4. With the evolution of the Yamnaya horizon, steppe societies must have developed a political infrastructure to manage migratory behavior. The change in living patterns and mobility described in the previous chapter cannot have happened without social effects. One of those might have been the creation of mutual obligations of “hospitality” between guest–hosts (*ghos–ti–). This institution, discussed in the last chapter, redefined who belonged under the social umbrella, and extended protection to new groups. It would have been very useful as a new way to incorporate outsiders as people with clearly defined rights and protections, as it was used from The Odyssey to medieval Europe.5 The apparent absence of this root in Anatolian and Tocharian suggests that this might have been anew development connected with the migratory behavior of the early Yamnaya horizon.
5. Finally, steppe societies had created an elaborate political theater around their funerals, and perhaps on more cheerful public occasions as well. Proto–Indo–European contained a vocabulary related to gift giving and gift taking that is interpreted as referring to potlatch–like feasts meant to build prestige and display wealth. The public performance of praise poetry, animal sacrifices, and the distribution of meat and mead were central elements of the show. Calvert Watkins found a special kind of song he called the “praise of the gift” in Vedic, Greek, Celtic, and Germanic, and therefore almost certainly in late Proto–Indo–European. Praise poems proclaimed the generosity of a patron and enumerated his gifts. These performances were both acclamations of identity and recruiting events.6
Wealth, military power, and a more productive herding system probably brought prestige and power to the identities associated with Proto–Indo–European dialects after 3300 BCE. The guest–host institution extended the protections of oath–bound obligations to new social groups. An Indo–European–speaking patron could accept and integrate outsiders as clients without shaming them or assigning them permanently to submissive roles, as long as they conducted the sacrifices properly. Praise poetry at public feasts encouraged patrons to be generous, and validated the language of the songs as a vehicle for communicating with the gods who regulated everything. All these factors taken together suggest that the spread of Proto–Indo–European probably was more like a franchising operation than an invasion. Although the initial penetration of a new region (or “market“ in the franchising metaphor) often involved an actual migration from the steppes and military confrontations, once it began to reproduce new patron–client agreements (franchises) its connection to the original steppe immigrants became genetically remote, whereas the myths, rituals, and institutions that maintained the system were reproduced down the generations.7
THE END OF THE CUCUTENI–TRIPOLYE CULTURE
AND THE ROOTS OF THE WESTERN BRANCHES
In this chapter we examine the archaeological evidence associated with the initial expansion of the western Indo–European languages, including the separation of Pre–Germanic, the ultimate ancestor of English. It is possible to connect prehistoric languages with archaeological cultures in this particular time and place only because the possibilities are already constrained by three critical parameters. These are (1) that the late Proto–Indo–European dialects did expand; (2) that they expanded into eastern and central Europe from a homeland in the Pontic–Caspian steppes; and (3) that the separations of Pre–Italic, Pre–Celtic, and Pre–Germanic, at least, from late Proto–Indo–European probably happened at about this time, between 3300 and 2500 BCE (see the conclusions of chapter 3 and chapter 4).
The Roots of the Oldest Western Indo–European Branches
These constraints oblige us to turn our attention to the region just to the west of the early Yamnaya territory, or west of the South Bug River valley, beginning about 3300 BCE. On this frontier we can identify three archaeological cases of cross–cultural contact in which people from the western Pontic steppes established long–term relationships with people outside the steppe zone to their west during the steppe Early Bronze Age, 3300–2800 BCE. Each of these new intercultural meetings provided a context in which language expansion might have occurred, and, given the constraints just described, probably did. But each case happened differently.
