Figure 12.4 Post-Mariupol ceramics and graves: left, Marievka kurgan 14, grave 7; upper right, Bogdanovskogo Karera Kurgan 2, graves 2 and 17; lower right, pots from Chkalovskaya kurgan 3. After Nikolova and Rassamakin 1985, figure 7.
About 40 percent of the Post-Mariupol graves in the core Orel-Samara region contained copper ornaments, usually just one or two. All forty-six of the copper objects examined by Ryndina from early-phase graves were made from “clean” Transylvanian ores, the same ores used in Tripolye B2 and C1 sites. The copper in the second phase, however, was from two sources: ten objects still were made of “clean” Transylvanian copper but twenty-three were made of arsenical bronze. They were most similar to the arsenical bronzes of the Ustatovo settlement or the late Maikop culture. Only one Post-Mariupol object (a small willow-leaf pendant from Bulakhovka kurgan cemetery I, k. 3, gr. 9) looked metallurgically like a direct import from late Maikop.10
Two Post-Mariupol graves were metalsmiths’ graves. They contained three bivalve molds for making sleeved axes. (A sleeved axe had a single blade with a cast sleeve hole for the handle on one side.) The molds copied a late Maikop axe type but were locally made.11 They probably were late Post-Mariupol, after 3300 BCE. They are the oldest known two-sided ceramic molds in the steppes, and they were buried with stone hammers, clay tubes or tulieres for bellows attachments, and abrading stones. These kits suggest a new level of technological skill among steppe metalsmiths and the graves began a long tradition of the smith being buried with his tools.
The Late Sredni Stog Culture
The third and final culture group in the western part of the Pontic-Caspian steppes was the late Sredni Stog culture. Late Sredni Stog pottery was shell-tempered and often decorated with cord-impressed geometric designs (see figure 11.7), quite unlike the plain, dark-surfaced pots of Mikhailovka I and the Post-Mariupol culture. The late Sredni Stog settlement of Moliukhor Bugor was located on the Dnieper in the forest-steppe zone. A Tripolye C1 vessel was found there. The people of Moliukhor Bugor lived in a house 15 m by 12 m with three internal hearths, hunted red deer and wild boar, fished, kept a lot of horses and a few domesticated cattle and sheep, and grew grain. Eight grain impressions were found among 372 sherds (one imprint in 47 sherds), a higher frequency than at Mikhailovka I. They included emmer wheat, einkorn wheat, millet, and barley. The well-known Sredni Stog settlement at Dereivka was occupied somewhat earlier, about 4000 BCE, but also produced many flint blades with sickle gloss and six stone querns for grinding grain, and so also probably included some grain cultivation.
Horses represented 63% of the animal bones at Dereivka (see chapter 10). The Sredni Stog societies on the Dnieper, like the other western steppe groups, had a mixed economy that combined grain cultivation, stockbreeding, horseback riding, and hunting and fishing.
Late Sredni Stog sites were located in the northern steppe and southern forest-steppe zones on the middle Dnieper, north of the Post-Mariupol and Mikhailovka I groups. Sredni Stog sites also extended from the Dnieper eastward across the middle Donets to the lower Don. The most important stratified settlement on the lower Don was Razdorskoe [raz-DOR-sko-ye]. Level 4 at Razdorskoe contained an early Khvalynsk component, level 5 above it had an early Sredni Stog (Novodanilovka period) occupation, and, after that, levels 6 and 7 had pottery that resembled late Sredni Stog mixed with imported Maikop pottery. A radiocarbon date said to be associated with level 6, on organic material in a core removed for pollen studies, produced a date of 3500–2900 BCE (4490 ± 180 BP). Near Razdorskoe was the fortified settlement at Konstantinovka. Here, in a place occupied by people who made similar lower-Don varieties of late Sredni Stog pottery, there might actually have been a small Maikop colony.12
Bodies buried in Sredni Stog graves usually were in the supine-with-raised knees position that was such a distinctive aspect of steppe burials beginning with Khvalynsk. The grave floor was strewn with red ochre, and the body often was accompanied by a unifacial flint blade or a broken pot. Small mounds sometimes were raised over late Sredni Stog graves, but in many cases they were flat.
Repin and Late Khvalynsk in the Lower Don-Volga Steppes
The two eastern groups can be discussed together. They are identified with two quite different kinds of pottery. One type clearly resembled a late variety of Khvalynsk pottery. The other type, called Repin, probably began on the middle Don, and is identified by round-based pots with cord-impressed decoration and decorated rims.
