Figure 12.11 Late Maikop-Novosvobodnaya objects and graves at Klady, Kuban River drainage, North Caucasus: (Right) plan and section of Klady kurgan 31 and painted grave wall from Klady kurgan 28 with frieze of red-and-black horses surrounding a red-and-black humanlike figure; (left and bottom): objects from grave 5, kurgan 31. These included (left) arsenical bronze sword; (top row, center) two beads of human teeth sheathed in gold, a gold ring, and three carnelian beads; (second row) five gold rings; (third row) three rock crystal beads and a cast silver dog; (fourth row) three gold button caps on wooden cores; (fifth row) gold ring-pendant and two bent silver pins; (sixth row) carved bone dice; (seventh row) two bronze bidents, two bronze daggers, a bronze hammer-axe, a flat bronze axe, and two bronze chisels; (eighth row) a bronze cauldron with repoussé decoration; (ninth row) two bronze cauldrons and two sleeved axes. After Rezepkin 1991, figures 1, 2, 4, 5, 6.
Textile fragments preserved in Novosvobodnaya-type graves included linen with dyed brown and red stripes (at Klady), a cotton-like textile, and a wool textile (both at Novosvobodnaya kurgan 2). Cotton cloth was invented in the Indian subcontinent by 5000 BCE; the piece tentatively identified in the Novosvobodnaya royal grave might have been imported from the south.31
The Road to the Southern Civilizations
The southern wealth that defined the Maikop culture appeared suddenly in the North Caucasus, and in large amounts. How did this happen, and why?
The valuables that seemed the most interesting to Mesopotamian urban traders were metals and precious stones. The upper Kuban River is a metal-rich zone. The Elbrusskyi mine on the headwaters of the Kuban, 35 km northwest of Elbruz Mountain (the highest peak in the North Caucasus) produces copper, silver, and lead. The Urup copper mine, on the upper Urup River, a Kuban tributary, had ancient workings that were visible in the early twentieth century. Granitic gold ores came from the upper Chegem River near Nalchik. As the metal prospectors who profited from the Uruk metal trade explored northward, they somehow learned of the copper, silver, and gold ores on the other side of the North Caucasus Mountains. Possibly they also pursued the source of textiles made of long-woolen thread.
It is possible that the initial contacts were made on the Black Sea coast, since the mountains are easy to cross between Maikop and Sochi on the coast, but much higher and more difficult in the central part of the North Caucasus farther east. Maikop ceramics have been found north of Sochi in the Vorontsovskaya and Akhshtyrskaya caves, just where the trail over the mountains meets the coast. This would also explain why the region around Maikop initially had the richest graves—if it was the terminal point for a trade route that passed through eastern Anatolia to western Georgia, up the coast to Sochi, and then to Maikop. The metal ores came from deposits located east of Maikop, so if the main trade route passed through the high passes in the center of the Caucasus ridge we would expect to see more southern wealth near the mines, not off to the west.
By the late Maikop (Novosvobodnaya) period, contemporary with Late Uruk, an eastern route was operating as well. Turquoise and carnelian beads were found at the walled town of Alikemek Tepesi in the Mil’sk steppe in Azerbaijan, near the mouth of the Kura River on the Caspian shore.32 Alikemek Tepesi possibly was a transit station on a trade route that passed around the eastern end of the North Caucasian ridge. An eastern route through the Lake Urmia basin would explain the discovery in Iran, southwest of Lake Urmia, of a curious group of eleven conical, gravel-covered kurgans known collectively as Sé Girdan. Six of them, up to 8.2 m high and 60 m in diameter, were excavated by Oscar Muscarella in 1968 and 1970. Then thought to date to the Iron Age, they recently have been redated on the basis of their strong similarities to Novosvobodnaya-Klady graves in the North Caucasus.33 The kurgans and grave chambers were made the same way as those of the Novosvobodnaya-Klady culture; the burial pose was the same; the arsenical bronze flat axes and short-nosed shaft-hole axes were similar in shape and manufacture to Novosvobodnaya-Klady types; and carnelian and gold beads were the same shapes, both containing silver vessels and fragments of silver tubes. The Sé Girdan kurgans could represent the migration southward of a Klady-type chief, perhaps to eliminate troublesome local middlemen. But the Lake Urmia chiefdom did not last. Mos-carella counted almost ninety sites of the succeeding Early Trans-Caucasian Culture (ETC) around the southern Urmia Basin, but none of them had even small kurgans.
