THE DNIEPER-DONETS II CULTURE
Dimitri Telegin defined the Dnieper-Donets II culture based on a series of excavated cemeteries and settlement sites in the Dnieper valley, in the steppes north of the Sea of Azov, and in the Donets valley. Dnieper-Donets II societies created large, elaborate cemeteries, made no female figurines, had open fires rather than kilns or ovens in their homes, lived in bark-covered huts rather than in large houses with fired clay floors, had no towns, cultivated little or no grain, and their pottery was very different in appearance and technology from Tripolye ceramics. The trajectory of the Cucuteni-Tripolye culture led back to the Neolithic societies of Old Europe, and that of Dnieper-Donets II led to the local Mesolithic foragers. They were fundamentally different people and almost certainly spoke different languages. But around 5200 BCE, the foragers living around the Dnieper Rapids began to keep cattle and sheep.
The bands of fishers and hunters whose cemeteries had overlooked the Rapids since the Early Mesolithic might have been feeling the pinch of growing populations. Living by the rich resources of the Rapids they might have become relatively sedentary, and women, when they live a settled life, generally have more children. They controlled a well-known, strategic area in a productive territory. Their decision to adopt cattle and sheep herding could have opened the way for many others in the Pontic-Caspian steppes. In the following two or three centuries domesticated cattle, sheep, and goats were walked and traded from the Dnieper valley eastward to the Volga-Ural steppes, where they had arrived by about 4700–4600 BCE. The evidence for any cereal cultivation east of the Dnieper before about 4200 BCE is thin to absent, so the initial innovation seems to have involved animals and animal herding.
Dating the Shift to Herding
The traditional Neolithic/Eneolithic chronology of the Dnieper valley is based on several sites near the Dnieper Rapids; the important ones are Igren 8, Pokhili, and Vovchok, where a repeated stratigraphic sequence was found. At the bottom were Surskii-type Neolithic pots and microlithic flint tools associated with the bones of hunted wild animals, principally red deer, wild pigs, and fish. These assemblages defined the Early Neolithic (dated about 6200–5700 BCE). Above them were Dnieper-Donets phase I occupations with comb-impressed and vegetal-tempered pottery, still associated with wild fauna; they defined the Middle Neolithic (probably about 5700–5400 BCE, contemporary with the Bug-Dniester culture). Stratified above these deposits were layers with Dnieper-Donets II pottery, sand-tempered with “pricked” or comb-stamped designs, and large flint blade tools, associated with the bones of domesticated cattle and sheep. These DDII assemblages represented the beginning of the Early Eneolithic and the beginning of herding economies east of the Dnieper River.15
Unlike the dates from DDI and Surskii, most DDII radiocarbon dates were measured on human bone from cemeteries. The average level of 15N in DDII human bones from the Dnieper valley is 11.8%, suggesting a meat diet of about 50% fish. Correcting the radiocarbon dates for this level of 15N, I obtained an age range of 5200–5000 BCE for the oldest DDII graves at the Yasinovatka and Dereivka cemeteries near the Dnieper Rapids. This is probably about when the DDII culture began. Imported pots of the late Tripolye A2 Borisovka type have been found in DDII settlements at Grini, Piliava, and Stril’cha Skelia in the Dnieper valley, and sherds from three Tripolye A pots were found at the DDII Nikol’skoe cemetery. Tripolye A2 is dated about 4500–4200 BCE by good dates (not on human bone) in the Tripolye heartland, and late DDII radiocarbon dates (when corrected for 15N) agree with this range. The DDII period began about 5200–5000 BCE and lasted until about 4400–4200 BCE. Contact with Tripolye A people seems to have intensified after about 4500 BCE.16
The Evidence for Stockbreeding and Grain Cultivation
Four Dnieper-Donets II settlement sites in the Dnieper valley have been studied by zoologists—Surskii, Sredni Stog 1, and Sobachki in the steppe zone near the Rapids; and Buz’ki in the moister forest-steppe to the north (table 9.2). Domesticated cattle, sheep/goat, and pig accounted for 30–75% of the animal bones in these settlements. Sheep/goat contributed more than 50% of the bones at Sredni Stog 1 and 26% at Sobachki. Sheep finally were accepted into the meat diet in the steppes. Perhaps they were already being plucked for felt making; the vocabulary for wool might have first appeared among Pre-Proto-Indo-European speakers at about this time. Wild horses were the most important game (?) animal at Sredni Stog 1 and Sobachki, whereas red deer, roe deer, wild pig, and beaver were hunted in the more forested parts of the river at Buz’ki and Surskii 2–4. Fishing net weights and hooks suggest that fish remained important. This is confirmed by levels of 15N in the bones of people who lived on the Dnieper Rapids, which indicate a meat diet containing more than 50% fish. Domesticated cattle, pig, and sheep bones occurred in all DDII settlements and in several cemeteries, and constituted more than half the bones at two settlement sites (Sredni Stog I and Sobachki) in the steppe zone. Domesticated animals seem indeed to have been an important addition to the diet around the Dnieper Rapids.17