Repin, excavated in the 1950s, was located 250 km upstream from Razdorskoe, on the middle Don at the edge of the feather-grass steppe. At Repin 55% of the animal bones were horse bones. Horse meat was much more important in the diet than the meat of cattle (18%), sheep-goat (9%), pigs (9%), or red deer (9%).13 Perhaps Repin specialized in raising horses for export to North Caucasian traders (?). The pottery from Repin defined a type that has been found at many sites in the Don-Volga region. Repin pottery sometimes is found stratified beneath Yamnaya pottery, as at the Cherkasskaya settlement on the middle Don in the Voronezh oblast.14 Repin components occur as far north as the Samara oblast in the middle Volga region, at sites such as Lebyazhinka I on the Sok River, in contexts also thought to predate early Yamnaya. The Afanasievo migration to the Altai was carried out by people with a Repin-type material culture, probably from the middle Volga-Ural region. On the lower Volga, a Repin antelope hunters’ camp was excavated at Kyzyl Khak, where 62% of the bones were saiga antelope (figure 12.5). Cattle were 13%, sheep 9%, and horses and onagers each about 7%. A radiocarbon date (4900 ± 40 BP) put the Repin occupation at Kyzyl-Khak at about 3700–3600 BCE.
Kara Khuduk was another antelope hunters’ camp on the lower Volga but was occupied by people who made late Khvalynsk-type pottery (figure 12.5). A radiocarbon date (5100 ± 45 BP, UPI 430) indicated that it was occupied in about 3950–3800 BCE, earlier than the Repin occupation at Kyzyl-Khak nearby. Many large scrapers, possibly for hide processing, were found among the flint tools. Saiga antelope hides seem to have been highly desired, perhaps for trade. The animal bones were 70% saiga antelope, 13% cattle, and 6% sheep. The ceramics (670 sherds from 30–35 vessels) were typical Khvalynsk ceramics: shell-tempered, round-bottomed vessels with thick, everted lips, covered with comb stamps and corded-impressed U-shaped “caterpillar” impressions.
Late Khvalynsk graves without kurgans were found in the 1990s at three sites on the lower Volga: Shlyakovskii, Engels, and Rovnoe. The bodies were positioned on the back with knees raised, strewn with red ochre, and accompanied by lamellar flint blades, flint axes with polished edges, polished stone mace heads of Khvalynsk type, and bone beads. Late Khvalynsk populations lived in scattered enclaves on the lower Volga. Some of them crossed the northern Caspian, perhaps by boat, and established a group of camps on its eastern side, in the Mangyshlak peninsula.
The Volga-Don late Khvalynsk and Repin societies played a central role in the evolution of the Early Bronze Age Yamnaya horizon beginning around 3300 BCE (discussed in the next chapter). One kind of early Yamnaya pottery was really a Repin type, and the other kind was actually a late Khvalynsk type; so, if no other clues are present, it can be difficult to separate Repin or late Khvalynsk pottery from early Yamnaya pottery. The Yamnaya horizon probably was the medium through which late Proto-Indo-European languages spread across the steppes. This implies that classic Proto-Indo-European dialects were spoken among the Repin and late Khvalynsk groups.15
Figure 12.5 Repin pottery from Kyzl-Khak (top) and late Khvalynsk pottery and settlement plan from Kara-Khuduk (bottom) on the lower Volga. After Barynkin, Vasiliev, and Vybornov 1998, figures 5 and 6.
CRISIS AND CHANGE ON THE TRIPOLYE FRONTIER:
TOWNS BIGGER THAN CITIES
Two notable and quite different kinds of changes affected the Tripolye culture between about 3700 and 3400 BCE. First, the Tripolye settlements in the forest-steppe zone on the middle Dnieper began to make pottery that looked like Pontic-Caspian ceramics (dark, occasionally shell-tempered wares) and a
dopted Pontic-Caspian–style inhumation funerals. The Dnieper frontier became more porous, probably through gradual assimilation. But Tripolye settlements on the South Bug River, near the steppe border, changed in very different ways. They mushroomed to enormous sizes, more than 400 ha, twice the size of the biggest cities in Mesopotamia. Simply put, they were the biggest human settlements in the world. And yet, instead of evolving into cities, they were abruptly abandoned.
