KURGAN CULTURE | ||
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Marija Gimbutas THE CIVILIZATION OF THE GODDESS EDITED BY JOAN MARLER Harper, San Francisco, 1994, ISBN 978-0062508041 Chapter 10 The End of Old Europe: The Intrusion of Steppe Pastoralists from N.Pontic and the Transformation of Europe |
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http://www.i-u.ru/biblio/archive/gimbatus_civ/09.aspx (In Russian) |
Introduction |
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The Indo-European culture is not a rival with the Türkic culture, their origins and histories are much interspersed, the protestations appearing in the posting are aimed solely at distortions and misrepresentations endemic to the Eurocentric offshoot of the science, and a full credit must be given to Eurocentrism for the studies that unwittingly advanced Turkology. Without Eurocentrism, Turkology as we know it would not have even existed. The book of Prof. M.Gimbutas is her late work, after she consolidated and fine-tuned her theory in defense from numerous critics. Her theory was rooted on technology, the development of carbon isotope dating allowed systematization of accumulated observations and conjectures into a coherent storyline. Fortuitously, she stood on shoulders of F.Soddy and F.W. Aston, without whom her theory could not have been created. While whole schools of archeology discounted radiocarbon dating as too imprecise and unreliable, the new tool allowed M.Gimbutas to leapfrog into the 20th c. Only with the 21st c. technology of haplotype allele dating it became clear that archeologists confused two separate developments, a later west-to-east movement of non-Kurgan people with the earlier east-to west movement of the Kurgan people. The history of these movements, separated in time by a millennia, is yet unwritten, but it is already clear that much of M.Gimbutas interpretations will have to be disbanded, while the facts on the ground will remain solidly intact. The adjusted storyline will still rest on the shoulders of M.Gimbutas, on the solid foundation she created using radiocarbon dating. A fallout of the picture drawn by the alleles is that R1a either pra-pra-Indo-Europeans or rather pra-pra-Türks reached C.Europe 10 mill. BP, the R1b1 pra-pra-Türks reached Urals 6.8 mill. BP, and the two strongly hybridized and metamorphised pra-kin groups met again in the C.Europe as a first wave of Kurganians 4.5 mill. BP. At about 3500 BC, Europe was invaded by the Kurgan wave 2, and at about 3000 BC Kurgan wave 3 flooded C.Europe. These waves, archeologically associated with the cultures dubbed Battle Ax and Corded Ware, roughly coincided in time with the Celtic expansion to the Central Europe, and wrecked there a havoc known as the Central European “killing fields”. These invader flows were predominantly marked by R1b haplogroup, the survivals that included possible pra-Indo-European male haplogroup I fled to the E. Europe and Scandinavia. This allele-driven scenario demands that the core traits of the 2500 BC-old pra-Indo-Europeans have already coagulated into a militant sexist patriarchy that Prof. M.Gimbutas improperly attributed to the matriarchal Kurgan people, creating a host of contradictions with the archeological and historical sources. The dynamics of the haplogroup and linguistic striation in the Eastern European Plain, in the Near East, and in Europe has led to erroneous linguistic and archaeological concepts such as the “Indo-European Kurgan Culture”, with its transposed languages (postulated “Indo-European”, when it was a Türkic language), the wrong direction of movement (the “Proto-Indo-Europeans” were moving eastward, not westward; the Türks were moving westward, the westward Türkic movement was seen by the creators and supporters of the “Kurgan Culture” as the “Indo-European movement”, exactly the opposite of reality), incorrect periods: in the 3rd millennium BC the Proto-Indo-European language advanced eastward across the Eastern European Plain, while the ancient Pit Grave or “Kurgan” culture is dated by the period of the 4th-3rd mill. BC, and was moving westward. Misreading the historical dynamics induced fabrication of a religious conflict in C.Europe when there was none, and unwarranted coinage of fictional militancy and patriarchy for the Kurgan people. The dynamics of the Indo-European peoples' creation was defined by a combination of the first migrants from Inner Asia to Europe marked by haplogroup R1a1, with all the additions they gained in the next 5,000 years, with the Eastern European Kurgan people of the haplogroup R1b1 who reached Iberia by southern circum-Mediterranean way, with all the additions they obtained in 1,200 years of migration, which formed the joint Beaker/TRB culture, which in turn absorbed uncounted additions when their migration pendulum reversed on their way to Central Europe, and one well-known part of which moved east, crossed the sands of the Central Asia, and reached India. The ignorance of the circum-Mediterranean component, with its powerful role in creating the Beaker/TRB culture, led the whole Kurgan model of Indo-Europeanization into a scientific chaos.
Page numbers are shown at the beginning of the page. The subheadings in bold blue, bold highlighting, the posting's notes and explanations added to the text of the author and not noted specially, are shown in parentheses in (blue italics), in blue boxes, or under blue headings. The annoying (blue italics) are repeated over again because information is mostly sought out as a quick look-up, and the same elucidations apply for each instance. |
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Marija Gimbutas |
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3522
The collapse of Old Europe coincides with the process of Indo-Europeanization (i.e. “Kurganization”) of Europe, a complicated transformative process leading to a drastic cultural change reminiscent of the conquest of the American continent. Archeological evidence, supported by comparative Indo-European linguistics and mythology, suggests a clash of two ideologies, social structures and economies perpetrated by trauma-inducing institutions. The Proto- or Early Indo-Europeans, whom I have labeled “Kurgan” people, arrived from the east, from southern Russia, on horseback. Their first contact with the borderland territories of Old Europe in the Lower Dnieper region and west of the Black Sea began around the middle of the 5th millennium BC A continuous flow of influences and people into east-central Europe was initiated which lasted for two millennia.
Following this collision of cultures, Old Europe was transformed, and later European prehistory and history became a “marble cake” composed of non-Indo-European and Indo-European elements (i.e. of Old Europe and Kurgan elements). The subsequent existence of a very strong non-Indo-European linguistic and mythological substratum cannot be overlooked. To begin to understand this complex situation, it is necessary to start thinking in terms of the social and symbolic structures of cultures. In this chapter I shall discuss the Kurgan culture of the Volga-Ural and North Pontic regions in relation to Old Europe; its influence on, infiltrations into, and destruction of the floruit of the Old European civilization. Linguistic evidence suggests that the original Indo-European homeland had to be located between the areas occupied by the Finno-Ugric, Semitic, and Caucasian linguistic families. A discussion of this problem is beyond the scope of this book and, in my belief, beyond the reach of adequate archeological sources. (And of the linguistic too, there are more theories on Indo-European Urheimat than an average IE has on both hands) The materials of the Volga-Ural interfluve and beyond the Caspian Sea prior to the 7th millennium BC are, so far, not sufficient for ethnographic interpretation. More substantive evidence emerges only around 5000 BC. We can begin to speak of “Kurgan people” when they conquered the steppe region north of the Black Sea around 4500 BC.
The Russian word “kurgan” (itself borrowed from the Turkish) (as much “Russian” as the Vietnamese “pizza”, itself borrowed from the Italian via English) means literally a “barrow” or “tumulus” and the term “Kurgan tradition” was introduced by the author in 1956 as a blanket term for the culture of these seminomadic pastoralists who built round funeral mounds.1
No weapons except implements for hunting are found among grave goods in Europe until c. 4500-4300 BC, nor is there evidence of hilltop fortification of Old European settlements. The gentle agriculturalists, therefore, were easy prey to the warlike Kurgan horsemen who swarmed down upon them. These invaders were armed with thrusting and cutting weapons: long dagger-knives, spears, halberds, and bows and arrows. The Kurgan tradition represents a stark contrast to the civilization of Old Europe which was, in the main, peaceful, sedentary, matrifocal, matrilineal, and sex egalitarian. The Kurgans were a warlike, patriarchal, and hierarchical culture with distinctive burial rites that included pit graves with tent- or hutlike structures of wood or stone, covered by a low cairn or earthen mound. Their economy was essentially pastoral with a rudimentary agriculture and seasonal, transient settlements of semi-subterranean houses. (All of warlike, patriarchal, and hierarchical traits are questionable. History knows more examples of symbiosis, cultural exchange, and trade then wars. In many societies, it was agriculturists who encroached on nomadic pastures, with violence and genocide. The matriarchal vestiges remain with the Kurgan people to this day, a woman has an equal status even after and in spite of the centuries of Islamic enforcement; unlike for the IE nations, Kurgan people had Queens leading the state: Tamiris, Boarix. The ability to drift away from an oppressor did not allow authoritarian regimes to take hold, all nomadic states were and remain unions and confederations with a variation of a parliamentary system, take the modern Kazakh Juzes. You can't keep a mounted rider a slave, unlike a stationary peasant in farming societies, first you need to impoverish the nomads of their horses.) The Kurgan tradition became manifest in Old European territories during three waves of infiltration: I at c. 4400-4300 BC, II at c. 3500 BC, and III soon after 3000 BC. This chronology does not represent the evolution of a single group but of a number of various steppe peoples who shared a common tradition, extending over broad temporal and spacial parameters. Kurgan I people were from the Volga steppe; Kurgan II, who were culturally more advanced, developed in the North Pontic area between the Lower Dniester and the Caucasus mountains; Kurgan III people were again from the Volga steppe. FIGURE
10-1 Earliest sculptures associated with the horse and oxen cult
(what cult? why cult? People were artists, that is clear, no need to invent mysticism).
(1,3) Horse, double-headed horse and (2,4) oxen figurines carved out of bone from the
cemetery of S'ezzhee on R. Samara, tributary of Middle Volga, district of Kuybyshev
(Modern Samara Province. Kuybyshev was a Stalinist-period
re-naming that replaced one venerated Turkic name with another name in an ignorant belief
that it was not Turkic). Russian archeologists use the terms “early Yamna” (i.e “Yamna culture” in English “Pit Grave Culture”) for Kurgan I; “Mikhailovka I” or “Maikop” culture for Kurgan II; and “late Yamna” for Kurgan III. (Yamna comes from yama, “pit,” i.e., “pit grave” under a barrow.) The livelihood and mobility of the Kurgan people depended on the domesticated horse,
in sharp contrast to the Old European agriculturalists to whom the horse was unknown.
Pastoral economy, growing herds of large animals, horse riding, and the need for male
strength to control the animals must have contributed to the transition from matrism to
armored patrism in southern Russia and beyond at the latest around 5000 BC (Although the
accurate date of this process as yet is difficult to establish, it certainly started much
earlier than 4000 BC, the date used for the transition to patrism and violence in
Saharasia caused by the pressures of severe desertification; see Demeo 1991.)
(The oldest traditions of the known Kurgan people, Bulgarians ca
5th c. AD, tell about physical and social equality of sexes, male pretenders having to
wrestle with his bride-to-be and not infrequent defeats, as well as female sexual freedom
prior to marriage, and Amazon-type female warriors. As a minimum, the allegations of
patrism are strongly exaggerated. The situation resembles the gap between the Chinese
annals and Chinese archeology: studying the Bulgar kurgans, an archeologist would come to
the same wrongful conclusions of unequal sexes, of patrism, and male warrior society as
was advanced by Prof. Marija Gimbutas.) The Domestication of the Horse The large horses of the Pleistocene became extinct during the drastic climatic changes that followed the last glacial period. The medium-sized horses that survived belong to one single species, Equus fems Boddaeit, and can be divided into two subspecies, the tarpan (Equus ferns gmelini Antonius] and the taki (Przewalski type). (Taki is Turkic for “mount”, a generic riding animal) Of the two, the tarpan, a small but strongly built animal with a short head, tail, and mane, was domesticated. Small groups of the wild tarpan continued to live in eastern Europe until the end of the 19th century when unbridled hunting caused their extinction.
Horse domestication may have taken place in the area between the eastern Ukraine and the northern Kazakhstan around 5000 BC. or earlier, most likely at forest edges and close to rivers whose basins were also forested. It is not surprising that the earliest evidence for the presence of the domesticated horse comes from the forest steppe of the Middle Volga basin where a Neolithic economy — stock breeding and small-scale farming — was present from the end of the 7th millennium BC (It is now believed that the first horse “domestication” occurred in the Botai Culture in Kazakhstan). ![]() The earliest artifacts associated with the cult of the horse and evidence for horse sacrifice (see cult and sacrifice above) have been discovered in the Middle Volga region from this time, i.e., around 5000 BC in the cemetery at S'ezzhee on the bank of the Samara River, district of Kuybyshev (Modern Samara Province) miniature horse figurines were found carved out of flat bone. (FIGURE 10-1) These were perforated, suggesting that they were worn as pendants and must have had symbolic meaning. Horse skulls and long bones were found above the burials in sacrificial hearths. 2 This cemetery predates the Khvalynsk period in the Lower Volga basin, dated by radiocarbon to the first half of the 5th millennium BC (see the following section on Khvalynsk).
Bones from a domesticated horse have been analyzed at Deieivka in the Lower Dnieper basin, 70 kilometers from the town of Kremenchug. 3 Dereivka belongs to the Sredniy (Sredny) Stog II group of the Kurgan culture, which entered the Dnieper steppe around 4500 BC. or somewhat earlier (Sredniy Stog I is a Dnieper-Donets site). Fifteen fragments of sexable horse mandibles found at this site were those of young adult or juvenile males, which suggests an advanced stage of domestication.(For a dietician, and a pastoralist, all that tells is that young adult or juvenile male horses were less needed in the economy, and were tastier than the aged variety. No difference from the current pastoralist practices) By the middle of the 5th millennium BC, large herds of horses were kept in the forest steppe and steppe zone between the Lower Dnieper on the west and northern Kazakhstan. The analysis of animal bones in the settlement at Repin on the bank of the Don River has shown that 80 percent of all domesticated animal bones belonged to the horse. 4 Great numbers of horse bones (more than 100,000) have also been discovered near Petropavlovsk (i.e. pre-colonial Kyzyl Yar) in the northern Kazakhstan in a site having Kurgan I (Early Yamna) (Pit Grave) affinities. There, horse bones constitute about 90 percent of all domesticated animal bones. 5 One motive for the domestication of the horse may have been its use for meat and milk which continues among steppe peoples to the present day. Of greater importance, however, was its ability to be ridden, which must have occurred from the initial domestication. Although cattle, sheep, and goats can be easily herded on foot, riding was essential for large-scale horse breeding. Antler tine (antler branch) cheek pieces, possibly used as bridle equipment, have been found in the Sredniy (Sredny) Stog sites of the middle of the 5th millennium BC (six occurred at Dereivka). Pairs of cheek pieces were found in graves or were associated with a ritual pit which included the skull, mandible, and leg bones of a stallion and the skulls and foreparts of two dogs.
