One traditional explanation for the settling-down phenomenon is that this was when agriculture was widely adopted across the northern steppes.22 But this explanation certainly does not apply everywhere. At the settlement of Krasnosamarskoe in the Samara River valley, where the dog sacrifice was found (chapter 15), a Pokrovka component (radiocarbon dated 1900–1800 BCE) and an early Srubnaya component (dated 1800–1700 BCE) were stratified within a single structure. In the Srubnaya period the structure probably was a well-house and woodshed where a variety of domestic tasks were conducted and food garbage was buried in pits. It was used during all seasons of the year. Anne Pike-Tay’s analysis of seasonal bands in the roots of animal teeth established that the cattle and sheep were butchered in all seasons. But there was no agriculture. Laura Popova found no seeds, pollen, or phytoliths of cultivated cereals associated with the LBA occupation, only wild Chenopodium and Amaranthus seeds. The skeletons of 192 adults from twelve Srubnaya cemeteries in the Samara oblast were examined by Eileen Murray and A. Khokhlov. They showed almost no dental decay. The complete absence of caries usually is associated with a low-starch, low-carbohydrate diet, typical for foragers and quite atypical for bread eaters (figure 16.12). The dental evidence confirmed the botanical evidence. Bread was not eaten much, if at all, in the northern steppes.
In pits at Krasnosamarskoe we found an abundance of carbonized wild seeds, including Chenopodium album and Amaranthus. Modern wild Chenopodium (also known as goosefoot) is a weed that grows in dense stands that can produce seed yields in the range of 500–1000 kg/ha, about the same as einkorn wheat, which yields 645–835 kg/ha.23 Amaranthus is equally prolific. With meat and milk from cattle, sheep, and horses, this was a sufficient diet. Although clear evidence of cereal agriculture has been found in Srubnaya settlements west of the Don in Ukraine, it is possible that agriculture was much less important east of the Don than has often been assumed. Herding and gathering was the basis for the northern steppe economy in at least some regions east of the Don as late as the LBA.24
Figure 16.12 Graph of the frequency of dental caries (cavities) in populations with different kinds of food economies (right), in Scythian and Sarmatian cemeteries in Tuva (center), and in prehistoric populations in the Samara oblast, middle Volga region (left six bars). Bread apparently was not part of the diet in the Samara oblast. After Murphy 2003; and Murphy and Khokhlov 2001.
So if agriculture does not provide an answer, then why did people settle down during the MBA/LBA transition in the northern steppes, including the earlier episode at Sintashta? As explained in chapter 15, climate change might have been the principal cause. A cool, arid climate affected the Eurasian steppes between about 2500–2000 BCE. This was the same event that struck Akkadian agriculture and weakened the Harappan civilization. The late MBA/early LBA settling-down phenomenon, including the earliest episodes at Sintashta and Arkaim, can be interpreted as a way to maintain control over the richest winter forage areas for herds, particularly if grazing animals were the principal source of food in an economy that, in many regions, did not include agriculture. Early LBA Krasnosamarskoe overlooked one of the largest marshes on the lower Samara River.