Contact with Sredni Stog on the Dnieper Frontier
Chapaevka was a Tripolye B2/C1 settlement of eleven dwellings located on a promontory west of the Dnieper valley in the northern forest-steppe zone. It was occupied about 3700–3400 BCE.16 Chapaevka is the earliest known Tripolye community to adopt cemetery burial (figure 12.6). A cemetery of thirty-two graves appeared on the edge of settlement. The form of burial, in an extended supine position, usually with a pot, sometimes with a piece of red ochre under the head or chest, was not exactly like any of the steppe grave types, but just the acceptance of the burial of the body was a notable change from the Old European funeral customs of the Tripolye culture. Chapaevka also had lightly built houses with dug-out floors rather than houses with plastered log floors (ploshchadka). Tripolye C1 pottery was found at Moliukhor Bugor, about 150 km to the south, perhaps the source of some of these new customs.
Most of the ceramics in the Chapaevka houses were well-fired fine wares with fine sand temper or very fine clay fabrics (50–70%), of which a small percentage (1–10%) were painted with standard Tripolye designs; but generally they were black to grey in color, with burnished surfaces, and were often undecorated. They were quite different from the orange wares that had typified earlier Tripolye ceramics. Undecorated grey-to-black ware also was typical of the Mikhailovka I and Post-Mariupol cultures, although their shapes and clay fabrics differed from most of those of the Tripolye C1 culture. One class of Chapaevka kitchen-ware pots with vertical combed decoration on the collars looked so much like late Sredni Stog pots that it is unclear whether this kind of ware was borrowed from Tripolye by late Sredni Stog potters or by Tripolye C1 potters from late Sredni Stog.17 Around 3700–3500 BCE the Dnieper frontier was becoming a zone of gradual, probably peaceful assimilation between Tripolye villagers and indigenous Sredni Stog societies east of the Dnieper.
Figure 12.6 Tripolye C1 settlement at Chapaevka on the Dnieper with eleven houses (features I–XI) and cemetery (gr. 1–32) and ceramics. After Kruts 1977, figures 5 and 16.
Towns Bigger Than Cities: The Tripolye C1 Super Towns
Closer to the steppe border things were quite different. All the Tripolye settlements located between the Dnieper and South Bug rivers, including Chapaevka, were oval, with houses arranged around an open central plaza. Some villages occupied less than 1 ha, many were towns of 8–15 ha, some were more than 100 ha, and a group of three Tripolye C1 sites located within 20 km of one another reached sizes of 250–450 ha between about 3700 and 3400 BCE. These super sites were located in the hills east of the South Bug River, near the edge of the steppe in the southern forest-steppe zone. They were the largest communities not just in Europe but in the world.18
The three known super-sites—Dobrovodi (250 ha), Maidanets’ke (250 ha), and Tal’yanki (450 ha)—perhaps were occupied sequentially in that order. None of these sites contained an obvious administrative center, palace, storehouse, or temple. They had no surrounding fortification wall or moat, although the excavators Videiko and Shmagli described the houses in the outer ring as joined in a way that presented an unbroken two-story-high wall pierced only by easily defended radial streets. The most thoroughly investigated of the three, Maidanets’ke, covered 250 ha. Magnetometer testing revealed 1,575 structures (figure 12.7). Most were inhabited simultaneously (there was almost no overbuilding of newer houses over older ones) by a population estimated at fifty-five hundred to seventy-seven hundred people. Using Bibikov’s estimate of 0.6 ha of cultivated wheat per person per year, a population of that magnitude would have required 3,300–4,620 ha of cultivated fields each year, which would have necessitated cultivating fields more than 3 km from the town.18 The houses were built close to one another in concentric oval rings, on a common plan, oriented toward a central plaza. The excavated houses were large, 5–8 m wide and 20–30 m long, and many were two-storied. Videiko and Shmagli suggested a political organization based on clan segments. They documented the presence of one larger house for each five to ten smaller houses. The larger houses usually contained more female figurines (rare in most houses), more fine painted pots, and sometimes facilities such as warp-weighted looms. Each large house could have been a community center for a segment of five to ten houses, perhaps an extended family (or a “super-family collective,” in Videiko’s words). If the super towns were organized in this way, a council of 150–300 segment leaders would have made decisions for the entire town. Such an unwieldy system of political management could have contributed to its own collapse. After Maidanests’ke and Tal’yanki were abandoned, the largest town in the South Bug hills was Kasenovka (120 ha, with seven to nine concentric rings of houses), dated to the Tripolye C1/C2 transition, perhaps 3400–3300 BCE. When Kasenovka was abandoned, Tripolye people evacuated most of the South Bug valley.