TABLE 9.2
Dnieper- Donets II Animal Bones from Settlements
Flint blades with sickle gloss attest to the harvesting of cereals at DDII settlements. But they could have been wild seed plants like Chenopodium or Amaranthus. If cultivated cereals were harvested there was very little evidence found. Two impressions of barley (Hordeum vulgare) were recovered on a potsherd from a DDII settlement site at Vita Litovskaya, near Kiev, west of the Dnieper. In the forests northwest of Kiev, near the Pripet marshes, there were sites with pottery that somewhat resembled DDII pottery but there were no elaborate cemeteries or other traits of the DDII culture. Some of these settlements (Krushniki, Novosilki, Obolon’) had pottery with a few seed impressions of wheat (T. monococcum and T. dicoccum) and millet (Panicum sativum). These sites probably should be dated before 4500 BCE, since Lengyel-related cultures replaced them in Volhynia and the Polish borderlands after about that date. Some forest-zone farming seems to have been practiced in the southern Pripet forests west of the Dnieper. But in steppe-zone DDII cemeteries east of the Dnieper, Malcolm Lillie recorded almost no dental caries, suggesting that the DDII people ate a low-carbohydrate diet similar to that of the Mesolithic. No cultivated cereal imprints have been found east of the Dnieper River in pots dated before about 4000 BCE.18
Pottery and Settlement Types
Pottery was more abundant in DDII living sites than it had been in DDI, and appeared for the first time in cemeteries (figure 9.5). The growing importance of pottery perhaps implies a more sedentary lifestyle, but shelters were still lightly built and settlements left only faint footprints. A typical DDII settlement on the Dnieper River was Buz’ki. It consisted of five hearths and two large heaps of discarded shellfish and animal bones. No structures were detected, although some kind of shelter probably did exist.19 Pots here and in other DDII sites were made in larger sizes (30–40 cm in diameter) with flat bottoms (pots seen in DDI sites had mainly pointed or rounded bottoms) and an applied collar around the rim. Decoration usually covered the entire outside of the vessel, made by pricking the surface with a stick, stamping designs with a small comb-stamp, or incising thin lines in horizontal-linear and zig-zag motifs—quite different from the spirals and swirls of Tripolye A potters. The application of a “collar” to thicken the rim was a popular innovation, widely adopted across the Pontic-Caspian steppes about 4800 BCE.
Polished (not chipped) stone axes now became common tools, perhaps for felling forests, and long unifacial flint blades (5–15 cm long) also became increasingly common, perhaps as a standardized part of a trade or gift package, since they appeared in graves and in small hoards in settlements.
Dnieper-Donets II Funeral Rituals
DDII funerals were quite different from those of the Mesolithic or Neolithic. The dead usually were exposed, their bones were collected, and they were finally buried in layers in communal pits. Some individuals were buried in the flesh, without exposure. This communal pit type of ce
metery, with several treatments of the body in one pit, spread to other steppe regions. The thirty known DDII communal cemeteries were concentrated around the Dnieper Rapids but occurred also in other parts of the Dnieper valley and in the steppes north of the Sea of Azov. The largest cemeteries were three times larger than those of any earlier era, with 173 bodies at Dereivka, 137 at Nikol’skoe, 130 at Vovigny II, 124 at Mariupol, 68 at Yasinovatka, 50 at Vilnyanka, and so on. Pits contained up to four layers of burials, some whole and in an extended supine position, others consisting of only skulls. Cemeteries contained up to nine communal burial pits. Traces of burned structures, perhaps charnel houses built to expose dead bodies, were detected near the pits at Mariupol and Nikol’skoe. At some cemeteries, including Nikol’skoe (figure 9.5), loose human bones were widely scattered around the burial pits.
