It is clear that populations continued to circulate between the Ural frontier and the Altai well into the Yamnaya period in the Ural steppes, or after 3300 BCE, bringing many Yamnaya traits and practices to the Altai. About a hundred metal objects have been found in Afanasievo cemeteries in the Altai and Western Sayan Mountains, including three sleeved copper axes of a classic Volga-Ural Yamnaya type, a cast shaft-hole copper hammer-axe, and two tanged copper daggers of typical Yamnaya type. These artifacts are recognized by Chernykh as western types typical of Volga-Ural Yamnaya, with no native local precedents in the Altai region.14
Mallory and Mair have argued at book length that the Afanasievo migration detached the Tocharian branch from Proto-Indo-European. A material bridge between the Afanasievo culture and the Tarim Basin Tocharians could be represented by the long-known but recently famous Late Bronze Age Europoid “mummies” (not intentionally mummified but naturally freeze-dried) found in the northern Taklamakan Desert, the oldest of which are dated 1800–1200 BCE. In addition to the funeral ritual (on the back with raised knees, in ledged and roofed grave pits), there was a symbolic connection. On the stone walls of Late Afanasievo graves in the Altai (perhaps dated about 2500 BC) archaeologist V. D. Kubarev found paintings with “solar signs” and headdresses like the one painted on the cheek of one of the Tarim “mummies” found at Zaghunluq, dated about 1200 BCE. If Mallory and Mair were right, as seems likely, late Afanasievo pastoralists were among the first to take their herds from the Altai southward into the Tien Shan; and after 2000 BCE their descendants crossed the Tien Shan into the northern oases of the Tarim Basin.15
WAGON GRAVES IN THE STEPPES
We cannot say exactly when wagons first rolled into the Eurasian steppes. But an image of a wagon on a clay cup is securely dated to 3500–3300 BCE at Bronocice in southern Poland (chapter 4). The ceramic wagon models of the Baden culture in Hungary and the Novosvobodnaya wagon grave at Starokorsunskaya kurgan 2 on the Kuban River in the North Caucasus probably are about the same age. The oldest excavated wagon graves in the steppes are radiocarbon dated about 3100–3000 BCE, but it is unlikely that they actually were the first. Wagons probably appeared in the Pontic-Caspian steppes a couple of centuries before the Yamnaya horizon began. It would have taken some time for a new, wagon-dependent herding system to get organized and begin to succeed. The spread of the Yamnaya horizon was the signature of that success.
In a book published in 2000 Aleksandr Gei counted 257 Yamnaya and Catacomb-culture wagon and cart burials in the Pontic-Caspian steppes, dated by radiocarbon between about 3100 and 2200 BCE (see figures 4.4, 4.5, 4.6). Parts of wagons and carts were deposited in less than 5% of excavated Yamnaya-Catacomb graves, and the few graves that had them were concentrated in particular regions. The largest cluster of wagon-graves (120) was in the Kuban steppes north of the North Caucasus, not far from Maikop. Most of the Kuban wagons (115) were in graves of the Novotitorovskaya type, a local Kuban-region EBA culture that developed from early Yamnaya.16
Usually the vehicles used in funeral rituals were disassembled and the wheels were placed near the corners of the grave pit, as if the grave itself represented the wagon. But a whole wagon was buried west of the Dnieper in the Yamnaya grave at Lukyanova kurgan, grave 1; and whole wagons were found under nine Novotitorovskaya kurgans in the Kuban steppes. Many construction details can be reconstructed from these ten cases. All ten wagons had a fixed axle and revolving wheels. The wheels were made of two or three planks doweled together and cut in a circular shape about 50–80 cm in diameter. The wagon bed was about 1 m wide and 2–2.5 m long, and the gauge or track width between the wheels was 1.5–1.65 m. The Novotitorovskaya wagon at Lebedi kurgan 2, grave 116, is reconstructed by Gei with a box seat for the driver, supported on a cage of vertical struts doweled into a rectangular frame. Behind the driver was the interior of the wagon, the floor of which was braced with X-crossed planks (like the repoussé image on the Novosvobodnaya bronze cauldron from the Evdik kurgan) (see figure 4.3a). The Lukyanovka wagon frame also was braced with X-crossed planks. The passengers and cargo were protected under a “tilt,” a wagon cover made of reed mats painted with red, white, and black stripes and curved designs, possibly sewn to a backing of felt. Similar painted reed mats with some kind of organic backing were placed on the floors of Yamnaya graves (figure 13.4).17
Figure 13.4 Painted reed mats in graves of the Yamnaya and related traditions. Top: Semenovskii kurgan 8, grave 9, late Yamnaya, lower Dniester steppes; bottom, Ostanni kurgan 2, double grave 15 with two wagons, Novotitorovskaya culture, Kuban River steppes. After Subbotin 1985, figure 7.7; and Gei 2000.