The first occurrence involved close integration, noted particularly in pottery but evident in other customs as well, between the steppe Usatovo culture and the late Tripolye villages of the upper Dniester and Prut valleys (figure 14.1). It is fairly clear from the archaeological evidence that the steppe aspect of the integrated culture had separate origins and stood in a position of military dominance over the upland farmers, a situation that would have encouraged the spread of the steppe language into the uplands. In the second case, people of the Yamnaya horizon moved in significant numbers into the lower Danube valley and the Carpathian Basin. This was a true “folk migration,” a massive and sustained flow of outsiders into a previously settled landscape. Again there are archaeological signs, in pottery particularly, of integration with the local Cotsofeni culture. Integration with the locals would have provided a medium for language shift. In the third case, the Yamnaya horizon expanded toward the border with the Corded Ware horizon on the headwaters of the Dniester in far northwestern Ukraine. In some places it appears there was no integration at all, but on the east flank of this contact zone, near the middle Dnieper, a hybrid border culture emerged. It is probably safe to assume that the separations of several western Indo–European branches were associated somehow with these events. The linguistic evidence suggests that Italic, Celtic, and Germanic, at least, separated next after Tocharian (discussed in the previous chapter). The probable timing of separations suggests that they happened around this time, and these are the visible events that seem like good candidates.
Figure 14.1 Yamnaya migrations into the Danube valley and the east Carpathian piedmont, 3100–2600 BCE. The older –estern IE branches probably evolved from dialects scattered by these migrations.
The End of the Cucuteni–Tripolye Culture
The people whose dialects would separate to become the root speech communities for the northwestern Indo–European language branches (Pre–Germanic, Pre–Baltic, and Pre–Slavic) probably moved initially toward the northwest. That would mean moving through or into Late Tripolye territory if it happened between 3300 and 2600 BCE, the time span of the final, staggering C2 phase of the Tripolye culture, after which all Tripolye traditions disappeared entirely. The period began with the sudden abandonment of large regions near the steppe border, including almost the entire South Bug valley. In the regions where the Tripolye culture survived, no Tripolye C2 towns had more than thirty to forty houses. The houses themselves were smaller and less substantial. Painted fine ceramics declined in frequency, while clinging to old motifs and styles. Domestic rituals utilizing clay female figurines became less frequent, the female traits became stylized and abstract, and then the rituals disappeared entirely. Two major episodes of change can be seen. The first major shock came at the transition from Tripolye C1 to C2 about 3300 BCE, simultaneously with the appearance of the early Yamnaya horizon. The second and final sweep of change erased the last remnants of Tripolye customs around 2800–2600 BCE, when the early Yamnaya period ended.
The first crisis, at the Tripolye C1/C2 transition about 3300 BCE (table 14.1), is evident in the abandonment of large regions that had contained hundreds of Tripolye C1 towns and villages. The vacated regions included the Ros’ River valley, a western tributary of the Dnieper south of Kiev, near the steppe border; all of the middle and lower South Bug valley, near the steppe border; and the southern Siret and Prut valleys in southeastern Romania (between Iasi and Bîrlad), also near the steppe border. After this event almost no Cucuteni–Tripolye sites survived in what is now Romania, so after two thousand years the Cucuteni sequence came to an end. All these regions had been densely occupied during Cucuteni B2/Tripolye C1. We do not know what happened to the evacuated populations. A Yamnaya kurgan was erected on the ruins of the Tripolye C1 super town at Maidanetsk’e
(see figure 12.7) in the South Bug valley, but this seems to have happened centuries after its abandonment. Other kurgans in the South Bug valley (Serezlievka) contained Tripolye C2 figurines and pots, so it is clear that kurgan–building people occupied the South Bug valley, but their population seems to have been sparse, and their use of Tripolye pottery has led to arguments over their origins.8 With the disappearance of agricultural towns from most of the South Bug valley, surviving Tripolye populations resolved into two geographic groups north and south of the South Bug (see figure 13.1).
TABLE 14.1 Selected Radiocarbon Dates for the Usatovo Culture, other Tripolye C2 groups, and Yamnaya graves in the Danube valley.
