The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

by David W. Anthony

  Yamnaya Herding Patterns

  An important clue to how the Yamnaya herding system worked is the location of Yamnaya kurgan cemeteries. Most Yamnaya kurgan cemeteries across the Pontic-Caspian region were located in the major river valleys, often on the lowest river terrace overlooking riverine forests and marshes. But at the beginning of the Yamnaya period kurgan cemeteries also began to appear for the first time in the deep steppes, on the plateaus between the major river valleys. If a cemetery can be interpreted as an ancestral claim to property (“here are the graves of my ancestors”), then the appearance of kurgan cemeteries in the deep steppes signaled that deep-steppe pastures had shifted from wild and free to cultured and owned resources. In 1985 V. Shilov made a count of the excavated kurgans located in the deep steppes, on inter-valley plateaus, in the steppe region between the lower Don, the lower Volga, and the North Caucasus. He counted 799 excavated graves in 316 kurgans located in the deep steppes, outside major river valleys. The earliest graves, the first ones to appear in these locations, were Yamnaya graves. Yamnaya accounted for 10% (78) of the graves, and 45% (359) were from MBA cultures related to the Catacomb culture, 7% (58) were from the LBA Srubnaya culture, 29% (230) were of Scytho-Sarmatian origin, and 9% (71) were historical-Medieval. The exploitation of pastures on the plateaus between the river valleys began during the EBA and rapidly reached its all-time peak during the MBA.27

  N. Shishlina collected seasonal botanical data from kurgan graves in the Kalmyk steppes, north of the North Caucasus, part of the same region that Shilov had studied. Shishlina found that Yamnaya people moved seasonally between valley-bottom pastures (occupied during all seasons) and deep-steppe plateau pastures (probably in the spring and summer) located within 15–50 km of the river valleys. Shishlina emphasized the localized nature of these migratory cycles. Repetitive movements between the valleys and plateau steppes created overgrazed areas with degraded soils (preserved today under MBA kurgan mounds) by the end of the Yamnaya period.

  What was the composition of Bronze Age herds in the Don-Volga steppes? Because there are no Yamnaya settlements east of the Don, faunal information has to be extracted from human graves. Of 2,096 kurgan graves reviewed by Shilov in both the river valleys and the inter-valley plateaus—a much bigger sample than just the graves on the plateaus—just 15.2% of Yamnaya graves contained sacrifices of domesticated animals. Most of these contained the bones of sheep or goats (65%), with cattle a distant second (15%), horses third (8%) and dogs fourth (5%) (table 13.2).28

  TABLE 13.2 Domesticated Animals in Early Bronze Age Graves and Settlements in the Pontic- Caspian Steppes

  Yamnaya herding patterns were diff erent in the west, between the Dnieper and Don valleys. One diff erence was the presence of Yamnaya settlements, implying a less mobile, more settled herding pattern. At Mikhailovka levels II and III, which define early and late Yamnaya in the Dnieper valley, cattle (60%) were more numerous than sheep (29%), unlike the sheep- dominant herds of the east. Kurgan cemeteries penetrated only a few kilometers into the plateaus; most cemeteries were located in the Dnieper valley or its larger tributaries. Th is riverine cattle- herding economy was tethered to fortified strongholds like Mikhailovka, supported by occasional small grain fields. About a dozen small Yamnaya settlements have been excavated in the Dnieper- Don steppes at places such as Liventsovka and Samsonovka on the lower Don. Most occupy less than 1 ha and were relatively low- intensity occupations, although fortification ditches protected Samsonovka and Mikhailovka, and a stone fortification wall was excavated at Skelya- Kamenolomnya. Cattle are said to predominate in the animal bones from all these places.29

