Tripolye C2 fine pots were particularly valued as grave gifts for the chiefs who died at Usatovo. Tripolye pots with an orange clay fabric, fired at almost 900°C, constituted 18% of the ceramics at the Usatovo settlement but 30% in the kurgan graves (figure 14.3, top). About 80% of the pottery at Usatovo and at other Usatovo–culture settlements was shell–tempered gray or brown ware, undecorated or decorated with cord impressions, and fired at only 700°C. This ware was made like steppe pottery. Though the shapes were like those made in the uplands by late Tripolye potters, some decorative motifs resembled those seen on Yamnaya Mikhailovka II–style pottery. A few of these shell–tempered gray pots at Usatovo were coated with a thick orange slip to make them look like fine Tripolye pots, indicating that the two kinds of pottery really were regarded as different.13
The painted Tripolye pots in Usatovo kurgan graves were most similar to those of the Tripolye C2 settlements at Brynzeny III on the Prut and Vikhvatintsii on the Dniester. Vikhvatinskii was 175 km up the Dniester from Usatovo near the steppe border, and Brynzeny III was about 350 km distant, hidden in the steep forested valleys of the East Carpathian piedmont. A fine painted pot of Brynzeny type was buried in the central grave of kurgan cemetery I, kurgan 12, at Usatovo, with an imported Maikop pot and a riveted bronze dagger. At this time Brynzeny III still had thirty–seven two–story ploshchadka houses, clay ovens, loom weights for large vertical looms, and female figurines. These traditional Tripolye customs survived in towns that showed ceramic connections with Usatovo, perhaps because patron–client agreements protected them. As the identities associated with the dying Tripolye culture were stigmatized and those associated with the Usatovo chiefs were emulated, people who lived at places like Brynzeny III and Vikhvatintsii might well have become bilingual. Their children then shifted to the Usatovo language.
Although fine Tripolye pots were preferred grave gifts for the Usatovo elite, the Tripolye culture itself occupied a secondary position of power and prestige. This is clearest in funeral customs. At Usatovo the chiefs buried under the kurgan graves were richer and more important than the people buried in the flat graves, and the flat graves were exactly reproduced in the upland Tripolye cemeteries at Vikhvatinskii and Holerkani.
The Usatovo Chiefs and Long–distance Trade
Another aspect of the Usatovo economy was long–distance trade, probably conducted by sea. All six known Usatovo settlements overlooked shallow coastal river mouths that would have made good harbors. These river mouths are today closed off from the sea by siltation, creating brackish lakes called limans, but they would have been more open to the sea in 3000 BCE. The sherds of small ceramic jugs and bowls of the Cernavoda III and Cernavoda II types from the lower Danube valley made up 1–2% of the broken crockery in the settlement at Usatovo, perhaps carried in by longboat rowers engaged in coastal trade down to Bulgaria. But these Cernavoda vessels never were offered as gifts in Usatovo graves. Whole imported late Maikop–Novosvobodnaya pots were included as grave gifts in the two central graves in kurgans 12 and 13 in kurgan cemetery I at Usatovo, two of the largest kurgans; but Maikop pottery never occurred in the settlement. Imported Maikop pots had a very different social meaning from Cernavoda pots.
Trade might have linked Usatovo to the emerging Aegean maritime chiefdoms of the EBI period, including Troy I. A white glass bead recovered from Usatovo kurgan cemetery II, kurgan 2, grave, 1 is the oldest known glass in the Black Sea region and perhaps in the ancient world. Glaze, the simplest form of glass, was applied to ceramics by about 4500–4000 BCE in northern Mesopotamia and Egypt. Glazes were made by mixing powdered quartz sand, lime, and either soda or ash and then heating the mixture to about 900°C, when it fused into a viscous state and could be dipped or poured. Faience beads were made of the same materials, molded into bead shapes, and glazed, beginning about the same time. But translucent glass, which required a higher temperature, has not been securely dated before the fifth dynasty of Egypt, or before 2450 BCE. The Usatovo bead and two others from Tripolye C2 Sofievka on the middle Dnieper are probably four hundred to seven hundred years older than that, equivalent to the first dynasty or the late Pre–Dynastic period. The Tripolye culture had no glazed ceramics or faience, so this vitreous technology was exotic. Almost certainly the Usatovo and Sofievka glass beads were made somewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean and imported. Another Tripolye C2 cemetery near Sofievka at Zavalovka, radiocarbon dated 2900–2800 BCE and similar to Sofievka in grave types and pottery, contained beads made of amber from the Baltic, perhaps the earliest expression of the exchange of northern amber for Mediterranean luxuries.14