TABLE 13.3 Selected Radiocarbon Dates associated with the Afanasievo Migration and the Yamnaya Horizon
The oldest radiocarbon dates from steppe vehicle graves bracket a century or two around 3000 BCE (table 13.3). One came from Ostannii kurgan 1, grave 160 in the Kuban, a grave of the third phase of the Novotitorovskaya culture dated 4440 ± 40 BP, or 3320–2930 BCE. The other is from Bal’ki kurgan, grave 57, on the lower Dnieper, an early Yamnaya grave dated 4370 ± 120 BP, or 3330–2880 BCE (see figure 4.4, figure 4.5). The probability distributions for both dates lie predominantly before 3000 BCE, which is why I use the figure 3100 BCE. But almost certainly these were not the first wagons in the steppes.18
Wagons probably appeared in the steppes between about 3500 and 3300 BCE, possibly from the west through Europe, or possibly through the late Maikop-Novosvobodnaya culture, from Mesopotamia. Since we cannot really say where the wheel-and-axle principle was invented, we do not know from which direction it first entered the steppes. But it had the greatest effect in the Don-Volga-Ural steppes, the eastern part of the early Proto-Indo-European world, and the Yamnaya horizon had its oldest roots there.
The subsequent spread of the Yamnaya horizon across the Pontic-Caspian steppes probably did not happen primarily through warfare, for which there is only minimal evidence. Rather, it spread because those who shared the agreements and institutions that made high mobility possible became potential allies, and those who did not share these institutions were separated as Others. Larger herds also probably brought increased prestige and economic power, because large herd-owners had more animals to loan or offer as sacrifices at public feasts. Larger herds translated into richer bride-prices for the daughters of big herd owners, which would have intensified social competition between them. A similar competitive dynamic was partly responsible for the Nuer expansion in east Africa (chapter 6). The Don-Volga dialect associated with the biggest and therefore most mobile herd owners probably was late Proto-Indo-European.
WHERE DID THE YAMNAYA HORIZON BEGIN?
Why, as I just stated, did the Yamnaya horizon have its oldest roots in the eastern part of the Proto-Indo-European world? The artifact styles and funeral rituals that defined the early Yamnaya horizon appeared earliest in the east. Most archaeologists accept Nikolai Merpert’s judgment that the oldest Yamnaya variants appeared in the Volga-Don steppes, the driest and easternmost part of the Pontic-Caspian steppe zone.
The Yamnaya horizon was divided into nine regional groups in Merpert’s classic 1974 study. His regions have been chopped into finer and finer pieces by younger scholars.19 These regional groups, however defined, did not pass through the same chronological stages at the same time. The pottery of the earliest Yamnaya phase (A) is divided by Telegin into two variants, A1 and A2 (figure 13.5).20 Type A1 pots had a longer collar, decoration was mainly in horizontal panels on the upper third of the vessel, and “pearl” protrusions often appeared on and beneath the collar. Type A1 was like Repin pottery from the Don. Type A2 pots had decorations all over the vessel body, often in vertical panels, and had shorter, thicker, more everted rims. Type A2 was like late Khvalynsk pottery from the lower Volga. Repin vessels were made by coiling strips of clay; Type A2 Yamnaya vessels were usually made by pounding strips of clay into bag-shaped depressions or moulds to build up the walls, a very specific technological style. Pots of bot
h subtypes were made of clays mixed with shell. Some of the shell temper seems to have been intentionally added, and some, particularly in Type A2 vessels, came from lake-bottom clays that naturally contained bits of shell and lake snails. Both the A1 and A2 types appeared across the Pontic-Caspian steppes in the earliest Yamnaya graves.
Figure 13.5 Early Yamnaya ceramic types A1 (Repin-related) and A2 (Khvalynsk-related). After Telegin et al. 2003.