The situation of initial domestication may have been similar to a practice known from
Siberia several centuries ago. During the 18th century, Russian colonists found
pastoralists between the Caspian Sea and the Altai Mountains who practiced little
cultivation but kept herds of horses, cattle, sheep, and goats. Their herding was done on
horseback // and the horse held a prominent position in their society. Geldings were
ridden, and the main herds of horses were kept more or less wild under a stallion whose
mares were milked and kept hobbled near the tents. 6
(Thanks for the tents, without it we would not have guessed that the subject are the
numerous Türkic tribes of the Junior, Middle, and Senior Juzes in the Kazakhstan who
lived in yurts, euphemistically named “tents”. Re-reading the paragraph again, the
audacity of the author in avoiding the reference to the Türkic nomads is rattlingly
marvelous, in the whole chapter the Türkic people are not mentioned even once, other then
superveiled allusion) The bovine remained the main draft animal of the Volga Neolithic as evidenced by figurines of probably yoked oxen (FIGURE 10-1, 2, 4) while the swift horse became the “motor” of transport. This innovation cut traveling time by a factor of five or more, nullifying whatever territorial boundaries had previously existed. These developments largely affected the exploitation of steppe resources and virtually all other aspects of life. Riding provided the ability to strike out across great distances, instigated cattle-looting or horse-stealing raids, the accumulation of wealth, trading capacities, and the development of. Once the steppe was conquered, it inevitably became a source of outward migration. (This depiction of the animal husbandry society is not rational, fair, or factual, even applied to the limited space of the Europe, and totally absurd in retrospect of their spread through the rest of Eurasia down to the Pacific Ocean. The main impetus for both directions was trade: the nomads had mind-boggling excesses of produce, and needed markets to trade with. The annalistic records tend to emphasize the disasters brought over by the nomads to the settled population, but the same annalistic records note a matching number of instances when nomads saved the farming states from Rome to China. There is a sea of difference between having a superior military technical capability and being militaristic society. In the historical period, invariably the nomadic militancy was a defensive reaction caused by aggression of sedentary states, be it Romans, Ahaemenids, or Chinese. The depiction of the endemic violence and warfare serves to conform to the image of Indo-Europeans as nations-warriors) Material remains of the first half of the 5th millennium BC show that in an enormous territory east of the Don River and between the Middle Volga, the Caucasus Mountains, and the Ural Mountains there spread a uniform culture. Almost identical ornaments, tools, and weapons in sites thousands of kilometers apart speak for an unprecedented mobility between the tribal groups. The first incursion into the Dnieper steppe by these horse-riding peoples is dated before the middle of the 5th millennium BC. Not much later, Kurgan I horse-riding warriors appeared in the heart of Europe. Horse riding changed the course of European prehistory. Coupled with the use of weapons, the mounted warrior became a deadly menace to the peaceful, unarmed agriculturalists. From the middle of the 5th millennium BC, the swift horse became a carrier of unrest that continued for millennia. If we look back at European history, at the routine massacres by horse-riding Scythians, Sarmatians, Huns, Avars, Romans, Slavs, and Vikings and the horse-drawn chariots of the Celts and those described by Homer — even the Christian Crusaders — we see how violence, abetted by the rise of the swift horse, became a dominant aspect of life. (If the reference to the Slavs is in respect to their invasion of Greece, they were an infantry force of the Türkic Avars, and clearly out of Kurgan Culture context. Crusaders also were a crowd of unprofessional infantry, with few mounted knights, no relation to the Kurgan people. Romans can't be accused of being Kurgan people. The rest can't be accused of routine massacres other then being the victims of routine massacres. The horse riding did change the course of history, in Europe and around the steppe belt, not by violence, but by spreading technologies, facilitation exchanges, bringing new concepts and so on. As to the negative application of the new technologies, they grew on the local soil, and ascribing them exclusively to the nomadic cattlemen is not accurate) Culture Groups in the Forest-Steppe Region of the Middle and Lower Volga Basin The Volga culture of the 5th millennium BC, referred to as Eneolithic in Soviet literature (meaning “Copper-Stone Age” or “Chalcolithic”), developed from the local Volga Neolithic culture. 7 Its territory covered the southern zones of the steppe areas between the lower Don, middle Volga, and the lower Ural, bordered by the Caucasus Mountains and the Caspian Sea farther south. The Neolithic and Eneolithic of this large area has been discovered only during the last twenty years, and several regional groups and chronological phases have already been recognized. The Eneolithic is subdivided into three periods: early, middle (or “developed”), and late. The Samara Period of c. 5000 BC The Early Eneolithic is known as the “Samara culture” in the forest steppe area of the Middle Volga and the “north Caspian culture” in the Lower Volga basin. The discovery, in 1973, of the cemetery of S'ezzhee on the bank of the River Samara, a tributary of the Middle Volga in the district of Kuybyshev (Modern Samara Province), 8 began an understanding of this culture which, until then, was almost entirely unknown. The cemetery was partly destroyed, and the remaining six single graves and one triple grave were in pits, 0.70-1.0 m deep, a few of which were covered with a cairn or a low earthen mound (“mound” stands for kurgan). The striking discovery here was the evidence of horse sacrifice (see cult and sacrifice above) in association with burials and the bone figurines of horses, double-headed horses, and double-headed oxen. A sacrificial area was uncovered 40 cm below the surface in the central part of the cemetery in which two skulls of horses were found surrounded with broken pots, shell beads, sweet water shells, and harpoons all sprinkled with ochre. Another sacrificial area of this cemetery yielded an accumulation of horse and cattle leg bones. Under the first sacrificial area, the richest graves of the cemetery were found, several containing children, all lying on a layer of ochre and sprinkled intensively with it. The most outstanding of all was the grave of a 1.5 to 2-year-old child (No. 6) equipped with a long flint dagger (FIGURE 10-2, 1), two flat figurines of double-headed oxen made of boar's tusk (FIGURE 10-1, 2, 4), three spoon-shaped objects with sculptured heads of ducks at the ends (ducks have a special place in the Türkic genesis myth), pendants and laminae of shell, a necklace or belt of shell beads, animal teeth, and two large gouges and adzes of polished stone. These grave gifts suggest an upper-class, probably royal, burial. The deposition of a dagger and sculptures in a grave of such a young child is unusual, although symbolic. From later archeological materials and comparative Indo-European mythology, it is known that the dagger and the yoked oxen pulling carts are attributes of the sovereign God of the Shining Sky. It is likely that the sacrifice (see cult and sacrifice above) of horses was associated with the death of a royal male child.
Two figurines of horses (FIGURE 10-1, 1, 3) are from destroyed graves, as are many gouges and adzes of polished stone, large bone spears, daggers, flint points, arrowheads, and scrapers. Daggers were of flint and bone, some as long as 56 cm, which were truly formidable weapons. Flint or quartzite blades were set into shafts of bone on two sides. (FIGURE 10-2, 3) Pots were not laid in graves but are found mostly in sacrificial areas
(The grave pots apparently were made of perishable materials:
tree bark, reeds, grass, wood. The ceramic pots used for funeral feast were left behind
at the grave, to not bring back any bad spirits from the funerals, this custom is
still being followed. Additional pots are also left after the ritual wake feasts).
S'ezzhee pots were tempered with crushed shells, as all later pottery of Kurgan
tradition. Most were made in a truncated egg shape with a narrow end, a flattened base,
and a thickened, outwardly turned rim. The whole surface, or just the upper part, was
decorated in horizontal or zigzag lines. These were executed by stabbing or stamping, by
making comb impressions, and had pitted or “button” designs below the rim. (FIGURE
10-3) Similar pottery occurred in a number of settlements recently discovered between
the Lower Don and Lower Ural. 9
356 Not much is known about the settlements. All are small and thin layered and have yielded only potsherds, flint scrapers, quartzite tools, and polished stone adzes and gouges. Since there are no radiocarbon dates for the S'ezzhee cemetery or other sites with similar materials, their chronology rests on typological comparisons. For instance, laminae of boar's tusks are known from the Dnieper-Donets sites and from the Samara culture. In the former area they precede the Sredniy (Sredny) Stog n period; in the latter, the Khvalynsk. If Khvalynsk, on the basis of radiocarbon dates, belongs to the first half of the 5th millennium BC, the Samara culture should be placed around 5000 BC or early 5th millennium BC The Khvalynsk Period, First Half of the
5th Millennium BC The “developed Eneolithic” in the Volga basin is represented by the cemetery of Khvalynsk, located on the bank of the Volga in the district of Saratov, excavated by Vasiliev and others. 10 One hundred and fifty-eight skeletons were unearthed in an area of 30 by 26 m, mostly from single graves, although some held two to five skeletons or more. The dead were buried in pits in a contracted position, lying on their backs with their knees upward. Twelve graves were covered with stone cairns. As in S'ezzhee, sacrificial areas were unearthed with remains of horse, cattle, and sheep sacrifices (see cult and sacrifice above), while animal bones were also found in graves and deposited separately (leg bones of a horse and a calf, skulls of cattle, and sheep bones). The inventory of grave finds include about forty metal artifacts (rings and spiral rings), large pendants of boar's tusk, bone and shell beads and bracelets, a perforated and polished lugged axe, a schematized horse-head sculpture which was probably a scepter, bifacially retouched flint points and daggers, stone adzes, and bone harpoons. A very similar inventory was brought to light in a grave of a rich individual accidentally discovered in 1929 at Krivoluchie, in the district of Samara. The body lay in a contracted position on ground scattered with ochre and was equipped with a lugged axe of porphyry, six flint points of fine workmanship, a flint dagger, a scraper, bracelets of polished stone and bone, beads of deer teeth, and annular and cylindrical beads of pectunculus shell.11 (FIGURE 10-4) This individual must have been an important member of the society. (The padding of ochre, or less frequent typologically synonymous chalk or charcoal is one of the markers of the Kurgan burial tradition, observable and used for typological definition not only for kurgan burials, but also in cases where kurgan mounds were washed away, blown off, plowed over, or were impossible to build. Some of the following descriptions skip over the typological kinship and omit mentioning of the grave padding, instead concentrating on the grave goods that serve for typological distinctions expected in the excavation reports. The kurgan burial ceremony associated with red ochre for padding or sprinkling, underlayment of the bottom of the tomb with grass, reed, or felt, and accompanying the deceased with horses and food for travel are the typological elements that unite temporal and spatial embodiments of the Kurgan Culture across Eurasian steppes in the European and Asian Pit Grave, Andronovo, Afanasiev, Timber Grave, Cimmerian, Scythian, Hunnic, Avar/Kangar/Bajanak, Bulgar, Oguz, and Kipchak Cultures) In the south, related finds and burial rituals were discovered at Nalchik in the northern Caucasus in the region of Kabardino-Balkaria. One hundred and twenty-one graves were excavated under a low kurgan, 0.67 m high and 30 m across. The contracted bodies lay in groups of five to eight, on layers of ochre, and were covered with stones. Among the most common grave goods were beads of pectunculus shell, stone, and the teeth of deer, wolf, bear, boar, and other animals, stone or bone bracelets, pendants of boar's tusk, long flint daggers, arrowheads, and points. The latter were bifacially retouched. 12 The astonishing similarity of grave goods in sites separated by thousands of kilometers suggest the existence of phenomenal mobility and intertribal relationships between Samara and the Caucasus. On the west, sites with related materials extend to the Sea of Azov and on the east to the River Ural. The types of stone tools, weapons, ornaments, and pottery of the Khvalynsk phase continued from the Samara period. The chronology of the Khvalynsk phase is indicated roughly by similarity with the finds of the Sredniy (Sredny) Stog sites in the Lower Dnieper basin, dated by radiocarbon and contacts with the Karanovo and Cucuteni cultures to the middle of the 5th millennium BC. The first radiocarbon dates for the Khvalynsk materials (analyzed by the laboratory of the Ural Institute of Education) fall within the early 4th millennium BC. When calibrated, they must belong to the period before the middle of the 5th millennium BC. 13
The Early Pit Grave Period, Middle of the 5th
Millennium BC The “Late Eneolithic” period of the Lower Volga basin is the Early Yamna (Early Pit-grave) culture, characterized by a number of kurgans and settlements. In all respects it is a continuation from the Khvalynsk period. The excavated settlements have revealed the same tradition of ceramic craft and of flint, quartzite, and bone industry, indicating no changes in art or technology. The egg-shaped pots with out-turned rims (FIGURE 10-5), stone-tool kits dominated by adzes, gouges, and weapons — flint arrowheads, points, and daggers — continued to be produced. The continuity of the material culture is well documented by excavations in the same areas where Khvalynsk sites previously existed — by the settlement of Alekseevo near Khvalynsk, for instance, located on the terrace of a small river, a tributary of the Middle Volga. 14 Before the discovery of the Samara and Khvalynsk cemeteries of the Volga culture, the Early Pit Grave kurgans with burials in pits under earthen barrows were considered to be the earliest. Their origin was nebulous. Examples of such Early Pit Grave kurgans were known from excavations during the fifties and sixties: Berezhnovka I, 15 Politotdelsk, 16 and Arkhara 17, were known from the excavations of 1950 - 1960-ies. Low earthen barrows above pit graves became the most characteristic and universal feature. During the Khvalynsk period, graves were rarely covered with an earthen mound, more often with a stone cairn or a mound which accumulated because of the sacrificial activities above the graves. The earliest earthen kurgans could have started in the Khvalynsk period in the steppe territories and may have existed side by side with flat graves of the forest-steppe region. 18 The kurgan is a feature of the steppe.
The site of this period, in the region between the Lower Don and Lower Ural, is Repin,
located on the bank of the Don, excavated in the fifties by I. V. Sinitsyn.
19 This settlement yielded the greatest numbers
of pots and horse bones which, as mentioned above, constituted 80 percent of all
domesticated animal bones. Ten other sites with similar materials are known now in this
region.