The northern Tripolye C2 group was located on the middle Dnieper and its tributaries around Kiev, where the forest–steppe graded into the closed northern forest. Cross–border assimilation with steppe cultures had begun on the middle Dnieper during Tripolye C1, as at Chapaevka (see figures 12.2, figures 12.6), and this process continued during Tripolye C2. At towns like Gorodsk, west of the Dnieper, and cemeteries like Sofievka, east of the Dnieper, the mix of cultural elements included late Sredni Stog, early Yamnaya, late Tripolye, and various influences from southern Poland (late Baden, late TRB). The hybrid that emerged from all these intercultural meetings slowly became its own distinct culture.
The southern Tripolye C2 group, centered in the Dniester valley, was closely integrated with a steppe culture, the Usatovo culture, described in detail below. The two surviving late Tripolye settlement centers on the Dnieper and Dniester continued to interact—Dniester flint continued to appear in Dnieper sites—but they also slowly grew apart. For reasons that will be clear in the next chapter, I believe that the emerging hybrid culture on the middle Dnieper played an important role in the evolution of both the Pre–Baltic and Pre–Slavic language communities after 2800–2600 BCE. Pre–Germanic is usually assigned an earlier position in branching diagrams. If early Pre–Germanic speakers moved away from the Proto–Indo–European homeland toward the northwest, as seems likely, they moved through one of these Tripolye settlement centers before 2800 BCE. Perhaps it was the other one in the Dniester valley. Its steppe partner was the Usatovo culture.
STEPPE OVERLORDS AND TRIPOLYE CLIENTS: THE USATOVO CULTURE
The Usatovo culture appeared about 3300–3200 BCE in the steppes around the mouth of the Dniester River, a strategic corridor that reached northwest into southern Poland. The rainfall–farming zone in the Dniester valley had been densely occupied by Cucuteni–Tripolye communities for millennia, but they never established settlements in the steppes. Kurgans had overlooked the Dniester estuary in the steppes since the Suvorovo migration about 4000 BCE; these are assigned to various groups including Mikhailovka I and the Cernavoda I–III cultures. Usatovo represented the rapid evolution of a new level of social and political integration between lowland steppe and upland farming communities. The steppe element used Tripolye material culture but clearly declared its greater prestige, wealth, and military power. The upland farmers who lived on the border itself adopted the steppe custom of inhumation burial in a cemetery, but they did not erect kurgans or take weapons to their graves. This integrated culture appeared in the Dniester valley just after the abandonment of all the Tripolye C1 towns in the South Bug valley on one side and the final Cucuteni B2 towns in southern Romania on the other. The chaos caused by the dissolution of hundreds of Cucuteni–Tripolye farming communities probably convinced the Tripolye townspeople of the middle Dniester valley to accept the status of clients. Explicit patronage defined the Usatovo culture.9
Cultural Integration between Usatovo and Upland Tripolye Towns
The stone–walled houses of the Usatovo settlement occupied the brow of a grassy ridge overlooking a bay near modern Odessa, the best seaport on the northwest coast of the Black Sea. Usatovo covered about 4–5 ha. A stone defensive wall probably defended the town on its seaward side. The settlement was largely destroyed by modern village construction and limestone quarrying prior to the first excavation by M. F. Boltenko in 1921, but parts of it survived (figure 14.2). Behind the ancient town four separate cemeteries crowned the hillcrest, all of them broadly contemporary. Two were kurgan cemeteries and two were flat–grave cemeteries. In one of the kurgan cemeteries, the one closest to the town, half the central graves contained men buried with bronze daggers and axes. These bronze weapons occurred in no other graves, not even in the second kurgan cemetery. Female figurines were limited to the flat–grave cemeteries and the settlement, never occurring in the kurgan graves. The flat–grave cemeteries were similar to flat–grave cemeteries that appeared outside Tripolye villages in the uplands, notably at Vikhvatinskii on the Dniester, where excavation of perhaps one–third of the cemetery yielded sixty–one graves of people with a gracile Mediterranean skull–and–face configuration. Upland cemeteries appeared at several other Tripolye sites (Holerkani, Ryşeşti, and Danku) located at the border between the steppes and the rainfall agriculture zone in the forest–steppe.