Some permanent settlements also developed near copper mines. Cattle forage was not the only critical resource in the northern steppes. Mining and bronze working became important industries across the steppes during the LBA. A vast Srubnaya mining center operated at Kargaly near Orenburg in the South Urals, and other enormous copper mines operated near Karaganda in central Kazakhstan. Smaller mining camps were established at many small copper outcrops, like the Srubnaya mining camp at Mikhailovka Ovsianka in the southern Samara oblast.25
EAST OF THE URALS, PHASE I: THE PETROVKA CULTURE
The first culture of the LBA east of the Urals was the Petrovka culture, an eastern offshoot of Sintashta dated about 1900–1750 BCE. Petrovka was so similar to Sintashta in its material culture and mortuary rituals that many archaeologists (including me) have used the combined term Sintashta-Petrovka to refer to both. But Petrovka ceramics show some distinctive variations in shape and decoration, and are stratified above Sintashta deposits at several sites, so it is clear that Petrovka grew out of and was generally later than Sintashta. The oldest Petrovka sites, like the type site, Petrovka II, were settlements on the Ishim River in the steppes of northern Kazahstan (figure 16.13). The Petrovka culture probably absorbed some people who had roots in the older post-Botai horse-centered cultures of the Ishim steppes, like Sergeivka, but they were materially (and probably linguistically) almost invisible. Petrovka-style pottery then replaced Sintashta ceramics at several Sintashta fortified sites, as at Ust’ye, where the Sintashta settlement was burned and replaced by a Petrovka settlement built on a different plan. Petrovka graves were dug into older Sintashta kurgans at Krivoe Ozero and Kamenny Ambar.26
The settlement of Petrovka II was surrounded by a narrow ditch less than 1 m deep, perhaps for drainage. The twenty-four large houses had dug-out floors and measured from 6 by 10 m to about 8 by 18 m. They were built close together on a terrace overlooking the floodplain, a nucleated village pattern quite different from the scattered homesteads of the Srubnaya culture. Petrovka II was reoccupied by people who made classic Andronovo-horizon ceramics of both the Alakul and Federovo types, stratified above the Petrovka layer, and the Andronovo town was succeeded by a “final-LBA” settlement with Sargar ceramics. This stratified sequence made Petrovka II an important yardstick for the LBA chronology of the Kazakh steppes. Chariots continued to be buried in a few early Petrovka graves at Berlyk II and Krivoe Ozero, and many bone disk-shaped cheekpieces have come from Petrovka sites. During the Petrovka period, however, chariot burials gradually ceased, the size and number of mortuary animal sacrifices also declined, and large-scale Sintashta-type fortifications were no longer built around settlements in the northern steppes.
Figure 16.13 The Petrovka settlement, type site for the Petrovka culture, ca. 1900–1750 BCE: (top) general plan of the original ditch around the settlement, with a later enlargement at the east end, after Zdanovich 1988, Figure 12; (bottom) detail of overlapping rebuilt house floors in the northeast corner of the original settlement, with new houses built over the original eastern ditch, after Maliutina 1991, Figure 14. The stratigraphic complexity of these settlements contributes to arguments about phases and chronology.
Petrovka settlements and kurgan cemeteries spread southward into the arid steppes of central Kazkahstan, and from there to Tugai on the Zeravshan, more than 1,200 km south of central Kazakhstan. Petrovka probably also was in touch with the Okunevo culture in the western Altai, the successor of late Afanasievo. The permanent nucleated settlements of the Petrovka culture do not resemble the temporary camps of nomadic herders, so it is unlikely that the Petrovka economy depended on annual long-distance migrations. Early historic nomads, who did not live in permanent nucleated villages, wintered in the Syr Darya marshes and summered in the north Kazakh steppes, a cycle of annual movements that brought them to the doorstep of Central Asia civilizations each winter. But the Petrovka economy seems to have been less nomadic. If the Petrovka people did not engage in long-distance herd migrations, then their movement south to the Zeravshan was not an accidental by-product of annual herding patterns (as is often presumed) but instead was intentional, motivated by the desire for trade, loot, or glory. The later annual migration pattern does at least show that in the spring and fall it was possible to drive herds of animals across the intervening desert and semi-desert.27
Petrovka settlements commonly contained two-part furnaces, slag, and abundant evidence of copper smelting, like Sintashta settlements. But, unlike Sintashta, most Petrovka metal objects were made of tin-bronze.28 A possible source for the tin in Petrovka tin-bronzes, in addition to the Zeravshan valley, was in the western foothills of the Altai Mountains. A remarkable shift occurred in the forest-steppe zone north of the Petrovka territory during the early Petrovka phase.
THE SEIMA-TURBINO HORIZON IN THE FOR
EST-STEPPE ZONE
The Seima-Turbino horizon marks the entry of the forest-steppe and forest-zone foragers into the cycle of elite competition, trade, and warfare that had erupted earlier in the northern steppes. The fin-bronze spears, daggers, and axes of the Seima-Turbino horizon were among the most technically and aesthetically refined weapons in the ancient world, but they were made by forest and forest-steppe societies that in some places (Tashkovo II) still depended on hunting and fishing. These very high-quality tin-bronze objects first appeared among the Elunino and Krotovo cultures located on the upper and middle Irtysh and the upper Ob in the western foothills of the Altai Mountains, a surprisingly remote region for such a remarkable exhibition of metallurgical skill. But tin, copper, and gold ores all could be found on the upper Irtysh, near the confluence of the Irtysh and the Bukhtarta rivers about 600 km east of Karaganda. The exploitation of these ore sources apparently was accompanied by an explosion of new metallurgical skills.