Chronologically, the Late Eneolithic (i.e. the Late Eneolithic period of the Early Pit Grave Culture of the Kuragan Culture) follows the Khvalynsk period (i.e. the period of the Khvalynsk Culture) which belongs to the middle of the 5th millennium BC. This is the Kurgan I period in which the Kurgan people expanded into east-central Europe as far as the Karanovo culture in Bulgaria and in the Danube valley. (FIGURE 10-6) Kurgan I Sites in the Lower Dnieper Basin: The Emergence of New Types of Burials, Pottery, and Weapons, and the Leadership of Males The Kurgan people first entered European prehistory during the mid-5th millennium BC, when they streamed into the basin of the Lower Dnieper and west of the Black Sea (FIGURE 10-6). hi the Dnieper rapids region, the Dnieper-Donets settlement of Sredniy (Sredny) Stog I was found overlain around 4500 BC or earlier by a new cultural complex, Sredniy Stog II, whose people practiced single burial in cairn-covered shaft or cist graves. The bodies in these later graves were supine, either contracted or extended, and were usually supplied with flint daggers, arrowheads, spear points, and beakers with pointed bases in the Kurgan tradition. (FIGURES 10-7A, B) The skeletal remains, moreover, are dolichomesocranial, taller statured, and of a more slender physical type than those of their Dnieper-Donets predecessors, 20 who were of robust Cro-Magnon type. (FIGURE 10-7C).
In contrast to the vegetal-temper characteristic of the earlier Dnieper-Donets
ceramics, the pots of these new inhabitants were tempered with crushed shells, and their
stamped, pitted, or cord-impressed decorations present a solar motif. Local evolution
cannot account for such abrupt changes.
The Sredniy (Sredny) Stog II complex represents an extension of the Volga pastoralists into the Dnieper basin which occurred at the end of the Khvalynsk period. Their horse cult (see cult and sacrifice above) and burials are related to those found in the Middle Volga forest steppe region. At Dereivka in the Lower Dnieper region, tombs contain remains of sacrificed (see cult and sacrifice above) horses and dogs. Graves of a man and woman, perhaps the widow, and of a man and one or two children in one grave, buried at the same time, are frequent. As the Kurgans moved into Old Europe, however, certain influences were inevitably absorbed from the local indigenous cultures. The hundred sites in the lower Dnieper-Don interfluve are primarily cemeteries, and their grave goods reflect this influence and are enriched by copper and gold objects from the west. 21 Chisels, scrapers, and often long (to 22 cm) pointed flint daggers were placed at the man's hand and even in the cairn above. Occasionally as many as fifteen such daggerlike blades occur in a grave. Bifacially worked spearpoints, triangular flint arrowheads, narrow-butted flint and polished stone axes and daggers form the prototypical Indo-European weaponry (Indo-European is kind of exaggeration. While the Kurgan weaponry is known, the Indo-European Urheimat and weaponry still await their hour). These were usable from horseback and are still seen later in the Bronze and Early Iron ages. Exceptionally rich male graves include thousands of pectunculus or other shells (originally attached to disintegrated leather or woven belts); copper bead and animal tooth necklaces; shell and copper pendants,- spiral arm rings and finger rings of copper; long, thin spiral-headed copper pins and tubes. Presumably, this copper came from the Ai-Bunar mines in central Bulgaria via barter with the Cucuteni. Some of the copper artifacts, however; such as the spiral arm rings, tubes, and shell-shaped pendants, are unparalleled in the west and may have been the product of local craftsmen. (The belts are the hallmark of the Kurgan and all its embodiments' dress. The belts are noted as distinct feature in the burials, in the annalistic records, in the ethnological descriptions, in statuary starting from Cimmerian/Scythian times to the Late Kipchak times, and into the Modern Age. The Türkic kaftans and belts, together with their boots, were imitated, adopted, and absorbed, they became the textbook image of the Russian peasant down to the 20th c., they can be seen on Chinese and Middle Eastern depictions, and they still can be found in the most recent kurgan burials around Altai) The presence of antler hoes and querns is conclusive proof of agricultural activity in Sredniy (Sredny) Stog II, although no grains have thus far been identified. Awls, picks, polishers, and hammer-axes of bone and antler are found in the settlements in considerable numbers. (The reason that no grains have thus far been found is that until recent, the Russian archeology used a shovel-height layering in excavations, primarily searching for datable ceramics, trinkets and precious metals, and largely ignoring biological remains that do not provide Caucasoid/Mongoloid discriminators. Thus, the bulk of the archeological monuments in the European Russia were, and still are, destroyed without extracting information needed for scientific studies. Sifting is still is not a requirement, it is up to the archeologist to use or not to use it. In the history of Russian archeology, the first, and maybe the last, excavated kurgan was restored to its original shape in 2005. Kurgans are not listed in the registry of the national or local treasures, they are just piles of mud with no owner. Of the thousands upon thousands of osteological remains uncovered in the European Russia, to date, as of 2011, only one genetical testing was performed, and it identified the mtDNA of a female with the Türkic population, see Sarmatian mtDNA) At Dereivka, the bones of 55 horses were counted within a settlement of three dwellings, representing 63 percent of the total number of domesticated animal remains. Antler cheek pieces and the depiction of possible bridle equipment on stone sculptures is fairly convincing evidence of horse riding. (FIGURE 10-8) Radiocarbon determinations for Dereivka in calibrated chronology are within the second half of the 5th millennium BC, (UCLA 1466 : 4570-4150 BC; Kiev 466 : 4460-4000 BC; Kiev 465: 4340-3810 BC). The First Wave of Kurgans Into East-Central Europe c. 4400-4300 BC and Its Repercussions The Emergence of Warrior Elite Graves, the Custom of Suttee, and the Horse Cult After penetrating the Dnieper rapids region and the area north of the Sea of Azov, the Kurgans struck central Europe (see Fig. 10-6). Actual Kurgan graves (round kurgans with pit graves) found in Moldavia, southern Romania, and east Hungary are eloquent witnesses of these incursions. The earliest Kurgan graves in Moldavia date from Cucuteni A2-A3 phase, c. 4400-4300 BC. Their graves were almost exclusively for male burials, a distinct contrast to the even ratio of male-female burials in contemporary Old European cemeteries (The comparison should also have been with the source locations in Sredny Stog II, otherwise the conclusions on raiding are not substantiated). In contrast to the simple pit graves of Old Europe, the Kurgan tombs were cairn- or earth-covered and were reserved for the warrior elite with their favorite war gear, the spear, bow and arrow, and flint dagger or long knife. (FIGURES 10-7, 10-8, 10-9) Burial excavations reveal two aspects of Indo-European (i.e. Kurgan) ideology, found for the first time in east-central Europe at Suvorovo in Moldavia and at Casimcea on the Lower Danube. These two graves demonstrate the Kurgan religious concepts of the worship of the horse as a divine animal (see cult and sacrifice above) and the custom of suttee or sacrifice of the female consort or wife (FIGURE 10-9) (The suttee custom is documented by Ibn Fadlan for the Vikings called Rus in the 10th c. AD, in China consequent to the Zhou conquest in 12th-3rd cc. BC, and in India at the time of the British colonization. India underwent numerous conquests by the Kurgan people, and a chain of Kurgan-derived dynasties. Archeologically, the suttee custom is traced from Danube to Central China, and from 5th mill. BC to 1st mill. AD). FIGURE 10-8 Antfer cheek pieces from Dereivka, Lower Dnieper area. Second half 5th mill. BC. Scale 1:3 ![]() ![]() At Suvorovo, a chieftain was buried in a deep rectangular pit lined with stones containing a horse-headed scepter of porphyry, his symbol of power, and other objects deemed necessary in afterlife. (FIGURE 10-9, 2, 3) A woman, presumably his widow, was apparently put to death at this time and laid to rest beside her dead lord. Remnants of a garment covered with mother-of-pearl laminae and a necklace of unio shell beads express her relatively elevated station in life, but the only gift accorded her was a flint scraper. The double grave was covered by a massive kurgan and surrounded by a circle 13 m in diameter of upright stones. The practice of suttee is also documented in Sredniy Stog II tombs at Yama and Aleksandriya in the Lower Dnieper area of the same period. A Casimcea chieftain in Romania was buried with a horse-head scepter of porphyry, his power symbol, along with five flint axe heads, fifteen arrow points and three daggers. Arrows must have been placed in a skin quiver. (The scepter could serve as a marker, allowing to trace and date Kurgan migrations. Independent invention of the scepter as a symbol of power is not likely) The Suvorovo and Casimcea horse-headed scepters are paralleled elsewhere by finds in Moldavia, southern Romania, Transylvania, Bulgaria, and Macedonia. 22 These wands, with a carved horse head, are strikingly similar to those recovered from the Volga region, the north Caucasian steppe, and northeastern Dagestan. An important aspect of Indo-European religious ritual was the horse sacrifice (see cult and sacrifice above), especially in Indic (asvamedha), Roman (October Equus), and Celtic traditions. The archeological indications of equine sacrifice are found at Kherson in the Ukraine where a Kurgan tomb was flanked by a pit containing a horse skull. 23 In the Kurgan cemetery north of the Danube delta, near Odessa, there was a ritual hearth and a central grave containing pairs of horse and bull skulls. 24 In 1986, a complete horse skull cut from the neck was found in a Tiszapolgar pit in northeastern Hungary dating from the end of the 5th millennium BC. This is the earliest evidence in central Europe. 25
The Coexistence of Kurgan Pastoralists and Cucuteni Agriculturalists The Cucuteni civilization survived the first wave of Kurgan incursions intact. Its ceramic tradition continued undisturbed, although Kurgan elements within Cucuteni settlements (1 to 10 percent of Cucuteni A and AB pottery) indicate some sort of interaction between the two groups. (This confirms the argument against Kurgan militancy, a main point in the Prof. M.Gimbutas theory; quite the opposite, the Kurganians and Cucutenians enjoyed mutually beneficial symbiotic coexistence.) This intrusive shell-tempered pottery (referred to by some as Cucuteni C) is nearly identical in shape to that of the Sredniy Stog II (Kurgan I) level of the Lower Dnieper. Petrographic analysis has shown that all Cucuteni and Kurgan (Sredniy Stog II) samples were of similar mineralogical composition. This indicates that both peoples exploited similar clay types, but the respective technology was very different: the Cucuteni ware was well fired, completely oxidized, and without temper, whereas the Kurgan ceramics were low-fired and contained quantities of crushed shell, organic residues, and plant material. 26 FIGURE
10-9 Horse-head scepters made of semiprecious stone (1,2) appeared in east-central
Europe in rich male graves in kurgans after the middle of the 5th mill. BC ![]() ![]() 363 At the time of Cucuteni B in the early 4th millennium BC, the local populace had relocated into areas more naturally defensible. In a few instances, an additional rampart was built across the river from a settlement. The villages and towns continued to grow, and boundaries of Cucuteni sites in the district of Uman, identified by aerial photography and magnetometry, show towns more than two kilometers long, laid out in a dozen or so concentric elipses radially cut by streets (Figs. 3-63 to 3-65). 27 The density of Cucuteni sites indicates no massive dislocations in the wake of the first wave of relatively small groups of Kurgan infiltrators; nor is there evidence of amalgamation of the two groups throughout these approximately 800 years of coexistence, at least not until the mid-4th millennium BC. (800 years of peaceful coexistence is not exactly image of warlike, patriarchal, and hierarchical people) The Displacement and Amalgamation of the Varna, Karanovo, Vinca, and Lengyel Cultures For the Karanovo-Gumelnita civilization, the Kurgan incursions proved catastrophic. The small farming villages and townships were easily overrun, and Karanovo groups must have fled from the Lower Danube basin westward. The Salcuta group of southwestern Romania took refuge in Transylvanian caves or on Danubian islands. 28 Layer after layer of habitation material similar to Salcuta IV indicates that the refugees maintained a semblance of cultural identity for yet another four or five hundred years. 