Figure 14.2 The Usatovo settlement (inside dotted line), kurgan cemeteries, and flat–grave cemeteries within the modern bay–side village of Usatovo, at the northeastern edge of the city of Odessa. After Patovka 1976 (village plan) and Zbenovich 1974 (kurgans).
Clearly segregated funeral rituals (kurgan or flat grave) for different social groups appeared also at Mayaki, another Usatovo settlement on the Dniester. The dagger chiefs of Usatovo probably dominated a hierarchy of steppe chiefs. Their relationship with the Tripolye villages in the Prut and Dniester forest–steppe seems unequal. Kurgan graves and graves containing weapons occurred only in the steppe. The upland Vikhvatinskii cemetery contained female figurines, but no metal weapons and only one copper object, a simple awl. Probably the Usatovo chiefs were patrons who received tribute, including fine painted pottery, from upland Tripolye clients. This relationship would have provided a prestige and status gradient that encouraged the adoption of the Usatovo language by late Tripolye villagers.
Usatovo is classified in all eastern European accounts as a Tripolye C2 culture. All eastern European archaeological cultures are defined first (sometimes only!) by ceramic types. Tripolye C2 pottery was a defining feature of Usatovo graves and settlements (figure 14.3). But the Usatovo culture was different from any Tripolye variant in that all the approximately fifty known Usatovo sites appeared exclusively in the steppe zone, at first around the mouth of the Dniester and later spreading to the Prut and Danube estuaries. Its funeral rituals were entirely derived from steppe traditions. Its coarse pottery, although made in standard Tripolye shapes, was shell–tempered and decorated with cord–impressed geometric designs like those of Yamnaya pottery. If the settlements were not so disturbed, we might be able to say whether they included compounds where Tripolye craftspeople worked as specialists. To explore how the Tripolye element was integrated in Usatovo society we have to look at other kinds of evidence.
The Usatovo economy was based primarily on sheep and goats (58–76% of bones at the Usatovo and Mayaki settlements, respectively). Sheep clearly predominated over goats, suggesting a wool butchering pattern.10 At the same time, during Tripolye C2, clay loom weights and conical spindle whorls increased in frequency in upland towns in both the middle Dnieper and the Dniester regions, as if the Tripolye textile industry had accelerated. Usatovo settlements contained comparatively few spindle–whorls.11 Perhaps upland Tripolye weavers made the wool from steppe sheep into finished textiles in a reciprocal exchange arrangement. Usatovo herders also kept cattle (28–13%) and horses (14–11%). Horse images were incised on two stone kurgan stelae at Usatovo (kurgan cemetery I, k. 11 and 3) and on a pot from an Usatovo grave at Tudorovo (figure 14.3n). Horses were important symbolically probably because riding was important in herding and raiding, and possibly because horses were important trade commodities.
Figure 14.3 Usatovo–culture ceramics (a, e, h, p, q, r) Usatovo kurgan cemetery I; (b) Tudorovo flat grave; (c) Sarata kurgan; (d) Shabablat kurgan
; (f) Parkany kurgan 182; (g, j, l) Usatovo kurgan cemetery II; (i) Parkany kurgan 91; (k) abstract figurine from Usatovo flat grave cemetery II; (m) Mayaki settlement; (n) Tudorovo kurgan; (o) Usatovo flat grave cemetery II;(s) Mayaki settlement, probably a cheese strainer. Also shown: a painted fine bowl from the Tripolye C2 cemetery at Vikhvatintsii. After Zbenovich 1968.
Impressions in pottery at the Usatovo settlement showed cultivated wheat (mostly emmer and bread wheats), barley, millet (frequent), oats (frequent), and peas.12 The settlement also contained grinding stones and flint sickle teeth with characteristic edge gloss from cereal harvesting. This was the first evidence for cereal cultivation in the Dniester steppes, and, in fact, it is surprising, since rainfall agriculture is risky where precipitation is less than 350 mm per year. The grain would have been grown more easily in the upland settlements, perhaps cultivated by Tripolye people who resided part–time at Usatovo.
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World Page 38