  East of Repin no Yamnaya settlements have been found. Occasional wind- eroded scatters of microliths and Yamnaya pottery sherds have been observed in valley bottoms and near lakes in the Manych and North Caspian desert- steppes and deserts, but without intact cultural layers. In the lusher grasslands where it is more difficult to see small surface sites, even Yamnaya surface scatters are almost unknown. For example, the Samara oblast on the middle Volga was dotted with known settlements of the Mesolithic, Neolithic, Eneolithic, and Late Bronze Ages, but it had no EBA Yamnaya settlements. In 1996, during the Samara Valley Project, we attempted to find ephemeral Bronze Age camps by digging test pits at twelve favorable-looking places along the bottom of a stream valley, Peschanyi Dol, that had four Yamnaya kurgan cemeteries clustered near its mouth around the village of Utyevka (see figure 16.11 for a map). The Peschanyi Dol valley is today used as a summer pasturing place for cattle herds from three nearby Russian rural villages. We discovered seven ephemeral LBA Srubnaya ceramic scatters in this pleasant valley and a larger Srubnaya settlement, Barinovka, at its mouth. The LBA settlement and one camp also had been occupied during the MBA; each yielded a small handful of MBA ceramic sherds. But we found no EBA sherds—no Yamnaya settlements.

  If we cannot find the camps that Yamnaya herders occupied through the winter, when they had to retreat with their herds to the protection of riverine forests and marshes (where most Yamnaya cemeteries were located), then their herds were so large that they had to keep moving even in winter. In a similar northern grassland environment with very cold winters, the fifty bands of the Blackfoot Indians of Canada and Montana had to move a few miles several times each winter just to provide fresh forage for their horses. And the Blackfeet did not have to worry about feeding cattle or sheep. Mongolian herders move their tents and animal herds about once a month throughout the winter. The Yamnaya herding system probably was equally mobile.30

  Yamnaya herders watched over their herds on horseback. At Repin on the Don, 55% of the animal bones were horse bones. A horse skull was placed in a Yamnaya grave in a kurgan cemetery overlooking the Caspian Depression near Tsa-Tsa, south of the Volga, in kurgan 7, grave 12. Forty horses were sacrificed in a Catacomb-period grave in the same cemetery in kurgan 1, grave 5.31 The grave probably was dug around 2500 BCE. An adult male was buried in a contracted position on his left side, oriented northeast. Fragments of red ochre and white chalk were placed by his hip. A bronze dagger blade was found under his skull. Above his grave were forty horse skulls arranged in two neat rows. Three ram skulls lay on the floor of the grave. The amount of meat forty horses would have yielded—assuming they were slightly bigger than Przewalskis, or about 400 kg live weight—would be roughly 8,000 k, enough for four thousand portions of 2 k each. This suggests a funeral feast of amazing size. Horses were suitable animals for extraordinary ritual sacrifices.

  Wild Seeds and Dairy Foods in the Don-Volga Steppes

  A ceramics lab in Samara has microscopically examined many Yamnaya pot-sherds from graves, but no cultivated grain imprints appeared on Yamnaya pottery here or anywhere else east of the Don. Yamnaya people from the middle Volga region had teeth that were entirely free of caries (no caries in 428 adult Yamnaya-Poltavka teeth from Samara oblast [see figure 16.12]), which indicates a diet very low in starchy carbohydrates, like the teeth of foragers.32 Eastern Yamnaya people might have eaten wild Chenopodium and Amaranthus seeds and even Phragmites reed tubers and rhizomes. Analysis of pollen grains and phytoliths (silica bodies that form inside plant cells) by N. Shishlina from Yamnaya grave floors in the eastern Manych depression, in the steppes north of the North Caucasus, found pollen and phytoliths of Chenopodium (goosefoot) and amaranths, which can produce seed yields greater in weight per hectare than einkorn wheat, and without cultivation.33 Cultivated grain played a small role, if any, in the eastern Yamnaya diet.

  Although they were very tall and robust and showed few signs of systemic infections, the Yamnaya people of the middle Volga region exhibited significantly more childhood iron-deficiency anemia (bone lesions called cribra orbitalia) than did the skeletons from any earlier or later period (figure 13.6). A childhood diet too rich in dairy foods can lead to anemia, since the high phosphorus content of milk can block the absorption of iron.34 Health often declines in the early phases of a significant dietary change, before the optimal mix of
new foods has been established. The anomalous Yamnaya peak in cribra orbitalia could also have resulted from an increased parasite load among children, which again would be consistent with a living pattern involving closer contact between animals and people. Recent genetic research on the worldwide distribution of the mutation that created lactose tolerance, which made a dairy-based diet possible, indicates that it probably emerged first in the steppes west of the Ural Mountains between about 4600 and 2800 BCE—the Late Eneolithic (Mikhailovka I) and the EBA Yamnaya periods.35 Selection for this mutation, now carried by all adults who can tolerate dairy foods, would have been strong in a population that had recently shifted to a mobile herding economy.