29 (This must be one of the conflict episodes that came to light, not for its demographic dimension. Transylvanian caves or on Danubian islands could not harbor any significant population, the sources and sides of the conflict are not known) In the first half of the 4th millennium BC, the Black Sea coastal Varna culture was replaced, in east Romania and Bulgaria, by a Kurganish complex designated as Cernavoda I. 30 The fortified Cernavoda sites, in contrast to the Karanovo-Gumelnita and Varna settlements on the open plain, were strategically located on high river terraces and consisted of a few small surface or semisubterranean dwellings on sites generally covering no more than 100 by 200 m. These people bred stock (including the horse) and engaged in hunting, fishing, and primitive agriculture, and their antler and bone tools are identical to finds in the steppe north of the Black Sea. They produced gray, badly baked, crushed-shell tempered ceramics, unmistakably related to the Kurganoid wares in Moldavia and in the Ukraine, having the characteristic decor of stab-and-drag, knobs, and impressions of cord, fingernail, and shell. No painted pottery occurs at this time, although substratum influence may account for certain untempered, occasionally brown-slipped and burnished ceramics. Only a few stylized figurines were recovered from Cernavoda I, and Old European symbolic designs had disappeared. No cereal grains were found, despite the presence of antler and bone hoes, grinding stones, and sickle blades. Horse bones were ubiquitous among the remnant heaps of domesticated animals. Tools were predominantly of bone but included maceheads and perforated hammer axes of antler and stone, flint scrapers and knives, a few copper awls and chisels. (These archeological results have parallels throughout the Kurgan expansions. The process came to us as series of exogamic marital unions, where Kurgan people, each tribe and subdivision separately, seeks and joins a permanent marital partner, we have examples from every place that had annalistic records. Among the known pairs are Hunnic-Tibetan, Hunnic-Mongolic, Hunnic-Tungusic, in the Caucasus it is a Koban Culture, in the Central Asia it is an As-Tokhar alliance; when in the 17th c. the Tele tribes found refuge in the Altai, they allied with local Altaian hunter-gatherers. In the area of Northern China, that process took place in 7th-4th cc. BC, in the Eastern Europe amalgamation between Proto-Slavs and Bulgarian Kurgans created a Slavo-Türkic language called Old Church Slavonic, the Danube Slavs amalgamated with Avars, and with Becenyo/Bajanaks to become Bosnians. The intra-tribal conflicts became more acute with Türkic participation, bringing about crises and dislocations, powerfully described in the Slavic annals) The Kurgan disruption of Varna, Karanovo, and Vinca jolted a succession of dislocations in Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and as far west as the Upper Danube, Upper Elbe, and Upper Oder basins. Cultural boundaries disintegrated as elements of Vinca populations moved into western Hungary (to eventually become the “Balaton” complex), and into Croatia, Bosnia, and Slovenia (to become the “Lasinja” group). 31 The Lengyel people migrated west and north along the Upper Danube into Germany and Poland. Furthermore, sites of the probable Vinca refugees are also found in regions where no human community had settled since Paleolithic times, such as the eastern Alps and the central part of Slovenia and Croatian Karst. In this hilly terrain, the location of settlements in the highest places, surrounded by cliffs or girded by rivers, suggest an extreme concern for defense. In a number of sites, traces of rectangular houses built of timber posts and thick clay walls testify to a certain retention of the Vinca architectural traditions. At the same time, caves were also occupied. The occupation of caves and of heretofore uninhabited lands suggests that the movement of the Vinca people to the northwest and west took place in times of stress. There are no radiocarbon dates for the Balaton-Lasinja I complex. Its chronology is based on a typological relationship with the latest Vinca materials in Yugoslavia. The subsequent phase, labeled Balaton-Lasinja II-III, yielded two C-14 dates, the true age of which falls between 3900 and 3400 BC, placing the Balaton-Lasinja I complex before 4000 BC. By the end of the 5th millennium BC, the Vinca traditions with their temples, figurines and exquisite pottery are no longer found. There is no continuity of habitation on the Vinca mound after c. 4300 BC. The Tiszapolgar complex, an offshoot of late Tisza, emerged in northeastern Hungary,
eastern Slovakia, and western Transylvania. The continuity of their settlement to the
mid-4th millennium BC indicates that these people survived and did not merge with the
Kurgan culture. However, major social changes are observable and may reflect a Kurgan
influence. In contrast to the Tisza and Lengyel pattern, where the majority of known
sites are villages, the Tiszapolgar sites (about 100 reported) are cemeteries that
suggest small communities of thirty to forty people. This situation does not reflect a
normal growth of population as in Lengyel, Vinca, Karanovo, and other groups during the
period before the first Kurgan wave. Also, the social role of the male had risen,
indicated by several graves of males buried with more than usual care and equipped with
status symbols such as maceheads. Significantly, the skeletons of these men were of
proto-Europid type (proto-Europids=proto-Caucasians, i.e. the
“robust” Cro-Magnon type), whereas the majority of the population was of
Mediterranean type. 32 In the cemetery of Basatanya, of 75 graves (belonging to two phases), 33 a small group of male burials included maceheads, whereas the majority of the burials in this cemetery shows Old European features. 34 (Is the Old European a Cro-Magnon or in Russian terminology Proto-European, or somethinf else?) In the mountainous east Slovakia, the Tiszapolgar complex persisted through the mid-4th millennium BC. Several cemeteries of the Laznany group in the Carpathian foothills exemplify the last vestiges of this complex, which were finally submerged under the Kurganized Baden culture in the second half of the 4th millennium BC. 35 North of Budapest and in western Slovakia, Lengyel disappears after c. 4400-4300 BC and reemerges in Bavaria, central Germany, and western Poland, where characteristic biconic and footed vessels with warts show up in graves and in settlements. 36 The Emergence of Kurgan Elements in the Milieu of the LBK Culture The discontinuity of the Varna, Karanovo, Vinca, and Lengyel cultures in their main territories and the large scale population shifts to the north and northwest are indirect evidence of a catastrophe of such proportions that cannot be explained by possible climatic change, land exhaustion, or epidemics (for which there is no evidence in the second half of the 5th millennium BC.). Direct evidence of the incursion of horse-riding warriors is found, not only in single burials of males under barrows, but in the emergence of a whole complex of Kurgan cultural traits: hilltop settlements, the presence of horses, the predominance of a pastoral economy, signs of violence and patriarchy, and religious symbols that emphasize a sun cult. These elements are tightly knit within the social, economic, and religious structure of the Kurgan culture. (As was suggested elsewhere, though the changes are significant, the reasons for them appear to be entirely different. The general absence of traces of violence suggest that amalgamation with Kurgans, or cultural influence of Kurgans, which enabled the population to be more mobile and active in locating and occupying better environmental niches, and made conflicts more acute. A good example of the process is described by Julius Caesar, when one of the kindred Germanic tribes undertook a move under a pressure by another Germanic tribe) A chain of hill forts that appeared on high riverbanks in the Middle and Upper Danube basin, in Hungary, Austria, western Slovakia, Moravia, Bohemia, and Bavaria 37 is a new phenomenon in European prehistory. The earliest hill forts are contemporary with late Lengyel and Rossen materials or immediately follow them. Radiocarbon dates place this period between 4400 and 3900 BC. 38 Pit dwellings are found that sharply contrast with the solid above-ground long-houses of Lengyel and LBK type. These contain pottery decorated with solar designs, usually executed by stab and drag technique (in German called Furchenstich) along incisions of herringbone design and stabbings. Hanging triangles and parallel lines are typical motifs, with rows of dots above and below the shoulders. In the Upper Danube/Upper Rhine region, in Wurt-temberg and Bavaria, this pottery is characteristic of the Rossen culture, considered to be a “mixed culture” or an LBK culture “with oriental elements”. 39 This is a transformed culture, which did not simply develop from the Stroked Pottery stage of the LBK. Solar-decorated pottery is known from dwelling pits of classical Rossen and from Rossen of Wauwil type (found in Wauwilermoos, Lucerne, Switzerland). In Bavaria, a classical example of a fortified hilltop site with subterranean huts, is Goldberg in Nordlingen Ries, systematically excavated by G. Bersu in the late 1920s. 40 These pit dwellings measured from 4.2 by 3.2 m to 5.2 by 4.9 m. Solar decorated pottery from subterranean dwellings is known from the Middle Neckar basin around Stuttgart, Pfullingen, and Tubingen, north of Schwabische Alb, and more than twenty localities of the Aichbuhl-Schwieberdingen group north of Switzerland. In Rheinpfalz, on the Lower Main, nearly identical materials are known from Bischheim and Bischoffingen-Leiselheim on the Upper Rhine. 41 Further south, in Switzerland, Rossen wares have been recovered from peat bog sites and graves, including Wauwil, Saint-Leonard in Valais, Cravanche at Belfort, and Gonvillars in eastern France. 42 In the north, Rossen sites are found on alluvial sand dunes on the eastern bank of the River Elbe, with ample pastureland around. The inferior soil of this region was not cultivated by Neolithic agriculturalists. East of Magdeburg, the hilltop site of Wahlitz was systematically excavated. 43 This settlement, of two hectares, was surrounded by a ditch within which were five larger houses and ten small houses. Club wheat was the main crop and cattle the dominant species of domesticated animals. The flint industry shows much relationship with the Stroked Pottery phase of the LBK, but the pottery is decorated with solar patterns characteristic of the classical Rossen culture. The radiocarbon date from Wahlitz indicates the last centuries of the 5th millennium BC (5300 ±200 BP, calibrated 4380-3950 BC.) The most impressive hilltop sites belong to the Salzrminde phase, dated to a period before the middle of the 4th millennium BC. The name-giving site is a hilltop settlement on the River Saale near Halle. Others (such as Kahlenberg at Quenstedt, Goldberg at Motzlich, and Oberwerschen) are located on the highest places in their vicinity, naturally protected on two or three sides by water and by extremely steep, rocky hillsides. 44 Five small rectangular houses of wattle-and-daub, built of timber uprights, three to a wall, came to light on the hilltop of Salzmiinde. One of the houses, 3-5 m by 6-7 m, had a rectangular hearth in the center. Alongside the fortified hills, a change of culture can be seen in the emergence of
Kurgan type burials in the Elbe-Saale basin, dated to the first half of the 4th
millennium BC. Single graves in stone-lined and stone-covered pits under round kurgans
emerged in the Baalberge group in the Upper Elbe basin. These contrast with the local
tradition of collective burial. 45 (FIGURE
10-10) About twenty earthen kurgans have been excavated in the Elbe-Saale region;
each contains a central grave in a pit below the surface and a mortuary house, usually
built of stone or stone slabs. The radiocarbon dates for Baalberge and the following
Salzmunde burials are within the first half of the 4th millennium BC, between c. 3900 to
3400 BC. Signs of violence — evidence of people murdered with spears or axes — appear in this period and continue in the subsequent millennia. In the above-mentioned Goldberg hill fort, four individuals were found with unhealed wounds in their skulls, made with spearpoints. In Talheim, east of River Neckar in south-western Germany, thirty-four skeletons of murdered people — men, women and children — were uncovered in a pit dug into the settlement area of the LBK (several potsherds of late LBK were found in the debris, but no other finds were associated with the skeletons). At least eighteen skulls had large holes in the back or top from thrusts of stone axes or flint points, which suggests that the people were killed from behind, perhaps as they fled. Skeletons were found in a pit 1.5 by 3.1 m across and 1.5 m deep in chaotic order and positions, with females, males, and children mixed together. 46 Since murdered people were buried in the cultural layer of the LBK culture with radiocarbon dates-indicating early 5th millennium BC, the massacre must have happened after this time, probably within the Rossen period. The emergence of single-male burials under round kurgans in eastern Ireland and central England in the middle of the 4th millennium BC contrasts sharply with the local tradition of communal burials. This signals the arrival of the first people carrying Kurgan traditions across the Channel or North Sea from the continent, most probably coming from the Rhine basin (see chapter 6, the description of Linkardstown type burials in eastern Ireland and related round kurgans with single burials in Derbyshire, Dorset, and other locations in England). At the same time, signs of warfare and violence appear. It is readily apparent that a portion of central Europe was Kurganized to varying degrees soon after the first Kurgan wave. While the civilization of Old Europe was agricultural, matricentric, and matrilineal, a transformation took place around 4000 BC to a mixed agricultural-pastoral economy and a classed patriarchal society which I interpret as a successful process of Indo-Europeanization. There was a considerable increase in husbandry over tillage. The change of social structure, religion, and economy was not a gradual indigenous development from Old Europe, but a collision and gradual hybridization of two societies and of two ideologies (Fortunately for us, we can trace these Kurgan people by the emergence of their genetical markers from the center of Asia to N.Pontic, and to Europe, with their Kurganization and Turkification of Europe. The Turkification of Europe initiated eastward migration of somewhat Kurganized Europeans all the way to India).
Not all of central Europe was converted to the Kurgan way of life as an outcome of Wave No. 1, but it is clear that most of the Danube basin began to be ruled from hill forts. It took many successive generations for the Old European traditions to become gradually replaced. The indigenous populations either coexisted but remained separate from the Kurgan immigrants or were overrun and subjected to domination by a few Kurgan warriors. A considerable number of Old European culture groups — the Cucuteni, TRB, and the western portion of the LBK — continued their existence throughout the first half of the 4th millennium BC or even longer. An increased Kurganization occurred during the second half of the 4th millennium BC, which is treated in the section below.