One of the earliest and most important Seima-Turbino cemeteries was at Rostovka in the Omsk oblast on the middle Irtysh (figure 16.14). Although skeletal preservation was poor, many of the thirty-eight graves seem to have contained no human bones at all or just a few fragments of a skeleton. In the graves with whole bodies the skeleton was supine with the legs and arms extended. Grave gifts were offered both in the graves and in ritual deposits at the edge of graves. Both kinds of offerings included tin-bronze socketed spearheads, single-edged curved knives with cast figures on the pommel, and hollow-core bronze axes decorated with triangles and lozenges. Grave 21 contained bivalve molds for making all three of these weapon types. Offerings also included stemmed flint projectile points of the same types that appeared in Sintashta graves, bone plates pierced to make plate armor, and nineteen hundred sherds of Krotovo pottery (figure 16.14). One grave (gr. 2) contained a lapis lazuli bead from Afghanistan, probably traded through the BMAC, strung with beads of nephrite, probably from the Baikal region.29
Seima-Turbino metalsmiths were, with Petrovka metalsmiths, the first north of Central Asia to regularly use a t in-bronze alloy. But Seima-Turbino metalsmiths were unique in their mastery of lost-wax casting (for decorative figures on dagger handles) and thin-walled hollow-mold casting (for socketed spears and hollow axes). Socketed spearheads were made on Sintashta anvils by bending a bronze sheet around a socket form and then forging the seam (figure 16.15). Seima-Turbino socketed spearheads were made by pouring molten metal into a mold that created a seamless cast socket around a suspended core, making a hollow interior, a much more sophisticated operation, and easier to do with tin-bronze than with arsenical bronze. Axes were made in a similar way, tin-bronze with a hollow interior, cast around a suspended core. Lost-wax and hollow-mold casting methods probably were learned from the BMAC civilization, the only reasonably nearby source (perhaps through a skilled captive?).
Figure 16.14 The Rostovka cemetery near Omsk, one of the most important sites of the Seima-Turbino culture. Graves are numbered. Black dots represent ceramics, metal objects, and other artifacts deposited above and beside the graves. All the pots conform to the Krotova type. After Matiushchenko and Sinitsyna 1988, figures 4, 81, 82, and 83.
Figure 16.15 Grave lots from the Rostovka cemetery, graves 1, 2, and 8. The lost-wax cast figure of a man roping a horse and the hollow-mold casting of spears and axes were technical innovations probably learned from BMAC metalsmiths. Grave 1 contained beads made of both lapis lazuli from Afghanistan and nephrite probably from the near Lake Baikal. After Matiushchenko and Sinitsyna 1988, figures 6, 7, 17, and 18.
Beyond the western Altai/middle Irtysh core area the Seima-Turbino horizon was not a culture. It did not have a standard ceramic type, settlement type, or even a standard mortuary rite. Rather, Seima-Turbino metal-working techniques were adopted by emerging elites across the southern Siberian forest-steppe zone, perhaps in reaction to and competing with the Sintashta and Petrovka elites in the northern steppes. A series of original and distinctive new metal types quickly diffused through the forest-steppe zone from the east to the west, appearing in late Abashevo and Chirkovskaya cemeteries west of the Urals almost at the same time that they first appeared east of the Urals, beginning about 1900 BCE. The rapidity and reach of this phenomenon in the forest zone is surprising. The new metal styles probably spread more by emulation than by migration, along with fast-moving political changes in the structure of power. Seima-Turbino spearheads, daggers, and axes were displayed at the Turbino cemetery in the forests of the lower Kama, southward up the Oka, and as far south as the Borodino hoard in Moldova, in the East Carpathian foothills. East of the Urals, most Seima-Turbino bronzes were tin-bronzes, and west of the Urals, they were mostly arsenical bronzes. The source of the tin was in the east, but the styles and methods of Seima-Turbino metallurgy were diffused across the forest-steppe and forest zones from the Altai to the Carpathians. The Borodino hoard contained a nephrite axe probably made of stone quarried near Lake Baikal. In the eastern direction, Seima-Turbino metal types (hollow-cast socketed spearheads with a side hook, hollow-cast axes) appeared also in sites on the northwestern edges of the evolving archaic Chinese state, probably through a network of trading trails that passed north of the Tien Shan through Dzungaria.30
The dating of the Seima-Turbino horizon has changed significantly in recent years. Similarities between Seima-Turbino socketed spearheads and daggers and parallel objects in Mycenaean tombs were once used to date the Seima-Turbino horizon to a period after 1650 BCE. It is clear now, however, that Mycenaean socketed spearheads, like studded disk cheekpieces, were derived from the east and not the other way around. Seima-Turbino and Sintashta were partly contemporary, so Seima-Turbino probably began before 1900 BCE.31 Seima-Turbino and Sintasha graves had the same kinds of flint projectile points. Sintashta forged socketed spearheads probably were the simpler predecessors of the more refined hollow-cast Seima-Turbino socketed spearheads. A hollow-cast spearhead of Seima-Turbino type was deposited in a Petrovka-culture chariot grave at Krivoe Ozero (k. 2, gr. 1); and a Sintashta bent and forged spearhead appeared in the Seima-Turbino cemetery at Rostovka (gr. 1) (see figure 16.15).