Early Yamnaya on the Lower Volga and Lower Don
Archaeological surveys led by I. V. Sinitsyn on the lower Volga between 1951 and 1953 revealed a regular series of Bronze Age kurgan cemeteries spaced 15–20 km apart along the level plains on the eastern bank between Saratov and Volgograd (then Stalingrad). Some of these kurgans contained stratified sequences of graves, and this stratigraphic evidence was employed to identify the earliest Yamnaya monuments. Important stratified kurgans included Bykovo cemetery II, kurgan 2, grave 1 (with a pot of Telegin’s Type A1 stratified beneath later Yamnaya graves) and Berezh-novka cemetery I, kurgans 5 and 32, graves 22 and 2, respectively (with pots of Telegin’s Type A2 stratified beneath later graves). In 1956 Gimbutas suggested that the “Kurgan Culture” began on the lower Volga. Merpert’s synthesis of the Yamnaya horizon in 1974 supported Gimbutas. Recent excavations have reconfirmed the antiquity of Yamnaya traditions on the lower Volga. Archaic antecedents of both the A1 and A2 types of early Yamnaya pottery have been found in settlements on the lower Volga at Kyzyl Khak and Kara Khuduk (see figure 12.5), dated by radiocarbon between 4000 and 3500 BCE. Graves that seem intermediate between late Khvalynsk and Yamnaya in style and ritual have also been found at Shlyakovskii kurgan, Engels and Tarlyk between Saratov and Volgograd on the lower Volga.
The A1 or Repin style was made earliest in the middle Don–middle Volga region. Repin pottery is stratified beneath Yamnaya pottery at Cherkassky on the middle Don and is dated between 3950 and 3600 BCE at an antelope hunters’ camp on the lower Volga at Kyzyl-Khak. The earliest Repin pottery was somewhat similar in form and decoration to the late Sredni Stog–Konstantinovka types on the lower Don, and it is now thought that contact with the late Maikop-Novosvobodnaya culture on the lower Don at places like Konstantinovka stimulated the emergence and spread of the early Repin culture and, through Repin, early Yamnaya. The metal-tanged daggers and sleeved axes of the early Yamnaya horizon certainly were copied after Maikop-Novosvobodnaya types.
The A2 or Khvalynsk style began on the lower Volga among late Khvalynsk populations. This bag-shaped kind of pottery remained the most common type in lower Volga Yamnaya graves, and later spread up the Volga into the middle Volga-Ural steppes, where the A2 style gradually replaced Repin-style Yamnaya pottery. Again, contact with people from the late Maikop-Novosvobodnaya culture, such as the makers of the kurgan at Evdik on the lower Volga, might have stimulated the change from late Khvalynsk to early Yamnaya. One of the stimuli introduced from the North Caucasus might have been wagons and wagon-making skills.21
Early Yamnaya on the Dnieper
The type site for early Yamnaya in Ukraine is a settlement, Mikhailovka. That Mikhailovka is a settlement, not a kurgan cemetery, immediately identifies the western Yamnaya way of life as more residentially stable than that of eastern Yamnaya. The strategic hill fort at Mikhailovka (level I) on the lower Dnieper was occupied before 3400 BCE by people who had connections in the coastal steppes to the west (the Mikhailovka I culture). After 3400–3300 BCE Mikhailovka (level II) was occupied by people who made pottery of the Repin-A1 type, and therefore had connections to the east. While Repin-style pottery had deep roots on the middle Don, it was intrusive on the Dnieper, and quite different from the pottery of Mikhailovka I. Mikhailovka II is itself divided into a lower level and an upper level. Lower II was contemporary with late Tripolye C1 and probably should be dated 3400–3300 BCE, whereas upper II was contemporary with early Tripolye C2 and should be dated 3300–3000 BCE. Repin-style pottery was found in both levels. The Mikhailovka II archaeological layer was about 60–70 cm thick. Houses included both dug-outs and surface houses with one or two hearths, tamped clay floors, partial stone wall foundations, and roofs of reed thatch, judging by thick deposits of reed ashes on the floors. This settlement was occupied by people who were newly allied to or intermarried with the Repin-style early Yamnaya communities of the Volga-Don region.
The people of Mikhailovka II farmed much less than those of Mikhailovka I. The frequency of cultivated grain imprints was 1 imprint per 273 sherds at Mikhailovka I but declined to 1 in 604 sherds for early Yamnaya Mikhailovka II, and 1 in 4,065 sherds for late Yamnaya Mikhailovka III, fifteen times fewer than in Mikhailovka I. At the same time food remains in the form of animal bones were forty-five times greater in the Yamnaya levels than in Mikhailovka I.22 So although the total amount of food debris increased greatly during the Yamnaya period, the contribution of grain to the diet decreased. Grain imprints did occur in late Yamnaya funeral pottery from western Ukraine, as at Belyaevka kurgan 1, grave 20 and Glubokoe kurgan 2, grave 8, kurgans on the lower Dniester. These imprints included einkorn wheat, bread wheat (Triticum aestivum), millet (Panicum miliaceum), and barley (Hordeum vulgare). Some Yamnaya groups in the Dnieper-Dniester steppes occasionally cultivated small plots of grain, as pastoralists have always done in the steppes. But cultivation declined in importance at Mikhailovka even as the Yamnaya settlement grew larger.23
WHEN DID THE YAMNAYA HORIZON BEGIN?