  The importance of dairy foods might explain the importance of the cow in Proto-Indo-European myth and ritual, even among people who depended largely on sheep. Cattle were sacred because cows gave more milk than any other herd animal in the Eurasian steppe—twice as much as mares and five times more than goats, according to the Soviet ethnographer Vainshtein. He noted that, even among the sheep herders of Tuva in Siberia, an impoverished family of nomads that had lost all its sheep would try to keep at least one cow because that meant they could eat. The cow was the ultimate milk producer, even where herders counted their wealth in sheep.36

  Figure 13.6 Frequencies of cribra orbitalia, associated with anemia, in cultures of the Samara oblast, middle Volga region. After Murphy and Khokhlov 2004.

  The Yamnaya wagon-based herding economy seems to have evolved in the steppes east of the Don, like the earliest Yamnaya pottery styles. Unlike the pottery and grave styles, the high-mobility, sheep-herding strategy of eastern Yamnaya pastoralism did not spread westward into the Dnieper steppes or northward into the middle Volga-Ural steppes, where cattle breeding remained the dominant aspect of the herding economies. Instead, it seems that social, religious, and political institutions (guest-host agreements, patron-client contracts, and ancestor cults) spread with the Yamnaya horizon. Some new chiefs from the east probably migrated into the Dnieper steppes, but in the west they added cattle to their herds and lived in fortified home bases.

  YAMNAYA SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

  The speakers of late Proto-Indo-European expressed thanks for sons, fat cattle, and swift horses to Sky Father, *dyew pter, a male god whose prominence probably reflected the importance of fathers and brothers in the herding units that composed the core of earthly social organization. The vocabulary for kin relations in Proto-Indo-European was that of a people who lived in a patrilineal, patrilocal social world, meaning that rights, possessions, and responsibilities were inherited only from the father (not the mother), and residence after marriage was with or near the husband’s family. Kinship terms referring to grandfather, father, brother, and husband’s brother survive in clearly corresponding roots in nearly all Indo-European languages, whereas those relating to wife and wife’s family are few, uncertain, and variable. Kinship structure is only one aspect of social organization, but in tribal societies it was the glue that held social units together. We will see, however, that where the linguistic evidence suggests a homogeneous patri-centered Proto-Indo-European kinship system, the archaeological evidence of actual behavior is more variable.

  As Jim Mallory admitted years ago, we know very little about the social meanings of kurgan cemeteries, and kurgan cemeteries are all the archaeological evidence left to us over much of the Yamnaya world.37 We can presume that they were visible claims to territory, but we do not know the rules by which they were first established or who had the right to be buried there or how long they were used before they were abandoned. Archaeologists tend to write about them as static finished objects, but when they were first made they were dynamic, evolving monuments to specific people, clans, and events.

  Gender and the Meaning of Kurgan Burial

  We can be confident that kurgans were not used as family cemeteries. Mallory’s review of 2,216 Yamnaya graves showed that the median Yamnaya kurgan contained fewer than 3 Yamnaya graves. About 25% contained just 1 grave. Children never were buried alone in the central or principal grave—that status was limited to adults. A count of kurgans per century in the well-studied and well-dated Samara River valley, in the middle Volga region, indicated that Yamnaya kurgans were built rarely, only one every five years or so even in regions with many Yamnaya cemeteries. So kurgans commemorated the deaths of special adults, not of everyone in the social group or even of everyone in the distinguished person’s family. In the lower Volga, 80% of the Yamnaya graves contained males. E. Murphy and A. Khokhlov have confirmed that 80% of the sexable Yamnaya-Poltavka graves in the middle Volga region also contained males. In Ukraine, males predominated but not as strongly. In the steppes north of the North Caucasus, both in the eastern Manych steppes and in the western Kuban-Azov steppes, females and males appeared about equally in central graves and in kurgan graves generally. Mallory described the near-equal gender distribution in 165 Yamnaya graves in the eastern Manych region, and Gei gave similar gender statistics for 400 Novotitorovskaya graves in the Kuban-Azov steppes. Even in the middle Volga region some kurgans have central graves containing adult females, as at Krasnosamarskoe IV. Males were not always given the central place under kurgans even in regions where they strongly tended to occupy the central grave, and in the steppes north of the North Caucasus (where Maikop influence was strongest before the Yamnaya period) males and females were buried equally.38

