Prominent among these new dark-surfaced, shell-tempered pottery assemblages were loop-handled drinking cups and tankards called “Scheibenhenkel,” a new style of liquid containers and servers that appeared throughout the middle and lower Danube valley. Andrew Sherratt interpreted the Scheibenhenkel horizon as the first clear indicator of a new custom of drinking intoxicating beverages.58 The replacement of highly decorated storage and serving vessels by plain drinking cups could indicate that new elite drinking rituals had replaced or nudged aside older household feasts.
The Cernavoda I economy was based primarily on the herding of sheep and goats. Many horse bones were found at Cernavoda I, and, for the first time, domesticated horses became a regular element in the animal herds of the middle and lower Danube valley.59 Greenfield’s zoological studies in the middle Danube showed that, also for the first time, animals were butchered at different ages in upland and lowland sites. This suggested that herders moved animals seasonally between upland and lowland pastures, a form of herding called “transhumant pastoralism.” The new pastoral economy might have been practiced in a new, more mobile way, perhaps aided by horseback riding.60
Figure 11.12 Black- or grey-surfaced ceramics from the Cernavoda I settlement, lower Danube valley, about 3900–3600 BCE, including two-handled tankards. After Morintz and Roman 1968.
Kurgan graves were created only during the initial Suvorovo penetration. Afterward the immigrants’ descendants stopped making kurgans. The flat-grave cemetery of Ostrovul Corbului probably dates to this settling-in period, with sixty-three graves, some displaying a posture on the back with raised knees, others contracted on the side, on the ruins of an abandoned tell. Cernavoda I flat graves also appeared at the Brailiţa cemetery, where the males had wide Proto-Europoid skulls and faces like the steppe Novodanilovka population, and the females had gracile Mediterranean faces, like the Old European Gumelnitsa population.
By about 3600 BCE the Cernavoda I culture developed into Cernavoda III. Cernavoda III was, in turn, connected with one of the largest and most influential cultural horizons of eastern Europe, the Baden-Boleraz horizon, centered in the middle Danube (Hungary) and dated about 3600–3200 BCE. Drinking cups of this culture featured very high strap handles and were made in burnished grey-black fabrics with channeled flutes decorating their shoulders. Somewhat similar drinking sets were made from eastern Austria and Moravia to the mouth of the Danube and south to the Aegean coast (Dikili Tash IIIA–Sitagroi IV). Horse bones appeared almost everywhere, with larger sheep interpreted as wool sheep. At lowland sites in the middle Danube region, 60–91% of the sheep-goat lived to adult ages, suggesting management for secondary products, probably wool. Similarly 40–50% of the caprids were adults in two late TRB sites of this same era (Schalkenburg and Bronocice) in upland southern Poland. After 3600 BCE horses and wool sheep were increasingly common in eastern Europe.
Pre-Anatolian languages probably were introduced to the lower Danube valley and perhaps to the Balkans about 4200–4000 BCE by the Suvorovo migrants. We do not know when their descendants moved into Anatolia. Perhaps pre-Anatolian speakers founded Troy I in northwestern Anatolia around 3000 BCE. In prayers recited by the later Hittites, the sun god of heaven, Sius (cognate with Greek Zeus), was described as rising from the sea. This has always been taken as a fossilized ritual phrase retained from some earlier pre-Hittite homeland located west of a large sea.61 The graves of Suvorovo were located west of the Black Sea. Did the Suvorovo people ride their horses down to the shore and pray to the rising sun?
CHAPTER TWELVE
Seeds of Change on the Steppe Borders
Maikop Chiefs and Tripolye Towns
After Old Europe collapsed, the dedication of copper objects in North Pontic graves declined by almost 80%.1 Beginning in about 3800 BCE and until about 3300 BCE the varied tribes and regional cultures of the Pontic-Caspian steppes seem to have turned their attention away from the Danube valley and toward their other borders, where significant social and economic changes were now occurring.