The Second Wave, c. 3500 BC, and the Transformation of Central Europe After the Middle of the 4th Millennium BC The Kurgan tribal leaders of the north Pontic region turned to the Cucuteni area not later than the middle of the 4th millennium BC. There they encountered a flourishing civilization which had survived the first Kurgan infiltration. This time it succumbed and was transformed through a process of amalgamation with Kurgan elements. This change can in no way be attributed to a natural evolution of indigenous elements. What continued of the indigenous culture was a pale reflection of earlier times. The lords of the area can be recognized in royal or other elite tombs contained in mortuary houses covered with stone cupolas under kurgans with stone rings. (FIGURES 10-11, 10-12) Around 3500 BC, the culture south and north of the Carpathian Mountains was transformed beyond recognition. The transition from a matristic to a patriarchal era, in some territories of central Europe, was completed by the end of the 4th millennium BC. New cultural groups emerged, formed of Old European and Kurgan elements. (FIGURE 10-13) (Though far-fetched because of the intervening 2 millennia, but this M.Gimbutas' scenario fits well into the origin of more militaristic societies like Latins and Macedonians, who had horses in their arsenal, and with small forces accomplished great deeds)
367 This period of transformation coincides with changes in metal technology and the beginning of the Early Bronze Age in the circum-Pontic region. The new metallurgy is characterized by bronzes of copper and arsenic, copper and tin, and copper with arsenic-tin (As, Sn, As-Sn bronze) which replaced the pure copper metallurgy of the Old European Copper Age. 47 Tests made on arsenical bronze prove it to have been reasonably hard and durable, but a side effect must have been the slow and sure poisoning of the smith. The complex of tools and weapons that emerged north and west of the Black Sea — daggers, knives, halberds, chisels, flat axes, shafthole axes — does not show a continuity from Old European local types. Rather, the shapes of bronze artifacts have analogies in the north Caucasus, in Transcaucasia, and the Near East. (The continued connections of the Kurgans expanding south from N.Pontic through the Caucasus with the kins in their original lands should be expected, and technical feedback from the Caucasus, Transcaucasia, and the Near East confirms the genetical tracing) The tomb structure of Kurgan Wave No. 2 points to its origin in the North Pontic area. The main monuments of the Kurgan culture north of the Black Sea are surveyed below. The Source: The North Pontic Maikop Culture The North Pontic culture is typified by hill forts and hundreds of Kurgan tumuli (grave mounds) with mortuary houses built of stones or wood. Royal burials share a characteristic monumental style in which the tumuli are surrounded by orthostats (upright stone or slab) and stelae, then by an outermost ring of stones; within and below the kurgan is a stone- or wood-lined pit (mortuary house), covered with stone slabs and topped by a stone cupola. Models of wagons and daggers of hard metal accompany the males of the elite. (This model found the widest distribution, and is clearly directly ancestral to the Kipchak kurgan burials described by S.A.Pletneva Kipchaks) Large apsidal houses, exclusively on hilltops, are an architectural innovation. Hill forts with enormous fortifications and outstanding kurgans, including exceptionally well-built tombs of stone slabs, suggest a hierarchic society of consolidated tribal units ruled by leading families. The similarity of fortified settlements, burial rites, and ceramic, stone, and metal artifacts recovered northeast and northwest of the Black Sea suggests the unification of this region, not only by commercial contacts but also by political power. The North Pontic region had at this stage diverged from its Kurgan cousin of the Volga. The Kurgan elements that appear west of the Black Sea are clearly connected with the North Pontic, not with the Volga Steppe and have analogies in the Kuro-Araks valley of Transcaucasia. (Apparently, nothing can be said about the Kurgan developments east of Volga) Known from the end of the 19th century, the royal tomb at Maikop in the River Kuban basin, northwestern Caucasus, is the richest and most familiar of this culture. Although it dates from the early 3rd millennium BC, the place name has become eponymic of the whole North Pontic culture which began c. 3500 BC. The early phase of the Maikop culture in the Lower Dnieper area is best represented by the lowest layer of the Mikhailovka hill fort, surrounded by several walls of limestone boulders, which undoubtedly functioned as a strategic center. 48 The finds from Mikhailovka I show close affinities to those from Crimean and north Caucasian stone cists as well as to the Usatovo kurgans around Odessa. The chronology of this phase, the second half of the 4th millennium BC, is based on radiocarbon dates from Mikhailovka. (TABLE 25) There were two wattle-and-daub houses with apsidal ends at the Mikhailovka I hilltop. One measured 5 m by 16.5 m, and the other, which was partly subterranean, was 5.7 m by 12 m. In the center of each was a round, clay-daubed stone hearth. Arrowheads, points, and scrapers of flint, bone awls, and pottery were gathered in the work area of the north apse. Rock engravings from Kamennaya Mogila at Melitopol, north of the Sea of Azov, depict human and horse silhouettes and yoked oxen pulling a cart. 49 (FIGURE 10-14, 2) Large-horned oxen pulling a plow appear also on the wall of a cist grave at Zuschen, central Germany, 50 and on the rocks at Valcamonica, northern Italy. 51 (FIGURE 10-14, 1, 3, 4) These engravings provide graphic evidence that plow agriculture was used to pull both cart and plow. After 3500 BC, pairs of oxen appear in male graves in the Baden and Globular Amphora cultures of central Europe together with a host of other Kurgan elements (see the next section). (It appears that typical attributes of the sedentary agricultural populations are ascribed to Kurgan people, who do not engage in agriculture because their economy is horse husbandry. A symbiotic co-existence can produce sedentary attributes complemented by animal husbandry attributes like kurgan burials. The oxen and plow mast be attributed to the Old Europe, unless there is an alternate agricultural candidate not mentioned by Prof. Marija Gimbutas. Like in potato salad: you see the potatoes, but it is the eggs that make it a salad)
Mikhailovka I ceramics are typified by globular amphorae with rounded or flat bases and cylindrical necks wound with cord impressions; semiglobular tureens also occur. Pottery was brushed, stabbed, pitted, and beaded about the mouth, neck, and shoulder, and four-legged braziers were ornamented with the solar motif. (FIGURE 10-15) Ordinary pots were plain and rough, while fine ware was usually brown or blackish, polished and burnished, tempered with crushed shell or limestone and sand. This characteristic pottery is found in Pontic area kurgans concentrated south of the River Kuban in the western Caucasus where some 1,500 houselike structures of stone slabs have been counted. 52 These fairly uniform burial sites occur in the Crimea 53 and in the Lower Don, Lower Dnieper, Ingul, and Ingulets valleys. 54 Stone cists were surrounded by orthostats and an outer ring of stones. Cist walls were engraved with figures of men and male animals or painted in red ochre with zigzag, cross, and solar designs. 55 Royal burials and hoards of the late Maikop culture in the River Kuban basin, northwestern Caucasus, express the fabulous riches of tribal leaders and their contacts with Mesopotamia in the early 3rd millennium BC. The most lavishly equipped are those of Maikop and Tsarskaya (now Novosvobodnaya) excavated by N.I. Veselovskii at the end of the 19th century (both are known from the publications by Rostovtzeff 1920; Tallgren 1934; Hancar 1937; Childe 1936; Lessen 1950; and myself 1956). 56 These outstanding kurgans and their treasures throw much light on the social structure, kingship, religion, and art of this period. The Maikop tomb, as well as the series of others in the northern Caucasus 57 and in the south Caspian area 58 speak of the campaigns and raids south of the Caucasus Mountains and the Caspian Sea. (Where Prof. Marija Gimbutas speculates about campaigns and raids, alleles indicate a migration route. 1000 years later the nomadic horse mounted tribe of Guti capture Babylon for a century, ca. 2100-2000 BC. In the nomadic name Guti is easy to recognize the name of nomadic Guzes, or generic “Tribe” in Türkic. The Sumerian/Babylonian/Akkadian records also mention other horse nomadic tribes, who may be connected with the southwestern circum-Mediterranean Kurgan expansion route)
An Amalgam of Kurgan and Cucuteni Traditions: The Usatovo Complex Northwest of the Black Sea Typically, kurgans line the highest ridges along the rivers of the area. Outstanding sites are Usatovo near Odessa 59 and Tudorovo in Moldavia. 60 Characteristically, a kurgan of the Usatovo culture had a cist with uniform orthostats, an entrance corridor, a cupola-shaped cairn above the central grave, semicircles of stelae with engravings and reliefs, and inner and outer rings of stone. The richest graves were those of the leading member of the tribe and his suttee while graves of other adults and children were contrastingly poor. Near the settlement and kurgan at Usatovo there is a contemporaneous cemetery of the indigenous Cucuteni culture consisting of simple, unmarked (flat) pit graves, arranged in rows. Contrasting burial rites of the Cucuteni and Kurgan populations are paralleled by differences in their respective habitation sites. Cucuteni dwellings were on wide river terraces, while the Kurgans located their semisubterranean dwellings on spurs, dunes, and steep hills along rivers. The houses at Gorodsk, on the bank of the River Teterev in the western Ukraine, are small, about 5 m in length with a round hearth in the center; 61 close analogies are found in the Lower Dnieper basin. A list of radiocarbon dates obtained by analysis of charcoal and animal bones from the Usatovo and Mayaki sites of the Usatovo complex is in table 26. The calibration of dates suggests the period between the 34th and 29th centuries BC. A Kurgan-Influenced Culture in East-Central Europe: The Baden-Vucedol and Ezero Groups The second Kurgan infiltration headed south from the North Pontic region toward the Lower Danube area and beyond. At the fortified hill at Cernavoda, in Dobruja, radiocarbon dates from the second phase of the hill give the age as c. 3 400-3 200 BC. 62 By that time, a chain of acropolises (citadels) along the Danube, in the Marica (Bulgaria) plain, and in the area north of the Aegean, reflected the spread of a ruling power. The finest recently excavated tells, converted to hill forts, are at Ezero in central Bulgaria, 63 and Sitagroi on the Drama Plain of Greek Macedonia. 64 Radiocarbon dates are given in tables 27 and 28. In the Lower Danube, Marica, and Macedonian plains, many Karanovo tells indicate that the indigenous occupation of these sites was disrupted, and many were surmounted by fortifications (such are the Ezero, Sitagroi IV, Karanovo VII, Nova Zagora, Veselinovo, and Bikovo). In other areas, steep river banks and almost inaccessible promontories were selected as seats of the ruling class. A cultural change of the same nature as in the Danubian basin is evident as far west as the Alpine valleys of Italy and Switzerland and the Po River basin (the Remedello group), where hill forts (such as Columare, north of Verona) 65 are known on steep hills. This change in social structure was accompanied by a change in religion. The beginning of a new era in religious concepts is manifested in the Alpine valleys by a series of stelae engraved with a set of symbols alien to the indigenous Cortaillod and Lagozza cultures. We shall return to these at the end of this chapter. An Amalgamation of the Old European and the Kurgan Cultures During the second half of the 4th millennium BC, the new regime seems to have successfully eliminated or changed whatever remained of the old social system. Hill forts were the foci of power and cultural life, while the surrounding area supported either pastoral or agricultural populations, depending on the environment and the numbers of indigenous people who remained. Villages were small, the houses usually semisubterranean. But in the economy, an amalgamation of the Old European and the Kurgan cultural systems is clearly evident. In some areas, such as in central Bulgaria, cultivation of emmer, barley, vetch, and pea continued intact, probably carried on by the remaining indigenous population. In other territories, seasonal camps of a pastoral economy prevailed. The new metallurgy, with links to the circum-Pontic region, was now practiced all over east-central Europe, concentrating on the production of the dagger, the shaft-hole axe, and the flat axe of arsenic bronze; metal workshops (including clay bivalve molds) are found on hill forts. 66 The ceramic artifacts, however, continue to manifest certain Old European traditions: anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and ornithomorphic vases of beautiful workmanship were apparently produced by surviving Old European craftsmen. Such exceptional creations are typically found in the hill forts and rich tombs under large kutgans (cf. vases from Tarnava, fig. 10-11), although they are no longer found in the ordinary villages or graves. This situation seems analogous to that of Mycenaean Greece where surviving Minoan craftsmen continued to produce masterpieces of ceramic, gold, and stone for their new lords. The Old European symbolism largely vanished from popular artifacts, giving way to the ubiquitous solar design. (Comparison with Mycenae is good, but not on the right scale. Going backwards, the best comparison is with USA and Russia, where the common technology and artifacts cover a width of a continent; the next compatible in area and commonality of culture is Ottoman Turkey, then Chingiz-Khan's Mongolia, then Turkic Kaganate, then Hunnic Empires, and then Ahaemenid Empire. Between the time of Ahaemenids and European Kurgans no written history exists, we can only compare the spread of common archeology, and it is hard to miss the parallels between the Kurgan Europe, Kurgan Mongolia, Kurgan Turkic Kaganate, and Kurgan Hunnic Empires. The ethereal “solar ornament” is not even a miniscule detail in the globality of cultural attributes) Toward the end of the 4th millennium BC, only isolated islands of the Old European
tradition persisted. Such was the Cotofeni complex in the Danube valley in Oltenia,
western Muntenia, southern Banat, and Transylvania. 67
(TABLE 29) The Cotofeni were sedentary agriculturalists, living in solidly
built houses, using copper tools, and still producing burnished red and white painted
ceramics. Large numbers of bird-shaped vases attest the continuing worship of the Bird
Goddess. The Baden-Vucedol Culture in the Middle Danube Basin Hundreds of sites in the best explored area, the Middle Danube basin, particularly in Hungary and western Slovakia, afford a good opportunity to follow the cultural development at this critical period of European prehistory. Although treated as a separate culture, the Baden (also called Pecel or Radial-decorated Pottery) culture is actually a western branch of the overall culture complex between western Anatolia and Poland. The Baden complex, composed of indigenous and alien elements, covered the Middle Danube basin, with northern limits in Bohemia and southern Poland. In the south, it is known in the Morava-Vardar valleys of Yugoslavia, Bosnia, and even Albania. 68 The available radiocarbon dates range between the 34th and 29th centuries BC (TABLE 30). The eponymous site of Baden-Konigshohle, near Vienna, was excavated more than sixty years ago. 69 According to presently available radiocarbon dates, Baden lasted some 500 years. This period is subdivided into three phases: early (Boleraz), middle (classical Baden), and late (Bosaca). Almost a thousand Baden sites (counting surface finds) are recorded. 70 Hilltop Sites with Apsidal Houses The hill sites at Vucedol and Sarvas in northwestern Yugoslavia 71 (FIGURE 10-17), Nitrianski Hradok near Nitra and Levoca in western Slovakia, 71 a number near Vienna and Melk in Austria, and those in southern Poland, must have served as seats of chieftains. They each bear a strong resemblance to the difficult-to-access and heavily fortified hills at Mikhailovka in the Lower Dnieper, and Liventsovka at Rostov on the River Don in the Ukraine. Atop the Vucedol hill stood two apsidal houses of the classical Baden phase. One is considered to be the chiefs house and the other a storage place and kitchen. These houses were built of vertical posts and clay daub, the floors were clay plastered and dividing walls separated the rooms, each with its rectangular hearth. Apsidal houses are known also in Bulgaria (Karanovo VII and Nova Zagora), in Macedonia, northeastern Greece (Sitagroi V: figure 10-18), central and southern Greece (Lerna IV, Thebes, Asine), and in Turkey (Troy Ib and Karatas in Lycia). Baden-Ezero apsidal houses were exclusive to the leading hill forts. Moreover, apsidal houses in Palestine during the 34th-33rd centuries BC (at Megiddo, Meser, Jericho VII-VI, Beth Shan XVI, Rosh Hannigra II, Khirbet Kerah I, Tell Yarmuth B, II, and Byblos III) emerged together with other foreign culture elements (gray pottery, tournettes (turntable), and copper tools), 73 and are probably connected with Wave No. 2, which did not stop at the Dardanelles but proceeded to the eastern Mediterranean area as well (Prof. Marija Gimbutas cites confirming evidence on circum-Mediterranean movement of Kurgan people found by genetic analysis, without reciting on the assemblage of the Indo-European markers she uses for the Europe, for a good reason: they are manifestly missing. Instead, we have the undated and unexplained Türkic lexemes “adam” and “eve”, meaning “man” and “vulva” respectively, left on the Near Eastern leg of the Kurgans' route). Villages The typical Baden village was set on a river terrace or promontory. The houses were small (the largest were 3.5 by 4.5 m), rectangular, and semisubterranean with pitched roofs supported by timber posts. Their clay-plastered hearths were either round or rectangular. Above-ground dwellings occur most often in western Slovakia and Hungary. Baden settlements were both permanent and seasonal. Stable settlements were more or less confined to the uplands and the northwestern portion of this culture, whereas small short-lived settlements are found in the lowlands of eastern Hungary and Yugoslavia. The pattern of permanent settlement is clearly linked to the tradition of the Old European populations. Economy The economy was not uniform through the entire Baden territory; farming predominated in the northwest, 74 while a pastoral economy predominated in other areas, particularly in eastern Hungary and northern Yugoslavia. Botanists have identified wheat (with emmer wheat as the most important cereal), barley, millet, oats, pulses, and perhaps rye among plant remains 75 while hazelnuts, shells, cherry stones, and carbonized dried apples give evidence of gathering activities. Cattle led the inventory of domesticated animal bones, followed by sheep, goats, pigs, and horses. Cattle pens have been identified in areas 500-600 meters square, enclosed by ditches with crude fencing of branches and various-sized posts. 76 Sheep and roe deer bones are found in greater proportion in the debris of larger and wealthier homes. 77 Food production was heavily supplemented by fishing and hunting, shown by fish hooks and deposits of fish bones, and by bones of bear, boar, aurochs (bison), roe deer, wolf, fox, and hare. (Pigs are not compatible with the mobility of the horse husbandry, an indication of a symbiotic pastoral and sedentary populations, not properly discriminated in the analysis) Local metallurgy is known from classical Baden. At Sarvas (northern Yugoslavia) there
is evidence of open sandstone molds for a tanged dagger and a flat axe.