The metal-working techniques of the northern steppes (Sintashta and Petrovka) and the forest-steppe zone (Seima-Turbino) remained separate and distinct for perhaps one hundred to two hundred years. But by the beginning of the Andronovo period they merged, and some important Seima-Turbino metal types, such as cast single-edged knives with a ring-pommel, became widely popular in Andronovo communities.
EAST OF THE URALS, PHASE II: THE ANDRONOVO HORIZON
The Andronovo horizon was the principal LBA archaeological complex in the steppes east of the Urals, the sister of the Srubnaya horizon west of the Urals, between about 1800 and 1200 BCE. Andronovo sites extended from the Ural steppes eastward to the steppes on the upper Yenisei River in the Altai, and from the southern forest zone southward to the Amu Darya River in Central Asia. Andronovo contained two principal subgroups, Alakul and Federovo. The earliest of these, the Alakul complex, appeared in some places by about 1900–1800 BCE. It grew directly out of the Petrovka culture by small modifications of ceramic decorations and vessel shapes. The Federovo style might have developed from a southern or eastern stylistic variant of Alakul, although some specialists insist that it had completely independent origins. Andronovo continued many of the customs and styles inherited through Sintashta and Petrovka: small family kurgan cemeteries, settlements containing ten to forty houses built close together, similar spear and dagger types, similar ornaments, and even the same decorative motifs on pottery: meanders, hanging triangles, “pine-tree” figures, stepped pyramids, and zig-zags. But chariots were no longer buried.
Alakul and Federovo are described as separate cultures within the Andronovo horizon, but to this observer, admittedly not an expert in the details of LBA ceramic typology, the Alakul and Federovo ceramic styles seem similar. Pot shapes varied only slightly (Federovo pots usually had a more indented, undercut low
er profile) and decorative motifs also varied around common themes (some Federovo motifs were “italicized” or forward-slanted versions of Alakul motifs). Pots and potsherds of these two ceramic styles are found in the same sites from the Ural-Tobol steppes southeastward to central Kazkahstan, often in the same house and pit features, and in adjoining kurgans in the same cemeteries. Some pots are described as Alakul with Federovo elements, so the two varieties can appear on the same pot (figure 16.16). Alakul pottery is stratified beneath Federovo pottery in a few key features at some sites (at Novonikol’skoe and Petrovka II in the Ishim steppes and Atasu 1 in central Kazakhstan), but Federovo pottery has never been found stratified beneath Alakul. The earliest Alakul radiocarbon dates (1900–1700 BCE) are a little older than the earliest Federovo dates (1800–1600 BCE), so Alakul probably began a century or two earlier, although in many settlements the two are thoroughly mixed. Kurgans containing Federovo pots often had larger, more complex stone constructions around the grave and the dead were cremated, whereas kurgans with Alakul pots were simpler and the dead usually were buried in the flesh. Since the two ceramic styles occurred in the same settlements and cemeteries, and even in the same house and pit features, they cannot easily be interpreted as distinct ethnic groups.32
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World Page 47
