The Yamnaya horizon is the visible archaeological expression of a social adjustment to high mobility—the invention of the political infrastructure to manage larger herds from mobile homes based in the steppes. A linguistic echo of the same event might be preserved in the similarity between English guest and host. They are cognates, derived from one Proto-Indo-European root (*ghos-ti-). (A “ghost” in English was originally a visitor or guest.) The two social roles opposed in English guest and host were originally two reciprocal aspects of the same relationship. The late Proto-Indo-European guest-host relationship required that “hospitality” (from the same root through Latin hospes ’foreigner, guest’) and “friendship” (*keiwos-) should be extended by hosts to guests (both *ghos-ti-), in the knowledge that the receiver and giver of “hospitality” could later reverse roles. The social meaning of these words was then more demanding than modern customs would suggest. The guest-host relationship was bound by oaths and sacrifices so serious that Homer’s warriors, Glaukos and Diomedes, stopped fighting and presented gifts to each other when they learned that their grandfathers had shared a guest-host relationship. This mutual obligation to provide “hospitality” functioned as a bridge between social units (tribes, clans) that had ordinarily restricted these obligations to their kin or co-residents (*h4erós-). Guest-host relationships would have been very useful in a mobile herding economy, as a way of separating people who were moving through your territory with your assent from those who were unwelcome, unregulated, and therefore unprotected. The guest-host institution might have been among the critical identity-defining innovations that spread with the Yamnaya horizon.2
It is difficult to document a shift to a more mobile residence pattern five thousand years after the fact, but a few clues survive. Increased mobility can be detected in a pattern of brief, episodic use, abandonment, and, much later, re-use at many Yamnaya kurgan cemeteries; the absence of degraded or overgrazed soils under early Yamnaya kurgans; and the first appearance of kurgan cemeteries in the deep steppe, on the dry plateaus between major river valleys. The principal indicator of increased mobility is a negative piece of evidence: the archaeological disappearance of long-term settlements east of the Don River. Yamnaya settlements are known west of the Don in Ukraine, but east of the Don in Russia there are no significant Yamnaya settlements in a huge territory extending to the Ural River containing many hundreds of excavated Yamnaya kurgan cemeteries and probably thousands of excavated Yamnaya graves (I have never seen a full count). The best explanation for the complete absence of settlements is that the eastern Yamnaya people spent much of their lives in wagons.
The Yamnaya horizon was the first more or less unified ritual, economic, and material culture to spread across the entire Pontic-Caspian steppe region, but it was never completely homogeneous even materially. At the beginning it already contained two major variants, on the lower Don and lower Volga, and, as it expanded, it developed other regional variants, which is why most archaeologists are reluctant to call it the Yamnaya “culture.” But many broadly similar customs were shared. In addition to kurgan graves, wagons, and an increased emphasis on pastoralism, archaeological traits that defined the early Yamnaya horizon included shell-tempered, egg-shaped pots with everted rims, decorated with comb stamps and cord impressions; tanged bronze daggers; cast flat axes; bone pins of various types; the supine-with-raised-knees burial posture; ochre staining on grave floors near the feet, hips, and head; northeastern to eastern body orientation (usually); and the sacrifice at funerals of wagons, carts, sheep, cattle, and horses. The funeral ritual probably was connected with a cult of ancestors requiring specific rituals and prayers, a connection between language and cult that introduced late Proto-Indo-European to new speakers.