78 Deposits of triangular dagger blades with
rivet holes occur in male graves (This metallurgy originated in
the Caucasus, it was adopted and spread by mobile Kurganians, and it is marked by use of
casting. In China, then populated by Tao-type agricultural people, metallurgy did not
exist at that time, it was brought over to China by the Türkic Kurganians when they reached the Far East, and it also was marked by abruptly appearing casting and tongue-type mounting of handles, see
Nicola Di Cosmo, The Northern Frontier in Pre-Imperial China).
(The illustrations depict influences of the Kurgan cattlemen
on the sedentary populations of the Old Europe, but definitely do not belong to the
cattlemen who live with their herds, ride on their herds, and keep their herds wild and
under supervision at all times. The burial example depicts a Kurgan-type burial that may
or may not be connected with the Kurgan people) Burials with Sacrificed Animals and Vehicles Baden cemeteries show the typical Kurgan social inequality and the practice of human and animal sacrifice, the latter by the presence of cattle, dog, and horse bones included in ritual burials. At Alsonemedi and Budakalasz near Budapest, several ox teams had been sacrificed at the graves. (FIGURE 10-19) Grave goods of the wealthy include braziers and models of vehicles. At Budakalasz, a cenotaph included the clay model of a four-wheeled vehicle (FIGURE 10-20) not unlike the one in an inhumation burial at Szigetszentmarton, south of Budapest. 79 The burial of a cart with the dead of high social status was customary in late prehistoric and early historic times, and a copper crown on a male skull also suggests his high social status. (FIGURE 10-21) In multiple burials, the male skeleton is found in the center while women and children are at the edge. (FIGURE 10-22) (These observations, made for the Kurgan burials of the 3000 BC, typologically apply to practically all Kurgan burials spanning four and a half millennia from the 3000 BC to 1500 AD, from the Baden Culture in the west to the modern Tuvinians in the east) Physical type of Population The physical type of Baden was predominantly Mediterranean, as was to be expected from the Vinca substratum. A steppe type was also identified, however, and a certain facial flatness in some individuals seems to reflect eastern relations. At Budakalasz, the steppe type predominated, while at Alsonemedi the Mediterranean was mixed with a European brachycranial type. 80
Lingering Old European Traditions in Ceramics and Symbolism The Old European symbols recur in the Baden culture on bird vases, on winged anthropomorphic urns, and on other fine-quality ceramics decorated with a breast motif and panels of chevron, ladder, and net patterns. The finishing of ceramics by burnishing and channeling are the last flutter of the Old European way in conflict with the new Indo-European, ideology reflected in the rows of pits, zigzags, and solar patterns on beakers, braziers, tureens, and wagon models. (FIGURE 10-23) (Any objective scientist would look around for alternate connections and explanations) The Baden complex represents the process of amalgamation of two culture systems with contrasting economies, ideologies, racial types, and modes of living. (What racial types? Mediterranean and European brachycranial eastern “steppe type”? Or Mediterranean and proto-Europids=proto-Caucasians, i.e. the “robust” Cro-Magnon type?) The Late Baden (“Kostolac”) Expansion into Bosnia The Late Baden or “Kostolac” culture continued in northern Yugoslavia and made a strong thrust south into the Tuzla and Bila valleys of Bosnia. The richest and best explored site of the Kostolac type in Bosnia is a hilltop settlement at Pivnica near Odzak situated in a strategic place overlooking the Bosna River valley. There was a large apsidal house, 15 m long, on the eastern part of the hill and traces of other houses on the other part. 81 The Vucedol Culture In the early 3rd millennium BC, the Vucedol culture followed the Baden in the northwestern Balkans and the east Alpine area. This culture is named after the Vucedol hill fort at Vukovar on the Danube, northwestern Yugoslavia, excavated by R. R. Schmidt. 82 In Hungary it is called the “Zok culture” with several subgroups: “Zok” proper in southwestern Hungary, “Mako” in the Koros and Maros basins of southeastern Hungary, and “Nyirseg” in northeastern Hungary. 83 In the eastern Alpine area, it is better known as “Laibach-Ljubljana culture,” after the peat-bog site excavated at Ljubljana in 1878-79 by K. Deschmann. 84 About 500 Vucedol sites have been reported, all clustered in essentially the same territory as the Baden sites. A number of hill forts contain both Baden and Vucedol deposits, and in the hill fort of Vucedol, two successive Vucedol strata overlie the late Baden (Kostolac) phase. A similar sequence was indicated in the stratified settlements of Sarvas, Gomolava, and Belegis in Syrmia and Slovenia, Brno-Lisen in Moravia, Zok-Varhegy at Pecs in southwestern Hungary, and elsewhere. Vucedol materials are found diffused as far as the Adriatic islands in the south and Bohemia and central Germany in the northwest. An Intensive Defense System of Hill Forts An intensive defense system is seen in the chain of impressive fortresses and fortified hilltop villages. Particular concentrations of settlements occur around Vukovar and Osijek in northwestern Yugoslavia; near Pecs in southwestern Hungary; around Ljubljana in Slovenia, south of Vienna, and in western Slovakia. These hill forts functioned as administrative centers, as in the Baden period, and were located on very steep river banks, usually at the confluence with a smaller river, and were heavily defended by ramparts, palisades, and ditches on the inland side. Other settlements are also found on river banks and elevations, or on lake shores, where people lived in pile dwellings (Stilt houses ) (Ljubljana and Ig, at Ljubljana). Metallurgy Most of the metallurgical activities took place in these locations. The Vucedol hill fort yielded several smelting ovens, copper slags, and clay and sandstone molds. The metal-tool kit consisted of awls, tanged or riveted daggers, spiral tubes used for necklaces, weapons, and ornaments, in addition to shaft-hole axes, celts, and chisels. The ruling families had their own smiths who produced the best tools and weapons of the time. Metal, however, was still rare and most of the inventory was of bone and wood. Pottery The Vucedol ceramics are mostly memorable for the well-polished vases in dark brown or gray, excised and encrusted with white chalk (of crushed shell), which were stamped and impressed with geometric designs, typically in zones and metopes (spaces). Their shapes include a variety of forms — footed dishes which served as braziers, large bowls, handled pots and amphorae, flat and elongated dishes with a jim, miniature pots, and jars with broom-brushed surfaces. Much of the ceramic art reflects, as in Baden, the lingering of Old European traditions. This is strikingly evident in the presence of ornithomorphic vases. The Bird Goddess of the Vinca tradition and her symbols continued to be represented, but most of the symbolic signs and decorative motifs, especially those on the interior of dishes and braziers, are not in the Old European tradition. The dominant designs, instead, are sun and star motifs alien to Old Europe. Clearly, both traditions contributed to Vucedol art and symbolism. Burial A variety of grave types is reported — cremation, urn graves, inhumation, pits under
round earthen kurgans, stone cists, and oven-shaped tombs favored for members of leading
families. A rich double grave was found in the Vucedol hill fort, presumed to belong to a
ruler and his wife. Both skeletons were in a contracted position. The man's left arm lay
over the thigh bone of the woman and his right arm held a leather bottle near his mouth.
At his side lay two spears with socketed bronze heads, and at his feet were a hammer-axe
of antler, a perforated dog's incisor tooth, and a perforated Mediterranean shell. A
whole lamb had been dedicated to the royal couple, and there were many bones about of
cattle, stag, and pig. Other gifts had been deposited in large storage vessels, amphorae,
bowls, and dishes, some of which still contained organic substances. The woman's head was
covered with an exceedingly beautiful, white crusted terrine. In an adjacent oven-shaped
grave, five skeletons of children had been placed in a circle; three were newborn babies,
one was half a year old, and one was four years of age. The bone analysis of the latter
showed that the buried chieftain was the father.
The Ezero Culture in Bulgaria, the Northern Aegean, and Western Anatolia Ezero is a tell in central Bulgaria located three kilometers southeast of Nova Zagora. 85 The excavations of a Bulgarian-Soviet team in this location during 1961-71 revealed an unusually complete picture of the Early Bronze Age life and chronology of the Ezero culture. Although there are a number of important settlements in central Bulgaria (Michalic, Veselinovo, Bikovo, Karanovo) as well as in the north Aegean and western Anatolia that have yielded material related to Ezero [Sitagroi IV and V, Troy I-II, Yortan, Alishar), none can compare with its scope and completeness of information. For this reason, the name Ezero is applied as a label for the entire culture in Bulgaria, northern Aegean, and western Anatolia. This is not a separate culture, however, but is part of one widely spread Baden-Ezero culture united by a standard repertoire of finds, and similar administrative system and settlement pattern. Originally, the tell of Ezero, as also Karanovo, Veselinovo, Sitagroi, and others, was
occupied by the Karanovo people. The continuity of this remarkable civilization, as we
have seen in chapters 2 and 3, is well attested for almost two thousand years, c.
6000-4200 BC. Then, as a result of Kurgan Wave No. 1, the continuity of the Karanovo life
was truncated. After a hiatus, a hybrid culture emerged which was an amalgamation of Old
European traditions overlayed with new Kurgan influences. The tell was converted into an
acropolis (citadel). The Early Bronze Age layer of Ezero above the Karanovo tell had a thickness of 3.80 m. In the central section, thirteen building horizons were excavated, all of which are of one cultural tradition beginning in the middle of the 4th and ending in the middle of the 3rd millennium BC. Each horizon yielded rectangular houses built of timber uprights interspersed with latticed branches and covered with a thin layer of clay daub. Some structures of lighter construction built of timber posts hardly survived although their ground plans are traced from postholes. From nearly fifty houses uncovered, twenty had apsidal ends which appeared in the earliest horizon (Horizon XIII) and continued through the duration of this culture. Larger houses consisted of two rooms, living quarters and a working area, having ovens, hearths, platforms, and silo pits for drying and storing grain. The buildings stood in groups, about twenty houses in each horizon, around an open center. This central area had direct access to a corridor-like gate, 1 to 2.5 m wide and 8 m long, which was connected with the settlement's fortification. The hill was surrounded by two stone walls. The inner wall was 80 m in diameter, 1.5 to 1 m thick, built of large undressed stones, 60 to 80 cm in size, while the outer was double in size. Such Cyclopean walls of larger boulders were strengthened with smaller stones at the bottom and glued with clay. This acropolis, which could have held up to two hundred people, must have served as a fortress for the small, unprotected villages around it. Who lived on this hill ? The chieftain with his council of war leaders, the craftsmen and their families? Unfortunately we do not know, although the pattern appears to be proto-typical of the later Bronze Age Mycenaean acropolises. (Given the spread of the Baden-Ezero culture, and accepting its genetical connection with the Mycenaean culture, the Old Europe Mycenaean culture occupied half of the central Europe) ![]() Tools and Weapons The acropolis was the center of many activities including the manufacture of tools and weapons of stone, bone, antler, copper, and bronze, typical throughout the Baden-Ezero culture. Flint was obtained from the Rhodope Mountains while other stones were gathered from south and north of Ezero. Stone artifacts include pestles, hammers, polishers, grinding stones, querns (grinders), axes, and chisels, also globular and cylindrical mace-heads and ritual battle-axes. Bone and antler tools were found by the hundreds, mostly awls, chisels, polishers, digging sticks, hoes (some of which were possibly used as plowshares), axes, and hammer-axes. (FIGURE 10-24) Metal artifacts were not abundant since the total number from all horizons was 37 (awls, knives or knife-daggers, chisels, needles, a.o.). (FIGURE 10-25) In addition, three stone molds for casting axes were discovered which belong to the later phases of the Ezero sequence. In the earliest horizons, awls were made of pure copper or arsenical copper, while in later horizons the percentage of arsenic was much higher suggesting progress in metal work. Pottery Jugs, jars, bowls, and cups with high handles were of surprisingly similar forms all over the Baden-Ezero area. Only a close interaction between the various districts, the mobility of the people, and the same social structure could result in such a uniformity of products. From the onset of this culture, there was an overall decline in the quality of pottery which, in shape, make, and decoration, cannot be compared with the exquisite Karanovo VI pottery. Although the Baden-Ezero ceramics absorbed certain elements of the local cultures, this in no way represents a continuity of the Vinca or Karanovo. If the channeling technique for decoration was used on early Baden, Ezero, and Sitagroi IV bowls, or if chevrons or zigzag designs occasionally appeared on vases, this only shows that there were local elements in the population, probably female, that continued to apply long-used motifs from memory. The main set of prestige pottery types is a group of vessels concerned with communal
eating and drinking — jug, cup, dipper, bowl — which is a distinctive feature of elite
burials. In later phases of the Bronze Age such drinking vessels were either made of
metal or were imitated in clay. No doubt a variety of intoxicating drinks were used.
Thus, the complex of drinking vessels used primarily by males, by the male entourage of
the ruler or by his warriors, replaced the symbolically decorated libation vessels or
water containers used by women in temples.
381 The Globular Amphora Culture in the Northern European Plain Between Central Germany and East Romania The Globular Amphora culture emerged on the northern European plain and north of the Carpathians — the present territories of central Germany, Poland, Volynia, Podolia, and Moldavia — in the middle of the 4th millennium BC.86 (Table 31) It is known from hundreds of graves and from a few seasonal camps on sand dunes, small villages, and hilltop sites. The Globular Amphora culture was preceded by the Funnel-necked Beaker culture (TRB) and by the Cucuteni in the western Ukraine and Romania. In spite of a different substratum, the Globular Amphora culture was remarkably uniform. There is similarity between the burial rites of the Globular Amphora people and those of the Kurgans of the Maikop culture in the North Pontic region. Both used mortuary houses built of stone slabs and practiced the ritual burial of horses, cattle, and dogs, as well as human sacrifice in connection with funeral rites honoring high-ranking males. (FIGURES 10-26, 10-29) The typical vessel for which the culture is named is an amphora with a flat or rounded
base (FIGURE 10-27), with or without two or four small handles above the shoulder for
suspension. Other vases that accompanied the dead include a globular pot [a tureen or
wide-mouthed beaker) and occasionally a cup. (FIGURES 10-28A, B) The clay was tempered
with crushed shells and some sand or vegetable matter. In shape and construction, this
pottery, particularly that from Volynia and Poland, is much the same as that from
Mikhailovka I sites. The cord-impressed, incised, or stabbed decoration is restricted to
the neck and shoulder.
