Figure 13.7 Krasnosamarskoe cemetery IV, kurgan 1, early Poltavka culture on the middle Volga. Three graves were created simultaneously when the kurgan was raised, about 2800 BCE: the central grave, covered by a layer of clay, a peripheral grave to its southeast, and an overlying grave in the kurgan. Author’s excavation.
Proto-Indo-European Chiefs
The speakers of Proto-Indo-European followed chiefs (*weik-potis) who sponsored feasts and ceremonies and were immortalized in praise poetry. The richer Yamnaya graves probably commemorated such individuals. The dim outlines of a social hierarchy can be extracted from the amount of labor required to build kurgans. A larger kurgan probably meant that a larger number of people felt obligated to respond to the death of the person buried in the central grave. Most graves contained nothing but the body, or in some cases just the head, with clothing, perhaps a bead or two, reed mats, and wooden beams. The skin of a domestic animal with a few leg or head bones attached was an unusual gift, appearing in about 15% of graves, and a copper dagger or axe was very rare, appearing in less than 5%. Sometimes a few sherds of pottery were thrown into the grave. It is difficult to define social roles on the basis of such slight evidence.
Do big kurgans contain the richest graves? Kurgan size and grave wealth have been compared in at least two regions, in the Ingul River valley west of the Dnieper in Ukraine (a sample of 37 excavated Yamnaya kurgans), and in the Volga-Ural region (a sample of more than 90 kurgans).42 In both regions kurgans were easily divided into widely disparate size classes—three classes in Ukraine and four on the Volga. In both regions the class 1 kurgans were 50 m or more in diameter, about the width of a standard American football field (or two-thirds the width of a European soccer field), and their construction required more than five hundred man-days, meaning that five hundred people might have worked for one day to build them, or one hundred people for five days, or some other combination totaling five hundred.
The biggest kurgans were not built over the richest central graves in either region. Although the largest class 1 kurgans did contain rich graves, so did smaller kurgans. In both regions wealthy graves occurred both in the central position under a kurgan and in peripheral graves. In the Ingul valley, where there were no metal-rich graves in the study sample, more objects were found in peripheral graves than in central graves. In some cases, where we have radiocarbon dates for many graves under a single kurgan, we can establish through overlapping radiocarbon dates that the central grave and a richer peripheral grave were dug simultaneously in a single funeral ceremony, as at Krasnosamarskoe IV. The richest graves in some Novosvobodnaya kurgans, including the Klady cemetery, were peripheral graves, located off-center under the mound. It could be misleading to count the objects in peripheral graves, including some wheeled vehicle sacrifices, as separate from the central grave. In at least some cases, a richer peripheral grave accompanied the central grave in the same funeral ceremony.
Elite status was marked by artifacts as well as architecture, and the most widespread indication of status was the presence of metal grave goods. The largest metal artifact found in any Yamnaya grave was laid on the left arm of a male buried in Kutuluk cemetery I, kurgan 4, overlooking the Kinel River, a tributary of the Samara River in the Samara oblast east of the Volga (figure 13.8). A solid copper club or mace weighing 750 gm, it was 48.7 cm long and more than 1 cm thick, with a diamond cross-section. The kurgan was medium-sized, 21 m in diameter and less than 1 m high, but the central grave pit (gr. 1) was large. The male was oriented east, positioned supine with raised knees, with ochre at his head, hips, and feet—a classic early Yamnaya grave type. Two samples of bone taken from his skeleton were dated about 3100–2900 BCE (4370 ± 75 AA12570 and 4400 ± 70 BP OxA 4262), but 15N levels suggest that the date probably was too old and should be revised to about 2900–2700 BCE.
Figure 13.8 Kutuluk cemetery I, kurgan 4, grave 1, middle Volga region. An Early Yamnaya male with a large copper mace or club, the heaviest metal object of the Yamnaya horizon. Photograph and excavation by P. Kuznetsov; see Kuznetsov 2005.
In the Samara River valley, near the village of Utyevka on the floodplain of the Samara River, was the richest steppe grave of the Yamnaya-Poltavka period. Utyevka cemetery I, kurgan 1 was 110 m in diameter. Central grave 1 was a Yamnaya-Poltavka grave containing an adult male, positioned supine with legs in an uncertain position. He was buried with two golden rings with granulated decoration, unique objects with analogies in the North Caucasus or Anatolia; also a copper tanged dagger, a copper pin with a forged iron head, a flat copper axe, a copper awl, a copper sleeved axe of the classic Volga-Ural type IIa with a slightly rising blade, and a polished stone pestle43 (figure 13.9). In the Volga-Ural region numerous Yamnaya graves contained metal daggers, chisels, and cast shaft-hole axes.