The power of the Maikop chiefs probably grew partly from the aura of the extraordinary that clung to the exotic objects they accumulated, which were palpable symbols of their personal connection with powers previously unknown.34 Perhaps the extraordinary nature of these objects was one of the reasons why they were buried with their owners rather than inherited. Limited use and circulation were common characteristics of objects regarded as “primitive valuables.” But the supply of new valuables dried up when the Late Uruk long-distance exchange system collapsed about 3100 BCE. Mesopotamian cities began to struggle with internal problems that we can perceive only dimly, their foreign agents retreated, and in the mountains the people of the ETC attacked and burned Arslantepe and Hacinebi on the upper Euphrates. Sé Girdan stood abandoned. This was also the end of the Maikop culture.
MAIKOP-NOVOSVOBODNAYA IN THE STEPPES: CONTACTS WITH THE NORTH
Valuables of gold, silver, lapis, turquoise, and carnelian were retained exclusively by the North Caucasian individuals in direct contact with the south and perhaps by those who lived near the silver and copper mines that fed the southern trade. But a revolutionary new technology for land transport—wagons—might have been given to the steppes by the Maikop culture. Traces of at least two solid wooden disc wheels were found in a late Maikop kurgan on the Kuban River at Starokorsunskaya kurgan 2, with Novosvobodnaya black-burnished pots. Although not dated directly, the wooden wheels in this kurgan might be among the oldest in Europe.35 Another Novosvobodnaya grave contained a bronze cauldron with a schematic image that seems to portray a cart. It was found at Evdik.
Evdik kurgan 4 was raised by the shore of the Tsagan-Nur lake in the North Caspian Depression, 350 km north of the North Caucasus piedmont, in modern Kalmykia.36 Many shallow lakes dotted the Sarpa Depression, an ancient channel of the Volga. At Evdik, grave 20 contained an adult male in a contracted position oriented southwest, the standard Maikop pose, stained with red ochre, with an early Maikop pot by his feet. This was the original grave over which the kurgan was raised. Two other graves followed it, without diagnostic grave goods, after which grave 23 was dug into the kurgan. This was a late Maikop grave. It contained an adult male and a child buried together in sitting positions, an unusual pose, on a layer of white chalk and red ochre. In the grave was a bronze cauldron decorated with an image made in repoussé dots. The image seems to portray a yoke, a wheel, a vehicle body, and the head of an animal (see figure 4.3a). Grave 23 also contained a typical Novosvobodnaya bronze socketed bident, probably used with the cauldron. And it also had a bronze tanged dagger, a flat axe, a gold ring with 2.5 twists, a polished black stone pestle, a whetstone, and several flint tools, all typical Novosvobodnaya artifacts. Evdik kurgan 4 shows a deep penetration of the Novosvobodnaya culture into the lower Volga steppes. The image on the cauldron suggests that the people who raised the kurgan at Evdik also drove carts.
Figure 12.12 Konstantinovka settlement on the lower Don, with topographic location and artifacts. Plain pots are Maikop-like; cord-impressed pots are local. Loom-weights and asymmetrical flint points also are Maikop-like. Lower right: crucible and bellows fragments. After Kiashko 1994.
Evdik was the richest of the Maikop-Novosvobodnaya kurgans that appeared in the steppes north of the North Caucasus between 3700 and 3100 BCE. In such places, late Novosvobodnaya people whose speech would probably be assigned to a Caucasian language family met and spoke with individuals of the Repin and Late Khvalynsk cultures who probably spoke Proto-Indo-European dialects. The loans discussed in chapter 5 between archaic Caucasian and Proto-Indo-European languages probably were words s
poken during these exchanges. The contact was most obvious, and therefore perhaps most direct, on the lower Don.