Male Graves with Sacrificed Humans and Animals A classed social structure and the dominant position of men is demonstrated by richly equipped graves that contained astounding numbers of sacrificed human beings and animals. The chief adult male occupied the central position in the stone cist and was accompanied into the afterlife by family members, servants, oxen, horses, and dogs as well as boars and other game animals. These extraordinary burials contained from three to ten human skeletons buried at the same time. The sex, age, and the position of the skeletons suggest that one or more young children, an adult female, and one or two attendants were put to death to accompany their father, husband, or master to the other world. The important male skeleton is usually found at the end of the cist grave, while two or more other individuals, perhaps immediate family members, are beside him in the same room or are grouped at the opposite end. The other escorts are within the porch or in a smaller room of the mortuary house. 87
At Klementowice, eastern Poland, the male skeleton in the center of the north end of the stone cist was equipped with as many as thirty-five artifacts including thirteen vases, four flint axes, three daggers of boar tusk, and the jawbone of a boar. A young woman, seated upright in the southern end of the cist, was equipped with only a small amphora, while the bones of an old man and of a headless individual were in the southeastern corner of the cist. 88 Generally, rich male graves contain only one female skeleton and one or two of children. One exceptional instance is the cist grave at Voytsekhivka in Volynia, containing a male skeleton flanked by two women and four children, with a young man and a woman at his feet. 89 (FIGURE 10-29) In a number of cases, skeletal remains of adult males and children are found in separate stone cists together with sacrificed animals. The sacrificed human beings are headless or without legs, or are represented by heads alone. Often a double-pointed bone spear is found among the bones, suggesting the means of their death. At many Polish sites, a draft team of two oxen is buried near a cist with a human skeleton, as in the Baden complex (see fig. 10-26). They were laid sidewise, legs contracted, foreheads almost touching as if buried yoked, with bone disks in a star design around their necks. Near one such pair at Pikutkowo, central Poland, were two clay drums in a large dish. Other animal graves contained only cows or horses, or a combination including cows, pigs or boars, a stag, a fox, and a chamois. Pits filled with black-stained earth, perhaps remains of blood, have been noted at the animal burials. The religious and social traditions of the Globular Amphora culture demonstrate that the grave structure was unrelated to that of the TRB culture. TRB graves contain extended burials arranged in long-barrows or megalithic passage graves which occasionally underlie Globular Amphora graves. Sun Symbolism and the Quest for Amber The extension of Globular Amphora sites into the area of the Nemunas and Narva cultures is explained by their quest for amber to which they attached great ideological importance. Its golden hue was symbolically significant to these sun-worshiping people, and amber discs, plain or with carved solar designs (star or cross patterns), are found in important male graves. 90 The largest amber sun disc, 10 cm in diameter (FIGURE 10-30) was discovered in a rich cist grave at Ivanne, near Rovno, northern Ukraine, some 600 km from the amber source area in East Prussia or Lithuania. 91 On it, an engraved scene shows schematic human figures holding a large bow with upraised arms. A schematic animal, possibly a horse, is separated by two dashes from the group of human figures. This engraving is closely related in style to those on Crimean stone-cist walls and North Pontic stelae.
Economy, Tools, and Weapons The Globular Amphora people were seminomadic herders living in small groups who practiced a limited seasonal movement documented by seasonal settlements of two or three rectangular semisubterranean huts, or a singular above-ground timber house. (FIGURE 10-31) Hill forts and permanent settlements constituted the cultural focus for a tribe or clan. Agricultural tools, generally quern (grinder) stones, stone hoes, and wooden plowshares, indicate farming. The evidence of domesticated plants comes from impressions of barley, wheat, and pulses found in clay daub. Finds of carbonized acorns indicate their use either for human consumption or as fodder for swine. Agriculture, however, seems to have been only supplementary to an essentially stock breeding economy in which cattle were of paramount importance. They also bred pigs, horses, dogs, sheep, and goats and hunted, fished, and gathered wild plants. Frequently present in their grave goods are two major wood-working tools: a trapezoidal flint axe, quadrangular in cross-section, and a flint chisel. These stone tools are replicates of a pair of metal tools, which in the west were very scarce. Flint, therefore, was universally cherished and the industry was intensive. At the impressive flint mine at Krzemionki in the Upper Vistula area at Opatow, some thousand shafts bear witness to the quantities of banded flint that were removed. 91 For the Globular Amphora people, this was the primary choice for the axes and chisels. Other tools and weapons — arrowheads, points, knives, and scrapers — were made of gray or chocolate flint from other sources. Bone was used for awls and needles as well as for ornaments. Composite bows, known from engravings on stone stelae (see fig. 10-46),
on walls of stone cist graves (Gohlitzsh, River Saale basin in central Germany), and from
actual finds of burnt bows laid in graves (cf. grave at Bozejewice at Strzelno in western
Poland) were made of wood, most likely of ash, as supported by .
93 The composite bow evidenced from around the end of the 4th millennium BC,
between central Germany and the Lower Dnieper, has close analogies in central Asia,
particularly in the Siberian-Mongolian steppe. (Leaving aside
the unattested ash and “linguistic evidence”, the unaddressed by the Prof. Marija
Gimbutas history of the composite bow and its travel to Siberia and Far East, and not the
West, is consistent with the conclusion that the N.Pontic Pit Gravers were spreading in a
pendulum motion, with reciprocal flows carrying innovations across great distances. The
design of the composite bow could not be a secret, it is too obvious, and the secrets of
its manufacture could not be contained, because every pastoral family was producing them
for their own use; but the intricacies of its manufacture that make a difference between
an indigenous quality and a knockoff reserved its manufacture to the steppe nomads, and
made it a valuable trade commodity between the nomadic Türkic horse breeders and
agricultural Indo-Europeans) Physical Type of Population The physical type of this population is not yet satisfactorily known. In Romania, only seven skeletons have been examined which were characterized by Olga Necrasov as "attenuated proto-Europid with some brachylization.” 94 The broad-headed skulls from the stone-cist graves in western Ukraine are very similar to those from Romanian Moldavia, and the skulls from Poland are also broad-headed. Multivariate comparisons made between seventeen male skulls from central Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Poland by Ilse Schwidetzky has shown affinities with the substratum TRB population. Although the number of individuals examined is still very small, it is interesting to note that Schwidetzky sees a certain gradation within the Globular Amphora population in which breadth measurements decrease from east to west. The eastern groups are very similar to the Kurgan type, while the western resemble the central German TRB people. 95 We have yet to discover the amount of population influx and how much crossing took place between various types. Nevertheless, it is apparent that the emergence of the Globular Amphora culture in the north European plain is crucial to an understanding of the Indo-Europeanization of this part of Europe. We must bear in mind that the fundamental social, religious, and economic components of the Globular Amphora culture link it to the North Pontic area. The fact that the Globular Amphora culture is more homogeneous than the Baden suggests that if these people were indeed Indo-European speakers, they completely succeeded in subverting the indigenous population or in converting them to their own creeds, customs, and language.
The Third Wave, c. 3000 BC: The Intrusion of the N.Pontic “Pit Grave” Kurgans into East-Central Europe and Their Impact The Kurgan Wave No. 3, c. 3000 BC, was a massive infiltration that caused drastic changes in the ethnic configurations of Europe. (FIGURE 10-32) Population shirts to western, northern, and northeastern Europe, as well as to the Adriatic region and Greece, account for the final Indo-Europeanization (I.e. Kurganization) of Europe. Late Pit Grave Graves in Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Eastern Hungary The third Kurgan thrust is identified by hundreds of graves in Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia (south Banat), and eastern Hungary, which are identical to Late Yamna (Pit Grave) burials in the Lower Dnieper, the Lower Don, and Lower Volga basins. 96 Diagnostic features are: male burials in deep pits; timber-hut construction within the grave roofed with oak or birch beams; floor covering of wood mats, bast, or ashes; grave walls hung with rugs or other textiles; predominantly western orientation of the dead; and supine skeletal position with contracted legs (lateral in later graves). (FIGURES 10-33, 10-34) Ochre was scattered with the dead. Round and low kurgans, usually no higher than one meter, were surrounded by stone rings or ditches. Stone cists, orthostats, and stelae, common in the North Pontic Mikhailovka I complex, are not characteristic of Pit Grave architecture. Graves were poorly equipped, but important males were furnished with a hammerhead pin of bone or copper, a round copper plate, spiral hair rings or earrings of silver or copper, cord-impressed and stabbed beakers, chains or necklaces of copper wire tubes and canine teeth, flint arrowheads, tanged daggers of arsenic copper or flint, awls and flat axes of stone or copper. Evidence abounds for the sacrifice of human beings and animals. Among the animals sacrificed were horses, cattle, sheep, goats, deer, boar, and dogs (see cult and sacrifice above).
385
Chronology One of the most informative monuments north of the Black Sea is the Mikhailovka hill fort in the Lower Dnieper region, with its three layers of cultural deposits. The lower layer, Mikhailovka I, which belongs to the early Maikop culture, was overlain, after a hiatus, by two layers of the Pit Grave culture, Mikhailovka II and III. 97 Fortifications of stone walls, 2, m high, belong to Mikhailovka III. Bronze and flint daggers (FIGURE 10-35) and tall beakers with rounded bases, decorated with horizontal cord impressions, comb-stamped herringbone design, and cord-impressed or incised hanging striated triangles are typical of the Pit Grave layers. In addition to beakers, there are bowls, dishes, and three- or four-legged braziers. This type of pottery is also found in the Pit Grave graves of the Lower Volga (The legged braziers are one more common trait notable among the European and Far-Eastern Kurganians). In Moldavia and the western Ukraine, Wave No. 3 barrows are stratigraphically situated above the Usatovo-Foltesti settlements and graves. Most of the calibrated radiocarbon dates for the Pit Grave graves west of the Black Sea range shortly after 3000 BC. (TABLE 32) Pit Grave graves from the Lower Dnieper, Don, and Lower Volga steppe date from the same time and also from a later period. A number of earlier Pit Grave radiocarbon dates from the Ukraine and southern Russia are given for comparison in table 33. The chronological link is obvious.
Table 10-33 shows extent of Baden-Ezero culture (Pereschepino area must have been a cemetery site, like the site the Scythians called “Gerra”, i.e. “Land”. In addition to the oldest Pit Grave kurgans, Pereschepino also contained the youngest royal kurgan of the Bulgarian Khan Kurbat [aka Kubrat], buried there at ca. 660 AD) Physical Type of Population Eighty skeletons from Pit Grave graves have been examined in Romania alone, a sufficient number for some conclusions about the physical type. The Pit Grave people in Romania were tall statured and strongly built, with predominantly dolichocephalic skulls, medium cranial height and rounded occipital, with variable facial mass, pronounced nose, and a robust mandible. 98 This type corresponds to that of the Pit Grave graves in the Ukraine and south Russia. 99 (This description, except for robust mandible, completely disassociates the Later Pit Gravers of Romania and N.Pontic from the people described for Kvalynsk and Early Pit Gravers. They must have obtained their way of life and culture by some form of immaculate conception, without engaging in sexual intercourse required to propagate genes. However, on their way to the east they regained back their robustness and “eastern steppe type” traits, used to link re-population of the Central Asia with the N.Pontic Late Pit Gravers) The Impact on the Balkans and Greece: The Vucedol Shift Northwest and South The Vucedol shift from its core area into the peripheries caused changes in the whole Balkan peninsula, as well as in central Europe. Vucedol sites virtually disappeared from Hungary and the Danube lands in Yugoslavia. The migration to the northwest and south must have started c. 3000-2800 BC and was obviously connected with the Pit Grave movement from the east. In central and northwestern Bohemia, the new settlers established a series of hilltop villages and are known under the name “Rivnac”, so called after a hilltop site nine kilometers northwest of Prague, excavated in 1882-84. 100 The major source of information derives from the hilltop village at Homolka northeast of Kladno in central Bohemia. 101 Dalmatia, western Bosnia, and Albania were reached from the eastern Alpine region. Along
the Sana River in western Bosnia, the Vucedol people occupied areas not previously
inhabited. Their settlements in the newly acquired lands consisted of naturally protected
hill forts and caves, usually difficult to access. 102 Cemeteries of
kurgans, including stone cists, were discovered at the Cetina River and at Rumen near Sinj near the Adriatic
coast. 103 At Mala Gruda, Tivat, a royal tomb in a
kurgan came to light equipped with a
silver axe, a gold dagger of Early Helladic II (Bronze Age Greece) type (2900-2500 BC), gold rings, copper
plate, and Vucedol vases.104 (FIGURE 10-36) This tumulus was nearly 4 m high and 30 m across. At the base was a round platform built of river pebbles, and the central grave, a
mortuary house built of stone slabs, was lowered into the ground. The male skeleton was
in a contracted position with a silver axe and gold dagger deposited at his waist, with
five gold rings and a copper plate at his head. A beaker and a conical dish stood at his
feet. The tomb architecture and burial rites at Mala Gruda are the same as those of the
North Pontic Maikop culture. Mala Gruda is located halfway between northwestern
Yugoslavia and western Greece, where kurgans of the same tradition also emerged in the early 3rd millennium BC.
The migration of the Vucedol south to the mountainous regions and to the inhospitable and stony Dalmatian coast cannot be explained as a normal territorial extension occasioned by a population increase. This was caused by the intrusion of Pit Grave people into Yugoslavia and Hungary. There was a conspicuous occupation of a series of caves, both on the continent (Hrustovaca, Dabar Pecina, Zelena Pecina in Dalmatia and Hercegovina) and on the Adriatic islands (Grapceva Spilja on the island of Hvar, Jamina Sredi on Cres, Vela Spilja on Korcula). Ample evidence from the islands of Leucas and the northwestern Peloponnese suggests that the Kurgans arriving in Greece at the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC, perhaps via Albania and the Adriatic, were descendants of the Indo-Europeanized (Kurganized) east-central Europeans, i.e., the Baden-Vucedol people.