Overall, the wide disparities in labor invested in kurgans of different sizes, from 10 m to more than 110 m in diameter, indicate a broad sociopolitical hierarchy, though one not always correlated with grave wealth. The class 1 kurgans tended to contain rich graves but they were not always the central grave, and rich graves frequently occurred in smaller kurgans. Chernykh observed that kurgans seem to have been bigger, as a rule, in the North Pontic steppes, where many also had additional stone elements including cromlechs or curbs, carved stone stelae, and even coverings of stone or gravel, whereas the graves of the Volga-Ural region were richer in metal but had simpler earthen monuments.44
The Identity of the Metalworker
The craft of the steppe metalsmith improved and became more sophisticated under Yamnaya chiefs. Metalworkers in the Pontic-Caspian steppes made cast-copper objects regularly for the first time, and in late Yamnaya they even experimented with forged iron. Thin seams of copper ore (azurite, malachite) are interbedded with iron-bearing sandstones between the central North Caucasus region (Krasnodar) and the Ural Mountains (Kargaly), including the entire Volga-Ural region. These ores are exposed by erosion on the sides of many stream valleys, and were mined by Yamnaya metalworkers. A Yamnaya grave at Pershin in Orenburg oblast, near the enormous copper deposits and mines at Kargaly on the middle Ural River, contained a male buried with a two-piece mold for a sleeved, one-bladed axe of Chernykh’s type 1. The grave is dated about 2900–2700 BCE (4200 ± 60, BM-3157). A Yamnaya mining pit has been found at Kargaly with radiocarbon dates of the same era. Almost all the copper objects from the Volga-Ural region were made of “clean” copper from these local sources. Although the cast sleeved single-bladed axes and tanged daggers of the early Yamnaya period imitated Novosvobodnaya originals, they were made locally from local copper ores. North Caucasian arsenical bronze was imported by people buried in graves in the Kalmyk steppe south of the lower Volga and in Kemi-Oba sites on the Crimean peninsula, but not in the Volga-Ural steppes.45
Figure 13.9 Utyevka cemetery I, kurgan 1, grave 1, between 2800 and 2500 BCE, middle Volga region. The richest grave and among the largest kurgans (more than 100 m in diameter) of the Yamnaya-Poltavka horizon. Gold rings with granulated decoration, ceramic vessel, copper shaft-hole axe, copper dagger, copper pin with iron head, copper flat axe, copper awl, and stone pestle. After Vasiliev 1980.
The grave at Pershin was not the only smith’s grave of the period. Metalworkers were clearly identified in several Yamnaya-period graves, perhaps because metalworking was still a form of shamanic magic, and the tools remained dangerously polluted by the spirit of the dead smith. Two Post-Mariupol smith’s graves on the Dnieper (chapter 12) probably were contemporary with early Yamnaya, as was a smith’s grave with axe molds, crucibles, and tulieres in a Novotitorovskaya-culture grave in the Kuban steppes at Lebedi I (figure 13.10). Copper slag, the residue of metalworking, was included in other graves, as at Utyevka I kurgan 2.46
One unappreciated aspect of EBA and MBA steppe metallurgy was its experimentation with iron. The copper pin in Utyevka kurgan 1 with a forged iron head was not unique. A Catacomb-period grave at Gerasimovka on the Donets, probably dated around 2500 BCE, con
tained a knife with a handle made of arsenical bronze and a blade made of iron. The iron did not contain magnetite or nickel, as would be expected in meteoric iron, so it is thought to have been forged. Iron objects were rare, but they were part of the experiments conducted by steppe metalsmiths during the Early and Middle Bronze Ages, long before iron began to be used in Hittite Anatolia or the Near East.47
THE STONE STELAE OF THE NORTH PONTIC STEPPES
The Yamnaya horizon developed in the Pontic-Caspian steppes largely because an innovation in land transport, wagons, was added to horseback riding to make a new kind of herding economy possible. At the same time an innovation in sea transport, the introduction of the multi-oared longboat, probably was responsible for the permanent occupation of the Cycladic Islands by Grotta-Pelos mariners about 3300–3200 BCE, and for the initial development of the northwest Anatolian trading communities such as Kum Tepe that preceded the founding of Troy.48 These two horizons, one on the sea and the other on a sea of grass, came into contact around the shores of the Black Sea.