On the southeast, in the North Caucasus Mountains, spectacularly ostentatious chiefs suddenly appeared among what had been very ordinary small-scale farmers. They displayed gold-covered clothing, gold and silver staffs, and great quantities of bronze weapons obtained from what must have seemed beyond the rim of the earth—in fact, from the newly formed cities of Middle Uruk Mesopotamia, through Anatolian middlemen. The first contact between southern urban civilizations and the people of the steppe margins occurred in about 3700–3500 BCE. It caused a social and political transformation that was expressed archaeologically as the Maikop culture of the North Caucasus piedmont. Maikop was the filter through which southern innovations—including possibly wagons—first entered the steppes. Sheep bred to grow long wool might have passed from north to south in return, a little considered possibility. The Maikop chiefs used a tomb type that looked like an elaborated copy of the Suvorovo-Novodanilovka kurgan graves of the steppes, and some of them seem to have moved north into the steppes. A few Maikop traders might have lived inside steppe settlements on the lower Don River. But, oddly, very little southern wealth was shared with the steppe clans. The gold, turquoise, and carnelian stayed in the North Caucasus. Maikop people might have driven the first wagons into the Eurasian steppes, and they certainly introduced new metal alloys that made a more sophisticated metallurgy possible. We do not know what they took in return—possibly wool, possibly horses, possibly even Cannabis or saiga antelope hides, though there is only circumstantial evidence for any of these. But in most parts of the Pontic-Caspian steppes the evidence for contact with Maikop is slight—a pot here, an arsenical bronze axe-head there.
On the west, Tripolye (C1) agricultural towns on the middle Dnieper began to bury their dead in cemeteries—the first Tripolye communities to accept the ritual of cemetery burial—and their coarse pottery began to look more and more like late Sredni Stog pottery. This was the first stage in the breakdown of the Dnieper frontier, a cultural border that had existed for two thousand years, and it seems to have signaled a gradual process of cross-border assimilation in the middle Dnieper forest-steppe zone. But while assimilation and incremental change characterized Tripolye towns on the middle Dnieper frontier, Tripolye towns closer to the steppe border on the South Bug River ballooned to enormous sizes, more than 350 ha, and, between about 3600 and 3400 BCE, briefly became the largest human settlements in the world. The super towns of Tripolye C1 were more than 1 km across but had no palaces, temples, town walls, cemeteries, or irrigation systems. They were not cities, as they lacked the centralized political authority and specialized economy associated with cities, but they were actually bigger than the earliest cities in Uruk Mesopotamia. Most Ukrainian archaeologists agree that warfare and defense probably were the underlying reasons why the Tripolye population aggregated in this way, and so the super towns are seen as a defensive strategy in a situation of confrontation and conflict, either between the Tripolye towns or between those towns and the people of the steppes, or both. But the strategy failed. By 3300 BCE all the big towns were gone, and the entire South Bug valley was abandoned by Tripolye farmers.
Finally, on the east, on the Ural River, a section of the Volga-Ural steppe population decided, about 3500 BCE, to migrate eastward across Kazakhstan more than 2000 km to the Altai Mountains. We do not know why they did this, but their incredible trek across the Kazakh steppes led to the appearance of the Afanasievo culture in the western Gorny Altai. The Afanasievo culture was intrusive in the Altai, and it introduced a suite of domesticated animals, metal types, pottery types, and funeral customs that were derived from the Volga-Ural steppes. This long-distance migration almost certainly separated the dialect group that later developed into the Indo-European languages of the Tocharian branch, spoken in Xinjiang in the caravan cities of the Silk Road around 500 CE but divided at that time into two or three quite different languages, all exhibiting archaic Indo-European traits. Most studies of Indo-European sequenci
ng put the separation of Tocharian after that of Anatolian and before any other branch. The Afanasievo migration meets that expectation. The migrants might also have been responsible for introducing horseback riding to the pedestrian foragers of the northern Kazakh steppes, who were quickly transformed into the horse-riding, wild-horse–hunting Botai culture just when the Afanasievo migration began.
By this time, early Proto-Indo-European dialects must have been spoken in the Pontic-Caspian steppes, tongues revealing the innovations that separated all later Indo-European languages from the archaic Proto-Indo-European of the Anatolian type. The archaeological evidence indicates that a variety of different regional cultures still existed in the steppes, as they had throughout the Eneolithic. This regional variability in material culture, though not very robust, suggests that early Proto-Indo-European probably still was a regional language spoken in one part of the Pontic-Caspian steppes—possibly in the eastern part, since this was where the migration that led to the Tocharian branch began. Groups that distinguished themselves by using eastern innovations in their speech probably were engaging in a political act—allying themselves with specific clans, their political institutions, and their prestige—and in a religious act—accepting rituals, songs, and prayers uttered in that eastern dialect. Songs, prayers, and poetry were central aspects of life in all early Indo-European societies; they were the vehicle through which the right way of speaking reproduced itself publicly.