  The male-centered funerals of the Volga-Ural region suggest a more male-centered eastern social variant within the Yamnaya horizon, an archaeological parallel to the male-centered deities reconstructed for eastern Indo-European mythological traditions. But even on the Volga the people buried in central graves were not exclusively males. In the patrilocal, patrilineal society reconstructed by linguists for Proto-Indo-European speakers, all lineage heads would have been males. The appearance of adult females in one out of five kurgan graves, including central graves, suggests that gender was not the only factor that determined who was buried under a kurgan. Why were adult females buried in central graves under kurgans even on the Volga? Among later steppe societies women could occupy social positions normally assigned to men. About 20% of Scythian-Sarmatian “warrior graves” on the lower Don and lower Volga contained females dressed for battle as if they were men, a phenomenon that probably inspired the Greek tales about the Amazons. It is at least interesting that the frequency of adult females in central graves under Yamnaya kurgans in the same region, but two thousand years earlier, was about the same. Perhaps the people of this region customarily assigned some women leadership roles that were traditionally male.39

  Kurgan Cemeteries and Mobility

  Were the kurgans in a cemetery built together in a rapid sequence and then abandoned, or did people stay around them and use them regularly for longer periods of time? For interval dating between kurgans it would be ideal to obtain radiocarbon dates from all the kurgans in a cemetery. In a Yamnaya cemetery, that would usually be from three to as many as forty or fifty kurgans. Very few kurgan cemeteries have been subjected to this intensity of radiocarbon dating.

  We can try to approximate the time interval between kurgans from the 210 radiocarbon dates on Yamnaya graves published in 2003 by Telegin and his colleagues. In his list we find nineteen Yamnaya kurgan cemeteries for which there are radiocarbon dates from at least two kurgans in the same cemetery. In eleven of these nineteen, more than half, at least two kurgans yielded radiocarbon dates that are statistically indistinguishable (see table 13.3 for radiocarbon dates). This suggests that kurgans were built rapidly in clusters. In many cases, the cemetery was then abandoned for a period of centuries before it was reused. For example, at the Poltavka cemetery of Krasnosamarskoe IV in the middle Volga region we can show this pattern, because we excavated all three kurgans in a small kurgan group and obtained multiple radiocarbon dates from each (figure 13.7). Like many kurgan groups in Ukraine, all three kurgans here were built within an indistinguishably brief time. The centra
l graves all dated about 2700–2600 BCE (dates reduced by 200 radiocarbon years to account for the measured 15N in the human bone used for the date), and then the cemetery was abandoned. Cemeteries like Krasnosamarskoe IV were used intensively for very short periods.

  If pastures were like the cemeteries that marked them, then they were used briefly and abandoned. This episodic pasturing pattern, similar to swidden horticulture, possibly was encouraged by similar conditions—a low-productivity environment demanding frequent relocation. But herding, unlike swidden horticulture, required large pastures for each animal, and it could produce trade commodities (wool, felt, leather) if the herds were sufficiently large. To “rest” pastures under these circumstances would have been attractive only at low population densities.40 It could have happened when the new Yamnaya economy was expanding into the previously unexploited pastures between the river valleys. But as the population of wagon-driving herders grew during the Early Bronze Age, some pastures began to show signs of overuse. A. A. Golyeva established that EBA Yamnaya kurgans in the Manych steppes were built on pristine soils and grasses, but many MBA Catacomb-culture kurgans were built on soils that had already been overgrazed.41 Yamnaya kurgan cemeteries were dynamic aspects of a new herding system during its initial expansionary phase.