Figure 13.10 Lebedi cemetery I, kurgan 3, grave 10, a metal worker’s gave of the late Novotitorovskaya culture, perhaps 2800–2500 BCE, Kuban River steppes. He wore a boars-tusk pendant. Under his arm was a serpentine hammer-axe (upper left). By his feet was a complete smithing kit: heavy stone hammers and abraders, sharp-edged flint tools, a round clay crucible (upper right), and axe molds for both flat and sleeved axes. After Gei 1986, figures 1, 4, 6, 7, and 9.
Figure 13.11 Carved stone anthropomorphic stelae of the Pontic steppes, Bulgaria, Troy I, and southeastern France. Graves 1 and 2 of Olaneşti kurgan 2 (upper left), located in the lower Dniester steppes, are pre-Usatovo, so before 3300 BCE. The Yamnaya stelae of Ukraine and Crimea (Kernosovka, Belogrudovka, Akchorak, Novoselovka, and Kasperovka) and Bulgaria (Plachidol, Yezerovo) probably date 3300–2500 BCE. Parallels at Troy I and in the mountains of southeastern France (Morel) are striking. After Telegin and Mallory 1994; and Yarovoy 1985.
The Kemi-Oba culture was a kurgan-building culture dated 3200–2600 BCE centered in the Crimean peninsula. Its dark-surfaced pottery was a continuation of Mikhailovka I ceramic traditions. Kemi-Oba grave cists were lined with flat-shaped stones, some painted in geometric designs, a custom shared with Novosvobodnaya royal graves (e.g., the Tsar kurgan at Nalchik). Kemi-Oba graves also contained large, stone funeral stelae, many with human heads carved at the top and arms, hands, belts, tunics, weapons, crooks, sandals, and even animal scenes sometimes carved on one or both faces (figure 13.11) This custom spread from the Crimean peninsula into both the Caucasus (where only a few stelae appeared) and the western Pontic steppes. At least three hundred stelae have been found in Yamnaya and Catacomb graves in the North Pontic steppes, usually re-used as grave-pit covers, with more than half concentrated between the South Bug and Ingul rivers.49 The carving of funeral stelae seems to have expanded in frequency and elaboration in the Crimean and Pontic steppes after about 3300 BCE. Their original purpose is unknown. Perhaps they marked the future site of a kurgan cemetery before the first kurgan was built, or maybe they marked the first kurgan until the second one was built. In any case, they are usually found re-used as stone covers over grave pits, sealed beneath kurgans.
Eerily similar stelae, with carved heads, bent arms, hands, weapons, and even specific objects such as crooks, were carved in northern Tuscany and the Italian piedmont at about the same time, and a fragment of a similar-looking stela was built into a stone building in Troy I. It is difficult to imagine that these widely separated but strikingly similar and contemporaneous funeral stelae were unconnected. A newly invigorated maritime trade probably was responsible for carrying ideas and technologies across the sea. The Yamnaya horizon spread across the Pontic-Caspian steppes while an invigorated sea trade spread across the eastern Mediterranean. A full understanding of the significance of the Yamnaya horizon requires an understanding of its external relations—the subject of the next chapter.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Western Indo–European Languages
“A wild river full of possibilities flowed from my new tongue.”
—Andrew Lam, Learning a Language, Inventing a Future 2006
We will not understand the early expansion of the Proto–Indo–European dialects by trying to equate language simply with artifact types. Material culture often has little relationship to language. I have proposed an exception to that rule in the case of robust and persistent frontiers, but that does seem to be an exception. The essence of language expansion is psychological. The initial expansion of the Indo–European languages was the result of widespread cultural shifts in group self–perception. Language replacement always is accompanied by revised self–perceptions, a restructuring of the cultural classifications within which the self is defined and reproduced. Negative evaluations associated with the dying language lead to a descending series of reclassifications by succeeding generations, until no one wants to speak like Grandpa any more. Language shift and the stigmatization of old identities go hand in hand.