Dimitri Telegin and his colleagues used 210 radiocarbon dates from Yamnaya graves to establish the outlines of a general Yamnaya chronology. The earliest time interval with a substantial number of Yamnaya graves is about 3400–3200 BCE. Almost all the early dates are on wood taken from graves, so they do not need to be corrected for old carbon reservoir effects that can affect human bone. Graves dated in this interval can be found across the Pontic-Caspian steppes: in the northwestern Pontic steppes (Novoseltsy k. 19 gr. 7, Odessa region), the lower Dnieper steppes (Obloy k. 1, gr. 7, Kherson region), the Donets steppes (Volonterivka k. 1, gr. 4, Donetsk region), the lower Don steppes (Usman k. 1, gr. 13, Rostov region), the middle Volga steppes (Nizhnaya Orlyanka I, k. 1, gr. 5 and k. 4, gr. 1), and the Kalmyk steppes south of the lower Volga (Zunda Tolga, k. 1, gr. 15). Early Yamnaya must have spread rapidly across all the Pontic-Caspian steppes between about 3400 and 3200 BCE. The rapidity of the spread is interesting, suggesting both a competitive advantage and an aggressive exploitation of it. Other local cultures survived in pockets for centuries, since radiocarbon dates from Usatovo sites on the Dniester, late Post-Mariupol sites on the Dnieper and Kemi-Oba on the Crimean peninsula overlap with early Yamnaya radiocarbon dates between about 3300 and 2800 BCE. All three groups were replaced by late Yamnaya variants after 2800 BCE.24
WERE THE YAMNAYA PEOPLE NOMADS?
Steppe nomads have fascinated and horrified agricultural civilizations since the Scythians looted their way through Assyria in 627 BCE. We still tend to stereotype all steppe nomads as people without towns, living in tents or wagons hung with brilliant carpets, riding shaggy horses among their cattle and sheep, and able to combine their fractious clans into vast pitiless armies that poured out of the steppes at unpredictable intervals for no apparent reason other than pillage. Their peculiar kind of mobile pastoral economy, nomadic pastoralism, is often interpreted by historians as a parasitic adaptation that depended on agriculturally based states. Nomads needed states, according to this dependency hypothesis, for grain, metals, and loot. They needed enormous amounts of food and weapons to feed and arm their armies, and huge quantities of loot to maintain their loyalty, and that volume of food and wealth could only be acquired from agricultural states. Eurasian nomadic pastoralism has been interpreted as an opportunistic response to the evolution of centralized states like China and Persia on the borders of the steppe zone. Yamnaya pastoralism, whatever it was, could not have been nomadic pastoralism, because it appeared before there were any states for the Yamnaya people to depend on.25
But t
he dependency model of Eurasian nomadic pastoralism really explains only the political and military organization of Iron Age and Medieval nomads. The historian Nicola DiCosmo has shown that political and military organizations among nomads were transformed by the evolution of large standing armies that protected the leader—essentially a permanent royal bodyguard that ballooned into an army, with all the costs that implied. As for the economic basis of nomadic pastoralism, Sergei Vainshtein, the Soviet ethnographer, and DiCosmo both recognized that many nomads raised a little barley or millet, leaving a few people to tend small valleybottom fields during the summer migrations. Nomads also mined their own metal ores, abundant in the Eurasian steppes, and made their own metal tools and weapons in their own styles. The metal crafts and subsistence economy that made Eurasian nomadic pastoralism possible did not depend on imported metal or agricultural subsidies from neighboring farmers. Centralized agricultural states like those of Uruk-period Mesopotamia were very good at concentrating wealth, and if steppe pastoralists could siphon off part of that wealth it could radically transform tribal steppe military and political structures, but the everyday subsistence economics of nomadic pastoralism did not require outside support from states.26
If nomadic pastoralism is an economic term, referring not to political organization and military confederacies but simply to a form of pastoral economy dependent on high residential mobility, it appeared during the Yamnaya horizon. After the EBA Yamnaya period an increasingly bifurcated economy appeared, with both mobile and settled elements, in the MBA Catacomb culture. This sedentarizing trend then intensified with the appearance of permanent, year-round settlements across the northern Eurasian steppes during the Late Bronze Age (LBA) with the Srubnaya culture. Finally mobile pastoral nomadism of a new militaristic type appeared in the Iron Age with the Scythians. But the Scythians did not invent the first pastoral economy based on mobility. That seems to have been the great innovation of the Yamnaya horizon.
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World Page 35