The most obvious material division within the early Yamnaya horizon was between east and west. The eastern (Volga–Ural–North Caucasian steppe) Yamnaya pastoral economy was more mobile than the western one (South Bug–lower Don). This contrast corresponds in an intriguing way to economic and cultural differences between eastern and western Indo–European language branches. For example, impressions of cultivated grain have been found in western Yamnaya pottery, in both settlements and graves, and Proto-Indo-European cognates related to cereal agriculture were well preserved in western Indo-European vocabularies. But grain imprints are absent in eastern Yamnaya pots, just as many of the cognates related to agriculture are missing from the eastern Indo-European languages.3 Western Indo-European vocabularies contained a few roots that were borrowed from Afro-Asiatic languages, such as the word for the domesticated bull, *tawr-, and the western Yamnaya groups lived next to the Tripolye culture, which might have spoken a language distantly derived from an Afro-Asiatic language of Anatolia. Eastern Indo-European generally lacked these borrowed Afro-Asiatic roots. Western Indo-European religious and ritual practices were female-inclusive, and western Yamnaya people shared a border with the female-figurine–making Tripolye culture: eastern Indo-European rituals and gods, however, were more male-centered, and eastern Yamnaya people shared borders with northern and eastern foragers who did not make female figurines. In western Indo-European branches the spirit of the domestic hearth was female (Hestia, the Vestal Virgins), and in Indo–Iranian it was male (Agni). Western Indo-European mythologies included strong female deities such as Queen Magb and the Valkyries, whereas in Indo-Iranian the furies of war were male Maruts. Eastern Yamnaya graves on the Volga contained a higher percentage (80%) of males than any other Yamnaya region. Perhaps this east-west tension in attitudes toward gender contributed to the separation of the feminine gender as a newly marked grammatical category in the dialects of the Volga-Ural region, one of the innovations that defined Proto-Indo-European grammar.4
Did the Yamnaya horizon spread into neighboring regions in a way that matches the known relationships and sequencing between the Indo-European branches? This also is a difficult subject to follow archaeologically, but the movements of the Yamnaya people match what we would expect surprisingly well. First, just before the Yamnaya horizon appeared, the Repin culture of the Volga-Ural region threw off a subgroup that migrated across the Kazakh steppes about 3700–3500 BCE and established itself in the western Altai, where it became the Afanasievo culture. The separation of the Afanasievo culture from Repin probably represented the separation of Pre-Tocharian from classic Proto-Indo-European. Second, some three to five centuries later, about 3300 BCE, the rapid diffusion of the early Yamnaya horizon across the Pontic-Caspian steppes scattered the speakers of late Proto-Indo-European dialects and sowed the seeds of regional differentiation. After a pause of only a century or two, about 3100–3000 BCE, a large migration stream erupted from within the western Yamnaya region and flowed up the Danube valley and into the Carpathian Basin during the Early Bronze Age. Literally thousands of kurgans can be assigned to this event, which could reasonably have incubated the ancestral dialects for several western Indo-European language branches, including Pre-Italic and Pre-Celtic. After this movement slowed or stopped, about 2800–2600 BCE, late Yamnaya people came face to face with people who made Corded Ware tumulus cemeteries in the east Carpathian foothills, a historic meeting through which dialects ancestral to the northern Indo-European languages (Germanic, Slavic, Baltic) began to spread among eastern Corded Ware groups. Finally, at the end of the Middle Bronze Age, about 2200–2000 BCE, a migration stream flowed from the late Yamnaya/Poltavka cultures of the Middle Volga–Ural region eastward around the southern Urals, creating the Sintashta culture, which almost certainly represented the ancestral Indo-Iranian–speaking community. These migrations are described in chapter 14 and chapter 15.
The Yamnaya horizon meets the expectations for late Proto-Indo-European in many ways: chronologically (the right time), geographically (the right place), materially (wagons, horses, animal sacrifices, tribal pastoralism), and linguistically (bounded by persistent frontiers); and it generated migrations in the expected directions and in the expected sequence. Early Proto-Indo-Europ
ean probably developed between 4000 and 3500 BCE in the Don–Volga–Ural region. Late Proto-Indo-European, with o-stems and the full wagon vocabulary, expanded rapidly across the Pontic-Caspian steppes with the appearance of the Yamnaya horizon beginning about 3300 BCE. By 2500 BCE the Yamnaya horizon had fragmented into daughter groups, beginning with the appearance of the Catacomb culture in the Don-Kuban region and the Poltavka culture in the Volga-Ural region about 2800 BCE. Late Proto-Indo-European also was so diversified by 2500 BCE that it probably no longer existed (chapter 3). Again, the linkage with the steppe archaeological evidence is compelling.
WHY NOT A KURGAN CULTURE?