The pre–Indo–European languages of Europe were abandoned because they were linked to membership in social groups that became stigmatized. How that process of stigmatization happened is a fascinating question, and the possibilities are much more varied than just invasion and conquest. Increased out–marriage, for example, can lead to language shift. The Gaelic spoken by Scottish “fisher” folk was abandoned after World War II, when increased mobility and new economic opportunities led to out–marriage between Gaelic “fishers” and the surrounding English–speaking population, and the formerly tightly closed and egalitarian “fisher” community became intensely aware both of its low ranking in a larger world and of alternative economic opportunities. Gaelic rapidly disappeared, although only a few people—soldiers, professionals, teachers—moved very far. Similarly, the general situation in Europe after 3300 BCE was one of increased mobility, new pastoral economies, explicitly status–ranked political systems, and inter–regional connectivity—exactly the kind of context that might have led to the stigmatization of the tightly closed identities associated with languages spoken by localized groups of village farmers.1
The other side of understanding language shift is to ask why the identities associated with Indo–European languages were emulated and admired. It cannot have been because of some essential quality or inner potential in Indo–European languages or people. Usually language shift flows in the direction of paramount prestige and power. Paramount status can attach to one ethnic group (Celt, Roman, Scythian, Turk, American) for centuries, but eventually it flows away. So we want to know what in this particular era attached prestige and power to the identities associated with Proto–Indo–European speech–Yamnaya identities, principally. At the beginning of this period, Indo–European languages still were spoken principally by pastoral societies from the Pontic–Caspian steppes. Five factors probably were important in enhancing their status:
1. Pontic–Caspian steppe societies were more familiar with horse breeding and riding than anyone outside the steppes. They had many more horses than anywhere else, and measurements show that their steppe horses were larger than the native marsh and mountain ponies of central and western Europe. Larger horses appeared in Baden, Cernavoda III, and Cham sites in central Europe and the Danube valley about 3300–3000 BCE, probably imported from the steppes.2 Horses began to appear commonly in most sites of the ETC culture in Transcaucasia at the same time, and larger horses appeared among them, as in southeastern Anatolia at Norşuntepe. Steppe horse–breeders might also have had the most manageable male bloodline—the genetic lineage of the original domesticated male founder was preserved even in places with native wild populations (see chapter 10). If they had the largest, strongest, and most manageable horses, and they had more than anyone else, steppe societies could have grown rich by trading horses. In the sixteenth century the Bukhara khanate in Central Asia, drawing on horse–breeding grounds in the Ferghana valley, exported one hu
ndred thousand horses annually just to one group of customers: the Mughal rulers of India and Pakistan. Although I am not suggesting anything near that scale, the annual demand for steppe horses in Late Eneolithic/Early Bronze Age Europe could easily have totaled thousands of animals during the initial expansion of horseback riding beyond the steppes. That would have made some steppe horse dealers wealthy.3
2. Horseback riding shortened distances, so riders traveled farther than walkers. In addition to the conceptual changes in human geography this caused, riders gained two functional advantages. First, they could manage herds larger than those tended by pedestrian herders, and could move those larger herds more easily from one pasture to another. Any single herder became more productive on horseback. Second, they could advance to and retreat from raids faster than pedestrian warriors. Riders could show up unexpectedly, dismount and attack people in their fields, run back to their horses and get away quickly. The decline in the economic importance of cultivation across Europe after 3300 BCE occurred in a social setting of increased levels of warfare almost everywhere. Riding probably added to the general increase in insecurity, making riding more necessary, and expanding the market for horses (see paragraph above).
3. Proto–Indo–European institutions included a belief in the sanctity of verbal contracts bound by oaths (*h1óitos), and in the obligation of patrons (or gods) to protect clients (or humans) in return for loyalty and service. “Let this racehorse bring us good cattle and good horses, male children and all–nourishing wealth, ” said a prayer accompanying the sacrifice of a horse in the Rig Veda (I.162), a clear statement of the contract that bound humans to the gods. In Proto–Indo–European religion generally the chasm between gods and humans was bridged by the sanctity of oath–bound contracts and reciprocal obligations, so these were undoubtedly important tools regulating the daily behavior of the powerful toward the weak, at least for people who belonged under the social umbrella. Patron–client systems like this could incorporate outsiders as clients who enjoyed rights and protection. This way of legitimizing inequality probably was an old part of steppe social institutions, going back to the initial appearance of differences in wealth when domesticated animals were accepted.4
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World Page 37