Figure 9.5 Dnieper-Donets II cemetery at Nikol’skoe with funerary ceramics. Pits A,B,G, and V were in an area deeply stained with red ochre. The other five burial pits were on a slightly higher elevation. Broken pots and animal bones were found near the cluster of rocks in the center. After Telegin 1991, figures 10, 20; and Telegin 1968, figure 27.
At Nikol’skoe and Dereivka some layers in the pits contained only skulls, without mandibles, indicating that some bodies were cleaned to the bone long before final burial. Other individuals were buried in the flesh, but the pose suggests that they were tightly wrapped in some kind of shroud. The first and last graves in the Nikol’skoe pits were whole skeletons. The standard burial posture for a body buried in the flesh was extended and supine, with the hands by the sides. Red ochre was densely strewn over the entire ritual area, inside and outside the grave pits, and pots and animal bones were broken and discarded near the graves.20
The funerals at DDII cemeteries were complex events that had several phases. Some bodies were exposed, and sometimes just their skulls were buried. In other cases whole bodies were buried. Both variants were placed together in the same multilayered pits, strewn with powdered red ochre. The remains of graveside feasts—cattle and horse bones—were thrown in the red-stained soil at Nikol’skoe, and cattle bones were found in grave 38, pit A, at Vilnyanka.21 At Nikol’skoe almost three thousand sherds of pottery, including three Tripolye A cups, were found among the animal bones and red ochre deposited over the graves.
Power and Politics
The people of the DDII culture looked different than people of earlier periods in two significant respects: the profusion of new decorations for the human body and the clear inequality in their distribution. The old fisher-gatherers of the Dnieper Rapids were buried wearing, at most, a few beads of deer or fish teeth. But in DDII cemeteries a few individuals were buried with thousands of shell beads, copper and gold ornaments, imported crystal and porphyry ornaments, polished stone maces, bird-bone tubes, and ornamental plaques made of boar’s tusk (figure 9.6). Boar’s-tusk plaques were restricted to very few individuals. The tusks were cut into rectangular flat pieces (not an easy thing to do), polished smooth, and pierced or incised for attachment to clothing. They may have been meant to emulate Tripolye A copper and Spondylus-shell plaques, but DDII chiefs found their own symbols of power in the tusks of wild boars.
Figure 9.6 Ornaments and symbols of power in the Early Eneolithic, from Dnieper-Donets II graves, Khvalynsk, and Varfolomievka. The photo of grave 50 at Mariupol, skull at the top, is adapted from Gimbutas 1956, plate 8. The beads from Nikol’skoe include two copper beads and a copper ring on the left, and a gold ring on the lower right. The other beads are polished and drilled stone. The maces from Mariupol and Nikol’skoe, and beads from Nikol’skoe are after Telegin 1991, figures 29, 38; and Telegin and Potekhina 1987, figure 39. The Varfolomievka mace (or pestle?) is after Yudin 1988, figure 2; Khvalynsk maces are after Agapov, Vasliev, and Pestrikova 1990, figure 24. Boars-tusk plaques, at the bottom, are after Telegin 1991, figure 38.
At the Mariupol cemetery 310 (70%) of the 429 boar’s-tusk plaques accompanied just 10 (8%) of the 124 individuals. The richest individual (gr. 8) was buried wearing forty boars-tusk plaques sewn to his thighs and shirt, and numerous belts made of hundreds of shell and mother-of-pearl beads. He also had a polished porphyry four-knobbed mace head (figure 9.6), a bull figurine carved from bone, and seven bird-bone tubes. At Yasinovatka, only one of sixty-eight graves had boars-tusk plaques: an adult male wore nine plaques in grave 45. At Nikol’skoe, a pair of adults (gr. 25 and 26) was laid atop a grave pit (B) equipped with a single boar’s-tusk plaque, a polished serpentine mace head, four copper beads, a copper wire ring, a gold ring, polished slate and jet beads, several flint tools, and an imported Tripolye A pot. The copper contained trace elements that identify it as Balkan in origin. Surprisingly few children were buried at Mariupol (11 of 124 individuals), suggesting that a selection was made—not all children who died were buried here. But one was among the richest of all the graves: he or she (sex is indeterminate in immature skeletons) wore forty-one boar’s-tusk plaques, as well as a cap armored with eleven whole boar’s tusks, and was profusely ornamented with strings of shell and bone beads. The selection of only a few children, including some who were very richly ornamented, implies the inheritance of status and wealth. Power was becoming institutionalized in families that publicly advertised their elevated status at funerals.