Figure 12.7 The Tripolye C1 Maidanets’ke settlement, with 1,575 structures mapped by magnetometers: left: smaller houses cluster around larger houses, thought to be clan or sub-clan centers; right: a house group very well preserved by the Yamnaya kurgan built on top of it, showing six inserted late Yamnaya graves. Artifacts from the settlement: top center, a cast copper axe; central row, a polished stone axe and two clay loom weights; bottom row, selected painted ceramics. After Shmagli and Videiko 1987; and Videiko 1990.
Specialized craft centers appeared in Tripolye C1 communities for making flint tools, weaving, and manufacturing ceramics. These crafts became spatially segregated both within and between towns.20 A hierarchy appeared in settlement sizes, comprised of two and perhaps three tiers. These kinds of changes usually are interpreted as signs of an emerging political hierarchy and increasing centralization of political power. But, as noted, instead of developing into cities, the towns were abandoned.
Population concentration is a standard response to increased warfare among tribal agriculturalists, and the subsequent abandonment of these places suggests that warfare and raiding was at the root of the crisis. The aggressors could have been steppe people of Mikhailovka I or late Sredni Stog type. A settlement at Novorozanovka on the Ingul, west of the Dnieper, produced a lot of late Sredni Stog cord-impressed pottery, some Mikhailovka I pottery, and a few imported Tripolye C1 painted fine pots. Mounted raiding might have made it impossible to cultivate fields more than 3 km from the town. Raiding for cattle or captives could have caused the fragmentation and dispersal of the Tripolye population and the abandonment of town-based craft traditions just as it had in the Danube valley some five hundred years earlier. Farther north, in the forest-steppe zone on the middle Dnieper, assimilation and exchange led ultimately in the same direction but more gradually.
THE FIRST CITIES AND THEIR CONNECTION TO THE STEPPES
Steppe contact with the civilizations of Mesopotamia was, of course, much less direct than contact with Tripolye societies, but the southern door might have been the avenue through which wheeled vehicles first appeared in the steppes, so it was important. Our understanding of these contacts with the south has been completely rewritten in recent years.
Between 3700 and 3500 BCE the first cities in the world appeared among the irrigated lowlands of Mesopotamia. Old temple centers like Uruk and Ur had always been able to attract thousands of laborers from the farms of southern Iraq for building projects, but we are not certain why they began to live around the temples permanently (figure 12.8). This shift in population from the rural villages to the major temples created the first cities. During the Middle and Late Uruk periods (3700–3100 BCE) trade into and out of the new cities increased tremendously in the form of tribute, gift exchange, t
reaty making, and the glorification of the city temple and its earthly authorities. Precious stones, metals, timber, and raw wool (see chapter 4) were among the imports. Woven textiles and manufactured metal objects probably were among the exports. During the Late Uruk period, wheeled vehicles pulled by oxen appeared as a new technology for land transport. New accounting methods were developed to keep track of imports, exports, and tax payments—cylinder seals for marking sealed packages and the sealed doors of storerooms, clay tokens indicating package contents, and, ultimately, writing.
The new cities had enormous appetites for copper, gold, and silver. Their agents began an extraordinary campaign, or perhaps competing campaigns by different cities, to obtain metals and semiprecious stones. The native chiefdoms of Eastern Anatolia already had access to rich deposits of copper ore, and had long been producing metal tools and weapons. Emissaries from Uruk and other Sumerian cities began to appear in northern cities like Tell Brak and Tepe Gawra. South Mesopotamian garrisons built and occupied caravan forts on the Euphrates in Syria at Habubu Kabira. The “Uruk expansion” began during the Middle Uruk period about 3700 BCE and greatly intensified during Late Uruk, about 3350–3100 BCE. The city of Susa in southwestern Iran might have become an Uruk colony. East of Susa on the Iranian plateau a series of large mudbrick edifices rose above the plains, protecting specialized copper production facilities that operated partly for the Uruk trade, regulated by local chiefs who used the urban tools of trade management: seals, sealed packages, sealed storerooms, and, finally, writing. Copper, lapis lazuli, turquoise, chlorite, and carnelian moved under their seals to Mesopotamia. Uruk-related trade centers on the Iranian plateau included Sialk IV1, Tal-i-Iblis V–VI, and Hissar II in central Iran. The tentacles of trade reached as far northeast as the settlement of Sarazm in the Zerafshan Valley of modern Tajikistan, probably established to control turquoise deposits in the deserts nearby.
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World Page 31