In addition, two of the central dagger graves (k. 1 and 3) at Usatovo and an Usatovo grave at Sukleya on the lower Dniester contained daggers with rivet holes for the handle, cast in bivalve molds with a midrib on the blade. [see figure 14.4, top]. This kind of blade appeared also in Anatolia at Troy II and contemporary sites in Greece and Crete (David Stronach’s Type 4 daggers). Like the glass, the Usatovo examples seem older than the Aegean ones—they should date to the equivalent of Troy I. But, in this case, the type might well have been locally invented in southeastern Europe and spread to the Aegean. Daggers with rivet holes but with a simpler lenticular–sectioned blade (without a midrib) certainly were made locally across southeastern Europe. They appeared in at least seven other Usatovo–culture graves, in graves at Sofievka on the middle Dnieper, and in Cotsofeni sites in the lower Danube valley, radiocarbon dated just before and after 3000 BCE [see figure 14.4, middle]. Regardless of the direction of borrowing, the shared riveted dagger types of Usatovo and the Aegean point to long–distance contacts between the two regions, perhaps in oared longboats.15
Patrons and Clients: Graves of the Warrior Chiefs at Usatovo
Usatovo kurgan cemetery I was quite near the Usatovo settlement (see figure 14.2). It originally contained about twenty kurgans. Fifteen were excavated between 1921 and 1973. They were complex constructions. Each kurgan had an earth core built up inside a stone cromlech made of large rectangular stones laid horizontally. All the cromlechs were covered by earth when the kurgans were enlarged; whether this was part of the original funeral or an entirely unconnected later event is unknown. The central grave was a deep shaft (up to 2 m deep) dug in the center of the cromlech circle, and in most kurgans it was accompanied by several (1–3) other graves also located inside the cromlech circle, in shallow pits covered by stone lids. At least five kurgans in cemetery I (3, 9, 11, 13, 14) were guarded by standing stone stelae on the southwestern sector of the mound. One stela (k. 13) was shaped at its top into a head, making an anthropomorphic shape, like many contemporary Yamnaya stelae in the South Bug–Dnieper steppes (see figure 13.11). Kurgan 3 (31 m in diameter) had two stelae standing side by side. The larger one (1.1 m tall) was inscribed with the images of a man, a deer, and three horses; the smaller one had just one horse. Kurgan 11 (40 m in diameter, the largest at Usatovo) covered a cromlech circle and inner mound 26 m in diameter surfaced with eighty–five hundred stones. On its southwest border were three stelae, one 2.7 m tall (!) with inscribed images of either dogs or horses. The central grave was robbed.
Only adult men were buried in the central graves of kurgan cemetery I, in a contracted position on the left side oriented east–northeast. Only the central graves and the peripheral graves on the southwestern sector contained red ochre. Seven of the fifteen central graves (k. 1, 3, 4, 6, 9, 12, and 14) had arsenical bronze dagger blades with two to four rivet holes for the handle. No other graves at Usatovo contained daggers (figure 14.4). Bronze daggers emerged as new symbols of status here and in the graves of the Yamnaya horizon at this time, but Yamnaya daggers had long tangs for the handle, like Novosvobodnaya daggers and unlike the Usatovo and Sofievka daggers with rivet holes for the handle. The central graves at Usatovo also contained fine Tripolye pots, arsenical bronze awls, flat axes, two Novosvobodnaya–style chisels, adzes, silver rings and spiral twists, flint microlithic blades, and flint hollow–based arrowhea
ds. Bronze weapons and tools appeared only in the central graves.
Kurgan cemetery II was about 400 m away from kurgan cemetery I. It originally contained probably ten kurgans, most of them smaller than those in kurgan cemetery I; three were excavated. They yielded no daggers, no weapons, only small metal objects (awls, rings), and only a few fine painted Tripolye ceramic vessels. Six individuals had designs painted on their skulls with red ochre (figure 14.5). Three of these were men who had been killed by hammer blows to the head. Hammer wounds did not appear in kurgan cemetery I. Kurgan cemetery II was used for a distinct social group or status, perhaps warriors. But similar red designs were painted on the head of one male in kurgan cemetery I, in a peripheral grave under kurgan 12, grave 2, in the southwestern sector; similar designs were painted on the skulls of some Yamnaya graves at the Popilnaya kurgan cemetery on the South Bug.16
The flat graves at Usatovo were shallow pits covered by large flat stones, usually containing a body in a contracted position on the left side, oriented east or northeast. The peripheral graves under the kurgans had the same form as flat graves, and two cemeteries contained just flat graves, without kurgans (thirty–six graves in flat cemetery I; thirty graves in flat cemetery II). Whereas just seven of the fifty–one graves (14%) in the kurgan cemeteries contained children, and two of these were buried with adults, twelve of the thirty–six graves (33%) in flat cemetery I contained children. Most of the adults in the flat graves were males, with a few old females. Each grave had from one to five pottery vessels but no metal, and only 4% of the pottery was fine painted ware. They did have ceramic female figurines (principally in children’s graves), flint tools, and projectile points, and fifteen skulls were painted in the same red ochre designs as those in the kurgan graves, but none had hammer wounds.
