had abandoned their tells. Cernavoda I ceramics appeared at Pevec and Hotnitsa-Vodopada in north-central Bulgaria, and at Renie II in the lower Prut region. These settlements were small, with five to ten pit-houses, and were fortified. Cernavoda I pottery also occurred in settlements of other cultural types, as at Telish IV in northwestern Bulgaria. Cernavoda I pottery included simplified versions of late Gumelniţa shapes, usually dark-surfaced and undecorated but made in shell-tempered fabrics. The U-shaped “caterpillar” cord impressions (figure 11.12i), dark surfaces, and shell tempering were typical of Sredni Stog or Cucuteni C.57
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World Page 29