THE FIVE CULTURES OF THE FINAL ENEOLITHIC IN THE STEPPES
Much regional diversity and relatively little wealth existed in the Pontic-Caspian steppes between about 3800 and 3300 BCE (table 12.1). Regional variants as defined by grave and pot types, which is how archaeologists define them, had no clearly defined borders; on the contrary, there was a lot of border shifting and inter-penetration. At least five Final Eneolithic archaeological cultures have been identified in the Pontic-Caspian steppes (figure 12.1). Sites of these five groups are sometimes found in the same regions, occasionally in the same cemeteries; overlapped in time; shared a number of similarities; and were, in any case, fairly variable. In these circumstances, we cannot be sure that they all deserve recognition as different archaeological cultures. But we cannot understand the archaeological descriptions of this period without them, and together they provide a good picture of what was happening in the Pontic-Caspian steppes between 3800 and 3300 BCE. The western groups were engaged in a sort of two-pronged death dance, as it turned out, with the Cucuteni-Tripolye culture. The southern groups interacted with Maikop traders. And the eastern groups cast off a set of migrants who rode across Kazakhstan to a new home in the Altai, a subject reserved for the next chapter. Horseback riding is documented archaeologically in Botai-Tersek sites in Kazakhstan during this period (chapter 10) and probably appeared earlier, and so we proceed on the assumption that most steppe tribes were now equestrian.
TABLE 12.1 Selected Radiocarbon Dates for Final Eneolithic Sites in the Steppes and Early Bronze Age Sites in the North Caucasus Piedmont
Figure 12.1 Final Eneolithic culture areas from the Carpathians to the Altai, 3800–3300 BCE.
Figure 12.2 Final Eneolithic sites in the steppes and Early Bronze Age sites in the North Caucasus piedmont.
The Mikhailovka I Culture
The westernmost of the five Final Eneolithic cultures of the Pontic-Caspian steppes was the Mikhailovka I culture, also called the Lower Mikhailovka or Nizhnimikhailovkskii culture, named after a stratified settlement on the Dnieper located below the Dnieper Rapids (figure 12.2).2 Below the last cascade, the river spread out over a broad basin in the steppes. Braided channels crisscrossed a sandy, marshy, forested lowland 10–20 km wide and 100 km long, a rich place for hunting and fishing and a good winter refuge for cattle, now inundated by hydroelectric dams. Mikhailovka overlooked this protected depression at a strategic river crossing. Its initial establishment probably was an outgrowth of increased east-west traffic across the river. It was the most important settlement on the lower Dnieper from the Late Eneolithic through the Early Bronze Age, about 3700–2500 BCE. Mikhailovka I, the original settlement, was occupied about 3700–3400 BCE, contemporary with late Tripolye B2 and early C1, late Sredni Stog, and early Maikop. A few late Sredni Stog and Maikop pottery sherds occurred in the occupation layer at Mikhailovka I. A whole Maikop pot was found in a grave with Mikhailovka I sherds at Sokolovka on the Ingul River, in kurgan 1, grave 6a. Tripolye B2 and C1 pots also are found in Mikhailovka I graves. These exchanges of pottery show that the Mikhailovka I culture had at least sporadic contacts with Tripolye B2/C1 towns, the Maikop culture, and late Sredni Stog communities.3
The people of Mikhailovka I cultivated cereal crops. At Mikhailovka I, imprints of cultivated seeds were found on 9 pottery sherds of 2,461 examined, or 1 imprint in 273 sherds.4 The grain included emmer wheat, barley, millet, and 1 imprint of a bitter vetch seed (Vicia ervilia), a crop grown today for animal fodder. Zoologists identified 1,166 animal bones (NISP) from Mikhailovka I, of which 65% were sheep-goat, 19% cattle, 9% horse, and less than 2% pig. Wild boar, aurochs, and saiga antelope were hunted occasionally, accounting for less than 5 percent of the animal bones.