Figure 14.4 Daggers of the EBA, 3300–2800 BCE. Top row: Usatovo kurgan cemetery I, kurgan 3, central grave, with midrib † kurgan 1, midrib † Sukleya kurgan, midrib † kurgan 9, lenticular–sectioned † kurgan 6, lenticular–sectioned dagger. Middle row left: Werteba Cave, upper Dniester, riveted † Cucuteni B, Moldova, midrib † Werteba Cave, bone dagger carved in the shape of a metal dagger. Middle row right, Cotsofeni daggers from the lower Danube valley. Bottom row, Yamnaya tanged daggers from the North Pontic steppes. After Anthony 1996; and Nechitailo 1991.
Figure 14.5 Skulls painted with red ochre designs from the Usatovo and Mayaki cemeteries. Number 3 was killed by the hammer wound in the forehead. After Zin’kovskii and Petrenko 1987.
Kurgan cemetery I was reserved for leaders who displayed arsenical bronze riveted daggers and axes and wore silver rings but suffered no hammer wounds, perhaps patrons. Kurgan cemetery II honored old men, old women, young men, and children who did not have bronze daggers or metal weapons of any kind but sometimes died of hammer wounds to the head, perhaps those who died in battle and their close kin. The flat cemeteries contained many children, a few women, and old men who had plain pots and no daggers. All were connected to one another, and to external Yamnaya groups, by linear red designs painted on some skulls. The social organization of Usatovo has been interpreted as a male–centered military aristocracy, but it could also be read as remarkably like the tripartite social system suggested by Dumezil for the speakers of Proto–Indo–European, with priest–patrons (kurgan cemetery I), warriors (kurgan cemetery II), and ordinary producers (flat graves).
The Ancestor of English: The Origin and Spread of the Usatovo Dialect
The Usatovo culture was exclusively a steppe culture, and it appeared simultaneously with the rapid expansion of the Yamnaya horizon across the steppes, after the permanent dissolution of many Tripolye towns near the steppe border. Usatovo is often interpreted as a Tripolye population that migrated into the steppes, but Tripolye farmers had never done this during the previous two thousand years, and in neighboring valleys (the lower Siret, lower Prut, the entire South Bug valley, the Ros’) they were retreating from the steppe border, not advancing across it. The funeral customs of Usatovo were starkly hierarchical, with a typical steppe kurgan ritual reserved for the elite. Although Usatovo ceramics were almost entirely borrowed from and made by Tripolye potters, even here there were similarities with Yamnaya ceramics in some cord–impressed ornament on the coarse wares. Usatovo is not counted as a part of the Yamnaya horizon because of its close integration with the Tripolye culture, but it appeared at the same time as the Yamnaya horizon, in the steppes, with kurgan funeral rituals that repeated many old steppe customs; sacrifices and broken pottery also were placed on the southwestern side of the kurgan in Yamnaya and even Afanasievo graves. The painted skulls were also repeated in Yamnaya graves. Usatovo probably began with steppe clans connected with the early Yamnaya horizon who were able to impose a patron–client relationship on Tripolye farming villages because of the protection that client status offered in a time of great insecurity. The pastoral patrons quickly became closely integrated with the farmers.
Tripolye clients of the Usatovo chiefs could have been the agents through which the Usatovo language spread northward into central Europe. After a few generations of clientage, the people of the upper Dniester might have wanted to acquire their own clients. Nested hierarchies in which clients are themselves patrons of other clients are characteristic of the growth of patron–client systems. The archaeological evidence for some kind of northward spread of people or political relationships consists of pottery exchanges between Tripolye sites on the upper Dniester and late TRB (Trichterbecker or Funnel–Beaker culture) sites in southeastern Poland. Substantial quantities of fine painted Tripolye C2 pottery of the Brynzeny III type occurred in southern Polish settlements of the late TRB culture dated 3000–2800 BCE, importantly at Gródek Nadbuşny and Zimne, and late TRB pots were imported into the TripolyeC2 sites of Zhvanets and Brynzeny III.17 Zhvanets was a production center for fine Tripolye pottery, with seven large two–chambered kilns, a possible source of local economic and political prestige. Conflict accompanied or alternated with exchange, since both the Polish sites and the Tripolye C2 sites closest to southeastern Poland were heavily fortified. The TripolyeC2 settlement of Kosteshti IV had a stone wall 6 m wide and a fortification ditch 5 m wide, and Zhvanets had three lines of fortification walls faced with stone, and both were located on high promontories.18 Tripolye C2 community leaders whose parents had already adopted the Usatovo language could have attempted to extend to the late TRB communities of southern Poland the same kind of patron–client relationships that the Usatovo chiefs had offered them, an extension that might well have been encouraged or even backed up by paramount Usatovo chiefs.