Trade across a Persistent Cultural Frontier
Konstantinovka, a settlement on the lower Don River, might have contained a resident group of Maikop people, and there were kurgan graves with Maikop artifacts around the settlement (figure 12.12). About 90% of the settlement ceramics were a local Don-steppe shell-tempered, cord-impressed type connected with the cultures of the Dnieper-Donets steppes to the west (late Sredni Stog, according to Telegin). The other 10% were red-burnished early Maikop wares. Konstantinovka was located on a steep-sided promontory overlooking the strategic lower Don valley, and was protected by a ditch and bank. The gallery forests below it were full of deer (31% of the bones) and the plateau behind it was the edge of a vast grassland rich in horses (10%), onagers (2%), and herds of sheep/goats (25%). Maikop vistors probably imported the perforated clay loom weights similar to those at Galugai (unique in the steppes), copper chisels like those at Novosvobodnaya (again, unique except for two at Usatovo; see chapter 14), and asymmetrical shouldered flint projectile points very much like those of the Maikop-Novosvobodnaya graves. But polished stone axes and gouges, a drilled cruciform polished stone mace head, and boars-tusk pendants were steppe artifact types. Crucibles and slag show that copper working occurred at the site.
A. P. Nechitailo identified dozens of kurgans in the North Pontic steppes that contained single pots or tools or both that look like imports from Maikop-Novosvobodnaya, distributed from the Dniester River valley on the west to the lower Volga on the east. These widespread northern contacts seem to have been most numerous during the Novosvobodnaya/Late Uruk phase, 3350–3100 BCE. But most of the Caucasian imports appeared singly in local graves and settlements. The region that imported the largest number of Caucasian arsenical bronze tools and weapons was the Crimean Peninsula (the Kemi-Oba culture). The steppe cultures of the Volga-Ural region imported little or no Caucasian arsenical bronze; their metal tools and weapons were made from local “clean” copper. Sleeved, one-bladed metal axes and tanged daggers were made across the Pontic-Caspian steppes in emulation of Maikop-Novosvobodnaya types, but most were made locally by steppe metalsmiths.37
What did the Maikop chiefs want from the steppes? One possibility is drugs. Sherratt has suggested that narcotics in the form of Cannabis were one of the important exports of the steppes.38 Another more conventional trade item could have been wool. We still do not know where wool sheep were first bred, although it makes sense that northern sheep from the coldest places would initially have had the thickest wool. Perhaps the Maikop-trained weavers at Konstantinovka were there with their looms to make some of the raw wool into large textiles for payment to the herders. Steppe people had felts or textiles made from narrow strips of cloth, produced on small, horizontal looms, then stitched together. Large textiles made in one piece on vertical looms were novelties.
Another possibility is horses. In most Neolithic and earlier Eneolithic sites across Transcaucasia there were no horse bones. After the evolution of the ETC culture beginning about 3300 BCE horses became widespread, appearing in many sites across Transcaucasia. S. Mezhlumian reported horse bones at ten of twelve examined sites in Armenia dated to the later fourth millennium BCE. At Mokhrablur one horse had severe wear on a P2consistent with bit wear. Horses were bitted at Botai and Kozhai 1 in Kazakhstan during the same period, so bit wear at Mokhrablur would not be unique. At Alikemek Tepesi the horses of the ETC period were thought by Russian zoologists to be domesticated. Horses the same size as those of Dereivka appeared as far south as the Malatya-Elazig region in southeastern Turkey, as at Norşuntepe; and in northwestern Turkey at Demirci Höyük. Although horses were not traded into the lowlands of Mesopotamia this early, they might have been valuable in the steppe-Caucasian trade.39
PROTO-INDO-EUROPEAN AS A REGIONAL LANGUAGE IN A CHANGING WORLD
During the middle centuries of the fourth millennium BCE the equestrian tribes of the Pontic-Caspian steppes exhibited a lot of material and probably linguistic variability. They absorbed into their conversations two quite different but equally surprising developments among their neighbors to the south, in the North Caucasus piedmont, and to their west, in the Cucuteni-Tripolye region. From the North Caucasus probably came wagons, and with them ostentatious displays of incredible wealth. In the west, some Tripolye populations retreated into huge planned towns larger than any settlements in the world, probably in response to raiding from the steppes. Other Tripolye towns farther north on the Dnieper began to change their customs in ceramics, funerals, and domestic architecture toward steppe styles in a slow process of assimilation.