Marija Gimbutas first articulated her concept of a “Kurgan culture” as the archaeological expression of the Proto-Indo-European language community in 1956.5 The Kurgan culture combined two cultures first defined by V. A. Gorodtsov, who, in 1901, excavated 107 kurgans in the Don River valley. He divided his discoveries into three chronological groups. The oldest graves, stratified deepest in the oldest kurgans, were the Pit-graves (Yamnaya). They were followed by the Catacomb-graves (Katakombnaya), and above them were the timber-graves (Srubnaya). Gorodtsov’s sequence still defines the Early (EBA), Middle (MBA), and Late Bronze Age (LBA) grave types of the western steppes.6 Gimbutas combined the first two (EBA Pit-graves and MBA Catacomb-graves) into the Kurgan culture. But later she also began to include many other Late Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures of Europe, including the Maikop culture and many of the Late Neolithic cultures of eastern Europe, as outgrowths or creations of Kurgan culture migrations. The Kurgan culture was so broadly defined that almost any culture with burial mounds, or even (like the Baden culture) without them could be included. Here we are discussing the steppe cultures of the Russian and Ukrainian EBA, just one part of the original core of Gimbutas’s Kurgan culture concept. Russian and Ukrainian archaeologists do not generally use the term “Kurgan culture” rather than lumping EBA Yamnaya and MBA Catacomb-graves together they tend to divide both groups and their associated time periods into ever finer slices. I will seek a middle ground.
The Yamnaya horizon is usually described by Slavic archaeologists not as a “culture” but as a “cultural-historical community.” This phrase carries the implication that there was a thread of cultural identity or shared ethnic origin running through the Yamnaya social world, although one that diversified and evolved with the passage of time.7 Although I agree that this probably was true in this case, I will use the Western term “horizon,” which is neutral about cultural identity, in order to avoid using a term loaded toward that interpretation. As I explained in chapter 7, a horizon in archaeology is a style or fashion in material culture that is rapidly accepted by and superimposed on local cultures across a wide area. In this case, the five Pontic-Caspian cultures of the Final Eneolithic (chapter 12) were the local cultures that rapidly accepted, in varying degrees, the Yamnaya lifestyle.
BEYOND THE EASTERN FRONTIER:
THE AFANASIEVO MIGRATION TO THE ALTAI
In the last chapter I introduced the subject of the trans-continental, Repin-culture migration that created the Afanasievo culture in the western Altai Mountains and probably detached the Tocharian branch from common Proto-Indo-European. I describe it here because the process of migration and return migration that installed the early Afanasievo culture continued across the north Kazakh steppes during the Yamnaya period. In fact, it is usually discussed as an event connected with the Yamnaya horizon; it is only recently that early Afanasievo radiocarbon dates, and the broadening understanding of the age and geographic extent of the Repin culture, have pushed the beginning of the movement back into the pre-Yamnaya Repin period.
Two or three centuries before the Yamnaya horizon first appeared, the Repin-type communities of the middle Volga-Ural steppes experienced a conflict that prompted some groups to move across the Ural River eastward into the Kazakh steppes (figure 13.2). I say a conflict because of the extraordinary distance the migrants eventually put between themselves and their relatives at home, implying a strongly negative push. On the other hand, connections with the Volga-Ural Repin-Yamnaya world were maintained by a continuing round of migrations moving in both directions, so some aspect of the destination must also have exerted a positive pull. It is remarkable that the intervening north Kazakh steppe was not settled, or at least that almost no kurgan cemeteries were constructed there. Instead, the indigenous horse-riding Botai-Tersek culture emerged in the north Kazakh steppe at just the time when the Repin-Afanasievo migration began.
Figure 13.2 Culture areas in the steppes between the Volga and the Altai at the time of the Afanasievo migration, 3700–3300 BCE.
The specific ecological target in this series of movements might have been the islands of pine forest that occur sporadically in the northern Kazakh steppes from the Tobol River in the west to the Altai Mountains in the east. I am not sure why these pine islands would have been targeted other than for the fuel and shelter they offered, but they do seem to correspond with the few site locations linked to Afanasievo in the steppes, and the same peculiar steppe-pine-forest islands occur also in the high mountain valleys of the western Altai where early Afanasievo sites appeared.8 In the western Altai Mountains broad meadows and mountain steppes dip both westward toward the Irtysh River of western Siberia (probably the route of the first approach) and northward toward the Ob and Yenisei rivers (the later spread). The Afanasievo culture appeared in this beautiful setting, ideal for upland pastoralism, probably around 3700–3400 BCE, during the Repin–late Khvalynsk period.9 It flourished there until about 2400 BCE, through the Yamnaya period in the Pontic-Caspian steppes.