If I had to hazard a guess I would say that this was how the Proto–Indo–European dialects that would ultimately form the root of Pre–Germanic first became established in central Europe: they spread up the Dniester from the Usatovo culture through a nested series of patrons and clients, and eventually were spoken in some of the late TRB communities between the Dniester and the Vistula. These late TRB communities later evolved into early Corded Ware communities, and it was the Corded Ware horizon (see below) that provided the medium through which the Pre–Germanic dialects spread over a wider area.
THE YAMNAYA MIGRATION up THE DANUBE VALLEY
About 3100 BCE, during the initial rapid spread of the Yamnaya horizon across the Pontic–Caspian steppes, and while the Usatovo culture was still in its early phase, Yamnaya herders began to move through the steppes past Usatovo and into the lower Danube valley. The initial groups were followed by a regular stream of people that continued for perhaps three hundred years, between 3100 and 2800 BCE.19 The passage through the Usatovo chiefdoms probably was managed through guest–host relationships. The migrants did not claim any Usatovo territory—at least they did not create their own cemeteries there. Instead, they kept going into the Danube valley, a minimum distance of 600–800 km from where they began in the steppes east of Usatovo—in the South Bug valley and farther east. The largest number of Yamnaya migrants ended up in eastern Hun
gary, an amazing distance (800–1,300 km depending on the route taken). This was a major, sustained population movement, and, like all such movements, it must have been preceded by scouts who collected information while on some other kind of business, possibly horse trading. The scouts knew just a few areas, and these became the targets of the migrants.20
The Yamnaya migrations into the Danube valley were targeted toward at least five specific destinations (see figure 14.1). One cluster of Yamnaya kurgan cemeteries, probably the earliest, appeared on the elevated plain northwest of Varna bay in Bulgaria (kurgan cemeteries at Plachidol, Madara, and other nearby places). This cluster overlooked the fortified coastal settlement at Ezerovo, an important local Early Bronze Age center. The second cluster of kurgan cemeteries appeared in the Balkan uplands 200 km to the southwest (the Kovachevo and Troyanovo cemeteries). They overlooked a fertile plain between the Balkan peaks and the Maritsa River, where many old tells such as Ezero and Mihailich had just been reoccupied and fortified. The third target was 300 km farther up the Danube valley in northwestern Bulgaria (Tarnava), on low ridges overlooking the broad plain of the Danube. These three widely separated clusters in Bulgaria contained at least seventeen Yamnaya cemeteries, each with five to twenty kurgans. Across the Danube and just 100 km west of the northwestern Bulgarian cluster, a larger group of kurgan cemeteries appeared in southwestern Romania, where at least a hundred Yamnaya kurgans dotted the low plains overlooking the Danube around Rast in southern Oltenia, south of Craiova. The Tarnava and Rast kurgans were in the same terrain and can be counted as one group, separated by the Danube River (and a modern international border).
Pushing westward through Cotsofeni–culture territory, Yamnaya migrants found their way over the mountains around the Iron Gates, where the Danube sweeps through a long, steep set of gorges, and into the wide plains on the Serbian side. A few kurgan groups were erected in a fourth cluster west of the Iron Gates in the plains of northern Serbia (Jabuka). Finally, the fifth and largest group of kurgans appeared in the eastern Hungarian plains north of the Körös and east of the Tisza rivers.21 The number of kurgan sraised in the east Hungarian cluster is unknown, but Ecsedy estimated at least three thousand, sp read over about 6000–8000 km2. Archaeologists have mapped forty–five Yamnaya cemeteries, each of which contained five to thirty–five kurgans. One kurgan at Kétegyháza was built on top of the remains of a Cernavoda III settlement. The east Hungarian Yamnaya population seems to have been the largest that accumulated in any of the five target areas. Some of them wore leather caps, silver temple rings, and dog–canine–tooth necklaces in their graves.
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World Page 39