The valuables that signaled status were copper, shell, and imported stone beads and ornaments; boars-tusk plaques; polished stone mace-heads; and bird-bone tubes (function unknown). Status also might have been expressed through the treatment of the body after death (exposed, burial of the skull/not exposed, burial of the whole body); and by the public sacrifice of domesticated animals, particularly cattle. Similar markers of status were adopted across the Pontic-Caspian steppes, from the Dnieper to the Volga. Boars-tusk plaques with exactly the same flower-like projection on the upper edge (figure 9.6, top plaque from Yasinovatka) were found at Yasinovatka in the Dnieper valley and in a grave at S’yezzhe in the Samara valley, 400 km to the east. Ornaments made of Balkan copper were traded across the Dnieper and appeared on the Volga. Polished stone mace-heads had different forms in the Dnieper valley (Nikol’skoe), the middle Volga (Khvalynsk), and the North Caspian region (Varfolomievka), but a mace is a weapon, and its wide adoption as a symbol of status suggests a change in the politics of power.
THE KHVALYNSK CULTURE ON THE VOLGA
The initial spread of stockbreeding in the Pontic-Caspian steppes was notable for the various responses it provoked. The DDII culture, where the shift began, incorporated domesticated animals not just as a ritual currency but also as an important part of the daily diet. Other people reacted in quite different ways, but they were all clearly interacting, perhaps even competing, with one another. A key regional variant was the Khvalynsk culture.
A prehistoric cemetery was discovered at Khvalynsk in 1977 on the west bank of the middle Volga. Threatened by the water impounded behind a Volga dam, it was excavated by teams led by Igor Vasiliev of Samara (figure 9.7). Its location has since been completely destroyed by bank erosion. Sites of the Khvalynsk type are now known from the Samara region southward along the banks of the Volga into the Caspian Depression and the Ryn Peski desert in the south. The characteristic pottery included open bowls and bag-like, round-bottomed pots, thick-walled and shell-tempered, with very distinctive sharply everted thick “collars” around the rims. They were densely embellished with bands of pricked and comb-stamped decoration that often covered the entire exterior surface. Early Khvalynsk, well documented at the Khvalynsk cemetery, began around 4700–4600 BCE in the middle Volga region (after adjusting the dates downward for the 15N content of the humnan bones on which the dates were measured). Late Khvalynsk on the lower Volga is dated 3900–3800 BCE at the site of Kara-Khuduk but probably survived even longer than this on the lower Volga.22
The first excavation at the Khvalynsk cemetery, in 1977–79 (excavation I), uncovered 158 graves; the second excavation in 1980–85 (excavation II) recovered, I have been told,
43 additional graves.23 Only Khvalynsk I has been published, so all statistics here are based on the first 158 graves (figure 9.7). Khvalynsk was by far the largest excavated Khvalynsk-type cemetery; most others had fewer than 10 graves. At Khvalynsk most of the deceased were layered in group pits, somewhat like DDII graves, but the groups were much smaller, containing only two to six individuals (perhaps families) buried on top of one another. One-third of the graves were single graves, a move away from the communal DDII custom. Only mature males, aged thirty to fifty, were exposed and disarticulated prior to burial, probably an expression of enhanced male status, associated with the introduction of herding economies elsewhere in the world.24 Few children were buried in the cemetery (13 of 158), but those who were included some of the most profusely ornamented individuals, again possibly indicating that status was inherited. The standard burial posture was on the back with the knees raised, a distinctive pose. Most had their heads to the north and east, a consistent orientation that was absent in DDII cemeteries. Both the peculiar posture and the standard orientation later became widespread in steppe funeral customs.
Figure 9.7 Khvalynsk cemetery and grave gifts. Grave 90 contained copper beads and rings, a harpoon, flint blades, and a bird-bone tube. Both graves (90 and 91) were partly covered by Sacrificial Deposit 4 with the bones from a horse, a sheep, and a cow.
Center: grave goods from the Khvalynsk cemetery—copper rings and bracelets, polished stone mace heads, polished stone bracelet, Cardium shell ornaments, boars tusk chest ornaments, flint blades, and bifiacial projectile points. Bottom: shell-tempered pottery from the Khvalynsk cemetery. After Agapov, Vasiliev, and Pestrikova 1990; and Ryndina 1998, Figure 31.
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World Page 21