The high number of sheep-goat at Mikhailovka I might suggest that long-wool sheep were present. Wool sheep probably were present in the North Caucasus at Svobodnoe (see below) by 4000 BCE, and almost certainly were in the Danube valley during the Cernavoda III–Boleraz period around 3600–3200 BCE, so wool sheep could have been kept at Mikhailovka I. But even if long-wool sheep were bred in the steppes during this period, they clearly were not yet the basis for a widespread new wool economy, because cattle or even deer bones still outnumbered sheep in other steppe settlements.5
Mikhailovka I pottery was shell-tempered and had dark burnished surfaces, usually unornamented (figure 12.3). Common shapes were egg-shaped pots or flat-based, wide-shouldered tankards with everted rims. A few silver ornaments and one gold ring, quite rare in the Pontic steppes of this era, were found in Mikhailovka I graves.
Mikhailovka I kurgans were distributed from the lower Dnieper westward to the Danube delta and south to the Crimean peninsula, north and northwest of the Black Sea. Near the Danube they were interspersed with cemeteries that contained Danubian Cernavoda I–III ceramics.6 Most Mikhailovka I kurgans were low mounds of black earth covered by a layer of clay, surrounded by a ditch and a stone cromlech, often with an opening on the southwest side. T e graves frequently were in cists lined with stone slabs. T e body could be in an extended supine position or contracted on the side or supine with raised knees, although the most common pose was contracted on the side. Occasionally (e.g., Olaneshti, k. 2, gr. 1, on the lower Dniester) the grave was covered by a stone anthropomorphic stela– a large stone slab carved at the top into the shape of a head projecting above rounded shoulders (see figure 13.11). This was the beginning of a long and important North Pontic tradition of decorating some graves with carved stone stelae.7
Figure 12.3 Ceramics from the Mikhailovka I settlement, after Lagodovs-kaya, Shaposhnikova, and Makarevich 1959; and a Mikhailovka I grave (gr. 6) stratified above an older Eneolithic grave (gr. 6a) at Sokolovka kurgan on the Ingul River west of the Dnieper, after Sharafutdinova 1980.
The skulls and faces of some Mikhailovka I people were delicate and narrow. The skeletal anthropologist Ina Potekhina established that another North Pontic culture, the Post-Mariupol culture, looked most like the old wide-faced Suvorovo-Novodanilovka population. The Mikhailovka I people, who lived in the westernmost steppes closest to the Tripolye culture and to the lower Danube valley, seem to have intermarried more with people from Tripolye towns or people whose ancestors had lived in Danubian tells.8
The Mikhailovka I culture was replaced by the Usatovo culture in the steppes northwest of the Black Sea after about 3300 BCE. Usatovo retained some Mikhailovka I customs, such as making a kurgan with a surrounding stone cromlech that was open to the southwest. The Usatovo culture was led by a warrior aristocracy centere
d on the lower Dniester estuary that probably regarded Tripolye agricultural townspeople as tribute-paying clients, and that might have begun to engage in sea trade along the coast. People in the Crimean peninsula retained many Mikhailovka I customs and developed into the Kemi-Oba culture of the Early Bronze Age after about 3300 BCE. These EBA cultures will be described in a later chapter.
The Post-Mariupol Culture
The clumsiest culture name of the Final Eneolithic is the “Post-Mariupol” or “Extended-Position-Grave” culture, both names conveying a hint of definitional uncertainty. Rassamakin called it the “Kvityana” culture. I will use the name “Post-Mariupol.” All these names refer to a grave type recognized in the steppes just above the Dnieper Rapids in the 1970s but defined in various ways since then. N. Ryndina counted about three hundred graves of the Post-Mariupol type in the steppes from the Dnieper valley eastward to the Donets. They were covered by low kurgans, occasionally surrounded by a stone cromlech. Burial was in an extended supine position in a narrow oblong or rectangular pit, often lined with stone and covered with wooden beams or stone slabs. Usually there were no ceramics in the grave (although this rule was fortunately broken in a few graves), but a fire was built above the grave; red ochre was strewn heavily on the grave floor; and lamellar flint blades, bone beads, or a few small copper beads or twists were included (figure 12.4). Three cattle skulls, presumably sacrificed at the funeral, were placed at the edge of one grave at Chkalovska kurgan 3. The largest cluster is just north of the Dnieper Rapids on the east side of the Dnieper, between two tributary rivers, the Samara (smaller than the Volga-region Samara River) and the Orel. Two chronological phases are identified: an early (Final Eneolithic) phase contemporary with Tripolye B2/C1, about 3800–3300 BCE; and a later (Early Bronze Age) phase contemporary with Tripolye C2 and the Early Yamnaya horizon, about 3300–2800 BCE.9
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World Page 30