Although regionally varied, steppe cultural habits and customs remained distinct from those of the Maikop culture. An imported Maikop or Novosvobodnaya potsherd is immediately obvious in a steppe grave. Lithics and weaving methods were different (no loom weights in the steppes), as were bead and other ornament types, economies and settlement forms, and metal types and sources. These distinctions persisted in spite of significant cross-frontier interaction. When Maikop traders came to Konstantinovka, they probably needed a translator.
The Yamnaya horizon, the material expression of the late Proto-Indo-European community, grew from an eastern origin in the Don-Volga steppes and spread across the Pontic-Caspian steppes after about 3300 BCE. Archaeology shows that this was a period of profound and rapid change along all the old ethnolinguistic frontiers surrounding the Pontic-Caspian steppes. Linguistically based reconstructions of Proto-Indo-European society often suggest a static, homogeneous ideal, but archaeology shows that Proto-Indo-European dialects and institutions spread through steppe societies that exhibited significant regional diversity, during a period of far-reaching social and economic change.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Wagon Dwellers of the Steppe
The Speakers of Proto-Indo-European
The sight of wagons creaking and swaying across the grasslands amid herds of wooly sheep changed from a weirdly fascinating vision to a normal part of steppe life between about 3300 and 3100 BCE. At about the same time the climate in the steppes became significantly drier and generally cooler than it had been during the Eneolithic. The shift to drier conditions is dated between 3500 and 3000 BCE in pollen cores in the lower Don, the middle Volga, and across the northern Kazakh steppes (table 13.1). As the steppes dried and expanded, people tried to keep their animal herds fed by moving them more frequently. They discovered that with a wagon you could keep moving indefinitely. Wagons and horseback riding made possible a new, more mobile form of pastoralism. With a wagon full of tents and supplies, herders could take their herds out of the river valleys and live for weeks or months out in the open steppes between the major rivers—the great majority of the Eurasian steppes. Land that had been open and wild became pasture that belonged to someone. Soon these more mobile herding clans realized that bigger pastures and a mobile home base permitted them to keep bigger herds. Amid the ensuing disputes over borders, pastures, and seasonal movements, new rules were needed to define what counted as an acceptable move—people began to manage local migratory behavior. Those who did not participate in these agreements or recognize the new rules became cultural Others, stimulating an awareness of a distinctive Yamnaya identity. That awareness probably elevated a few key behaviors into social signals. Those behaviors crystallized into a fairly stable set of variants in the steppes around the lower Don and Volga rivers. A set of dialects went with them, the speech patterns of late Proto-Indo-European. This is the sequence of changes that I believe created the new way of life expressed archaeologically in the Yamnaya horizon, dated about 3300–2500 BCE (figure 13.1). The spread of the Yamnaya horizon was the material expression of the spread of late Proto-Indo-European across the Pontic-Caspian steppes.1
TABLE 13.1 Vegetation shifts in steppe pollen cores from the Don to the Irtysh
Figure 13.1 Culture areas in the Pontic-Caspian region about 3300–300
0 BCE.
The behavior that really set the Yamnaya people apart was living on wheels. Their new economy took advantage of two kinds of mobility: wagons for slow bulk transport (water, shelter, and food) and horseback riding for rapid light transport (scouting for pastures, herding, trading and raiding expeditions). Together they greatly increased the potential scale of herding economies. Herders operating out of a wagon could stay with their herds out in the deep steppes, protected by mobile homes that carried tents, water, and food. A diet of meat, milk, yogurt, cheese, and soups made of wild Chenopodium seeds and wild greens can be deduced, with a little imagination, from the archaeological evidence. The reconstructed Proto-Indo-European vocabulary tells us that honey and honey-based mead also were consumed, probably on special occasions. Larger herds meant greater disparities in herd wealth, which is reflected in disparities in the wealth of Yamanaya graves. Mobile wagon camps are almost impossible to find archaeologically, so settlements became archaeologically invisible where the new economy took hold.
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World Page 33