The Altai Mountains were about 2000 km east of the Ural River frontier that defined the eastern edge of the early Proto-Indo-European world. Only three kurgan cemeteries old enough to be connected with the Afanasievo migrations have been found in the intervening 2000 km of steppes. All three are classified as Yamnaya kurgan cemeteries, although the pottery in some of the graves has Repin traits. Two were on the Tobol, not far east of the Ural River, at Ubagan I and Verkhnaya Alabuga, possibly an initial stopping place. The other, the Karagash kurgan cemetery, was found 1000 km east of the Tobol, southeast of Karaganda in central Kazakhstan. Karagash was on the elevated green slopes of an isolated mountain spur that rose prominently above the horizon, a very visible landmark near Karkaralinsk. The earthen mound of kurgan 2 at Karagash was 27 m in diameter. It covered a stone cromlech circle 23 m in diameter, made of oblong stones 1 m in length, projecting about 60–70 cm above the ground. Some stones had traces of paint on them. A pot was broken inside the southwestern edge of the cromlech on the original ground surface, before the mound was built. The kurgan contained three graves in stone-lined cists; the central grave and another under the southeastern part of the kurgan were later robbed. The lone intact grave was found under the northeastern part of the kurgan. In it were sherds from a shell-tempered pot, a fragment of a wooden bowl with a copper-covered lip, a tanged copper dagger, a copper four-sided awl, and a stone pestle. The skeleton was of a male forty to fifty years old laid on his back with his knees raised, oriented southwest, with pieces of black charcoal and red ochre on the grave floor. The metal artifacts were typical for the Yamnaya horizon; the stone cromlech, stone-lined cist, and pot were similar to Afansievo types. Directly east of Karagash and 900 km away, up the Bukhtarta River valley east of the Irtysh, were the peaks of the western Altai and the Ukok plateau, where the first Afanasievo graves appeared. The Karagash kurgan is unlikely to be a grave of the first migrants—it looks like a Yamnaya-Afanasievo kurgan built by later people still participating in a cross-Kazakhstan circulation of movements—but it probably does mark the initial route, since routes in long-distance migrations tend to be targeted and re-used.10
Figure 13.3 Karakol kurgan 2, grave 1, an early Afanasievo grave in the western Gorny Altai. After Kubarev 1988.
Tne early Afanasievo culture in the Altai introduced fully developed kurgan funeral rituals and R
epin-Yamnaya material culture. At Karakol, kurgan 2 in the Gorny Altai, an early Afanasievo grave (gr. 1) contained a small pot similar to pots from the Ural River that are assigned to the Repin variant of early Yamnaya (figure 13.3).11 Grave 1 was placed under a low kurgan in the center of a stone cromlech 20 m in diameter. Afanasievo kurgans always were marked by a ring of stones, and large stone slabs were used to cover grave pits (early) or to make stone-lined grave cists (late). Early Afanasievo skull types resembled those of Yamnaya and western populations. On the Ukok plateau, where the early Afanasievo cemetery at Bertek 33 was found, the Afanasievo immigrants occupied a virgin landscape—there were no earlier Mesolithic or Neolithic sites. Afanasievo sites also contained the earliest bones of domesticated cattle, sheep, and horses in the Altai. At the Afanasievo settlement of Balyktyul, domesticated sheep-goat were 61% of the bones, cattle were 12%, and horses 8%.12
Cemeteries of the local Kuznetsk-Altai foragers like Lebedi II were located in the forest and forest-meadow zone higher up on the slopes of the Altai, and contained a distinct set of ornaments (bear-teeth necklaces and bone carvings of elk and bear), lithics (asymmetrical curved flint knives), antler tools (harpoons), pottery (related to the Serovo-Glazkovo pottery tradition of the Baikal forager tradition), and funeral rituals (no kurgans, no stone slab over the grave). As time passed, Glazkovo forager sites located to the northeast began to show the influence of Afanasievo motifs on their ceramics, and metal objects began to appear in Glazkovo sites.13
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World Page 34