The cemetery of Steno on the island of Leucas, consisting of 33 kurgans, is a good
example of the changed customs in Greece. 105 These
kurgans belong to several phases,
dating from the Early Helladic (Bronze Age Greece) II and III, c. 2900-2250 BC, and the buried chieftains and
warriors were probably members of the dynasty ruling the island. The earliest and largest
kurgan, encircled by a stone retaining wall, stood apart from the others (FIGURE 10-37,
2); its mortuary chamber was exceptionally large and well made, with walls of large round
stones. This contained the skeletons of a man and a woman and pieces of a sheep and a
lamb amid ash in the soil which suggest the remains of a funerary feast. Other early kurgans contained inhumation graves in shafts covered by stone slabs, under a cairn of stones and a pile of earth. In some, stone cists had been inserted into the kurgan. This type of grave architecture and burial practice go back to the Maikop traditions which were diffused into east-central Europe by Kurgan Wave No. 2. Analogies are seen in the splendid kurgans northwest of the Black Sea (see fig. 10-10), the Tarnava kurgans in northwestern Bulgaria (see fig. 10-11), and the Belotic kurgans in Serbia. Other close parallels are in Albania 106 and Dalmatia.107 The Early Helladic (Bronze Age Greece) II date of the early or R group of the Steno kurgans is indicated by bird-shaped vases (“sauce boats”), typical of Early Helladic II. Triangular copper dagger blades, with or without the mid-rib and with two rivet holes and halberds, are known from the engravings on Valcamonica stelae (see figs. 10-41, 10-42, 10-43). Also found were slotted spearheads and poignards (dagger). But the most prestigious weapon of the elite class was the dagger which was a routine accoutrement of leading males (usually held in the right hand) found in all the rich kurgans. (FIGURE 10-37.2) Kurgans on round stone platforms surrounded by stone rings, as well as apsidal houses, are also reported from the end of the Early Helladic (Bronze Age Greece) period at Olympia and were continuous in the later, Middle Helladic period. Many other kurgans from the western Peloponnese are reported as Early Helladic III or Middle Helladic, i.e., the second half of the 3rd to the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC. 108 Thus, in the middle and late 3rd millennium BC, the Kurgan tradition seems already to have been firmly established. A series of destroyed Early Helladic II sites in the Argolid speaks for a gruesome takeover. Destruction is evidenced at Lema, Tiryns, Asine, Zygouries, and Aghios Kosmas. At Lerna, the burned house of Tiles was not rebuilt, apsidal structures appeared, and the settlement plan changed. 109 The takeover in Greece was apparently analogous to that of east-central Europe which entailed a transformation of the basic social structure and administrative system by the establishment of a ruling class in hill forts. A study of the physical types of the population shows that the Kurgan warrior groups were not massive in numbers and did not eradicate the local inhabitants. 110 They came in small migrating bands and established themselves forcefully as a small ruling elite.
The Impact on Western Europe: The Bell Beaker culture of western Europe which diffused between 2500 and 2100 BC between central Europe, the British Isles, and the Iberian Peninsula, could not have arisen in a vacuum. The mobile horse-riding and warrior people who buried their dead in Pit Grave type kurgans certainly could not have developed out of any west European culture. We must ask what sort of ecology and ideology created these people, and where are the roots of the specific Bell Beaker equipment and their burial rites. In my view, the Bell Beaker cultural elements derive from Vucedol and Kurgan (Late Pit Grave) traditions.
The specific correspondence between the Pit Grave, Late Vucedol, and Bell Beaker complexes is visible in burial rites which include grave pits under round kurgans, the coexistence of cremation and inhumation rites, and the construction of mortuary houses. (FIGURE 10-38) In armaments we see tanged or riveted triangular daggers made of arsenic copper, spear points of arsenic copper and flint, concave-based or tanged triangular arrowheads of flint, and arrow straighteners. In ornaments there are necklaces of canine teeth, copper tubes, or bird bones; boar tusks; and crescent-shaped pendants resembling breast plates. 111 In solar symbolism we find sun or star motifs excised and white encrusted on the inside of braziers, or incised on bone or amber button-shaped beads. Techniques of ceramic decoration include stamping or gouging in zoned metopes, encrustation with white paste of delicate geometric motifs, zigzags, dashes, nets, lozenges, and dots or circles (a Baden-Kostolac-Vucedol tradition).
Certain ceramic forms placed in graves, such as braziers and beakers, are from the Kurgan tradition. The Bell Beaker people, wherever they spread, continued the traditional ceramic art connected with their faith (As much as the modern population of Ukraine, which went from Tengriism to Islam to a flash with Judaism to Orthodox Christianity, preserved their faith in their ceramics. The ceramics decoration practically have not changed until the industry was abandoned in the mid of 20th c.). Only the ritual importance of their uniquely beautiful stereotyped beakers could have motivated their production for hundreds of years in lands far from the homeland. The correspondences linking the Bell Beaker and Pit Grave with the Vucedol — in armament, costume, funeral rites, beliefs in life after death, and in symbolism — are precisely the most significant and revealing. It is very likely that the Bell Beaker complex is an amalgam of and Pit Grave traditions formed after the incursion of the Pit Grave people (i.e. Pit Grave wave 3 people, vs. symbiont Pit Grave wave 2 people of Vucedol) into the milieu of the Vucedol culture, i.e., in the course of 300 to 400 years after 3000-2900 BC.
Horse-Riding Warriors and Pastoralists Horse bones in a series of sites provide a clue to the mobility of the Bell Beaker people. Analysis of animal bones from the sites at Budapest (Czepel Hollandiut and Czepel-Haros) have shown that the horse was the foremost species of the domestic fauna, constituting more than 60 percent of the total animal bones. 112 This suggests a large-scale domestication of the horse in the Carpathian basin, Bell Beaker migrations were carried out on horseback from central Europe as far as Spain (where horse bones have also been found in Bell Beaker contexts). 113 The horse also played a significant role in religion, as can be seen from the remains of the horse sacrifice where skulls are found in cremation graves (see cult and sacrifice above).
The Bell Beaker people were primarily herders of domestic animals since cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, and dog bones consistently occur in their habitation sites. House remains are scarce, but several surface structures with stake walls daubed with clay (the largest measuring 6 by 10 m) are reported from Czechoslovakia. 114 Local metallurgy is evidenced by sandstone molds for daggers.
Kurgan Type Burials The striking similarity of burial practices ties the Bell Beaker complex to the Kurgan (Late Pit Grave) tradition. Individual burials were in pit-built mortuary houses, variously constructed, some with four posts in the corners, sometimes roofed, sometimes not, or stone lined. A ditch surrounded the central grave in which several rows of stakes were set (as shown in the reconstruction of the burial at Smolin in Moravia), 115 which was then covered by an earthen barrow. Individuals lay in a crouched position facing the rising sun. A great number of half-burned or dismembered child burials in cemeteries may imply sacrifice, not simple burial. The practice of cremation was inherited from the Vucedol culture; in Hungary, cremation burials constitute nearly 90 percent of all Bell Beaker burials (with variations, this description applies to most of the Eurasian Türkic people of the historical times, repeated over again by all archeologists who excavated kurgan burials of the known Türkic ethnoses, form Huns to modern Altaians). The quantitative analysis of grave material indicates that the Bell Beaker people had a social composition approximating a ranked society. 116 Three strata are represented: warriors (or rulers), craftsmen, and common folk (peasants). The richest graves are those of mature males. Grave goods indicating status are items such as earrings, button-shaped beads of amber, jet, and gold, belt rings, and weapons (A hybrid of primitive Marxism with an extract from Avesta would allow to shape any archeology into this kind of social nonsense). Chronology The great majority of Bell Beaker radiocarbon dates from western Europe cluster between the 25th and 21st centuries BC, while a few precede the middle of the 3rd millennium BC. The earliest date comes from the habitation pit of the Czepel Hollandiut site at Budapest. 117 (TABLE 34) The Vinkovci-Samogyvdr Culture: Successors of the Vucedol and Kurgan (Late Pit Grave) in the Middle Danube Basin The culture that succeeds Vucedol and Pit Grave in Yugoslavia and Hungary is known under two names: Vinkovci and Samogyvar. The first comes from the excavation of a settlement at Trznica near Vinkovci in Srem, northern Yugoslavia, 118 the latter from an excavation at the site of Samogyvar in southwestern Hungary. 119 Nearly 150 sites have been excavated or recorded in the last twenty years: hill forts, kurgans, and pits containing pottery (the sole remains of habitation sites). The stratigraphy from these excavations has shown that this culture superseded the late Vucedol culture. One of the best stratigraphies was uncovered in a settlement located on a high plateau at Pecina near Vrdnik, Srem. There, the Vinkovci pits were found dug into the late Vucedol cultural layer and the latter was above the Baden-Kostolac layer. 120 The distribution of Vinkovci-Samogyvar sites covers western Hungary north up to Slovakia, western Romania, Slavonia, Srem, western Serbia, Bosnia down to Montenegro, and the Morava River basin of central Yugoslavia down to the Svetozarevo and Krusevac region. (FIGURE 10-39) So far, archeologists have not linked the Vinkovci-Samogyvar culture with the Bell Beaker, in spite of the identity of burial rites, settlement type, and ceramics. There is hardly any reason to treat these groups as separate cultures. The repertoire of ceramic forms is inherited from the preceding late Vucedol-Mako culture of Yugoslavia and Hungary. In western Hungary and western Yugoslavia, the Vinkovci-Samogyvar traditions continued
into the 2nd millennium BC, to be typified by hill forts and by the absence of tells,
eventually developing into the “Encrusted Pottery Culture” of western Hungary and
northwestern Yugoslavia, and the “Gradina culture” of Bosnia and Dalmatia (from gradina,
meaning “hill forts”).
The Corded Pottery Culture of Central Europe and Its Expansion Northwest and Northeast The Corded Pottery (also called Battle Axe) complex is known not only from the north-central European plain in Germany and Poland but also from Holland, Denmark, southern Sweden, southern Norway, and the East Baltic countries as far as southern Finland in the northeast; the easternmost branch (Fatiyanovo) reached the Upper Volga basin in central Russia (see fig.10-32). According to radiocarbon dates, expansion into northwestern and northeastern Europe, territories previously occupied by TRB, Nemunas, Narva, and Volosovo cultures, took place before the middle of the 3rd millennium BC. Migration on so large a scale seems to have been a repercussion of a new push from the east — Kurgan Wave No. 3. In the earliest phase, grave equipment throughout this area exhibits features closely related to that of central Europe. Characteristic constituents are a beaker with horizontal cord impressions around the neck, a globular amphora with a radial pattern over the shoulder, a flint axe, a chisel, a blade or flake, and a stone battle axe (Type A). 121 (FIGURE 10-40) The early phase is therefore called the “Common European Horizon.” Burial in timber or stone mortuary houses under a low earthen kurgan is universal. The striking uniformity in all areas where Corded Pottery graves are found is a strong argument for a more or less simultaneous dispersion. Social Inequality and the Privileged Position of Males in Northwestern and Northeastern Europe The social structure of the early Corded Pottery people is related to that of both the Globular Amphora and the Pit Grave of the Dnieper-Volga steppe. The kurgans of the early phase contain only male skeletons and the central grave with mortuary pit-house structure probably honored a privileged individual. Apart from the primary burial, there are usually other graves dug into the earthen mounds that are close in time to that of the primary grave, and point to the existence of at least two social categories. It is of interest that the dug-in graves outnumber the central sub-barrow graves. The lower social stratum is also represented by males. Not much is known about the burial of women and children in this period. Corded Pottery graves of the later period, however, show a normal constituency of females and juveniles.
Physical Type Who were the Corded Pottery people? Do they represent an intrusion of a new Kurgan (i.e., Pit Grave) people from the east? Or does this period simply represent a later phase of the Globular Amphora complex, pushed to the north and northeast by the influx of the Pit Grave people? The latter seems likely. Both the Globular Amphora and Corded Pottery complexes contain components of the local TRB substratum and the Pontic steppe element. The TRB component is predominant in the physical type of the Corded Pottery population of Germany and Czechoslovakia, with the exception of some individuals who are considered to be of the steppe type. 122 Analysis of the skeletal material from Poland shows a steppe origin. 123 Elsewhere the bulk of the population were indigenous remnants of the Old Europeans. (This mysterious blend of Kurgan waves 1 and 2 “steppe type”, European brachycranial eastern “steppe type” or Mediterranean and proto-Europids=proto-Caucasians, i.e. the “robust” Cro-Magnon type? Citation from I.Schwidetzky, 1980, "Influence Of Steppe People Based On Physical Anthropological Data": "the physique of Kurgan people (Konduktorova 1973; Kruts 1969, Zinevich 1967 et al.): their skulls are long and broad, the face broad, the stature rather high; the robusticity of the bones is the main character. This Kurgan type is called by many physical anthropologists Proto-European (= Cromagnoid); it is found in many other European populations too, but not so frequently in the South and West as in the East. ...a certain facial flatness of some individuals seem to reflect also "eastern relations" (Nemeskéri: 1951, 70); also Toth (1958, 20) ... supposes a certain eastern influx." These works of 1951-1980 do not consider associated DNA) Chronology The Corded Pottery culture has two main periods. During the first, c. 3000-2600 BC, the Common European Horizon, the practice of nomadic movement and the short occupation of any one spot have left very few preserved habitation sites. The simultaneous existence of the nomadic Corded Pottery pastoralists and the indigenous agriculturalists has been demonstrated by studies of Corded Pottery sites in southern Poland. The second period is characterized by the crystallization of local units. A number of radiocarbon dates from various parts of this culture fix this period between 2,600-2200 BC. (TABLE 35) The Proto-Indo-European Economic and Social Tradition The proto-Indo-European (PIE) culture, as reconstructed on the basis of comparative Indo-European linguistics and mythology and supported by early historic records, coincides well with archeological data. In this section I shall touch upon the linguistic and mythological evidence relevant to the question of identity between the Kurgan and proto-Indo-European traditions. Languages, like cultures, act as living organisms: they constantly change and live through periods of convergence and divergence. Although we cannot go back much further than Volga Neolithic and Eneolithic of the 6th and 5th millennia BC, we can reconstruct certain characteristics of this culture that are in agreement with linguistic and mythological elements. The period around 5000-4500 BC is marked by incessantly growing mobility and trade. I therefore assume the possibility of linguistic consolidation in process at this period, just before the proto-Indo-European outburst into Europe. The hypothetical PIE language does not reflect preagricultural conditions. As linguistically reconstructed, domesticated animals (including the horse), mobility, and the classed patriarchal society, are among the most characteristic phenomena of the PIE culture. The Kurgan culture of the 5th millennium BC in the Volga forest-steppe and steppe and its newly acquired territory north of the Black Sea agrees with much that is reconstructed on a linguistic basis as PIE. Domesticated Animals Domesticated animals played a paramount role in the PIE culture as shown by the common
names for sheep (*owis), cattle (*gwows), steer (*(s)tauro), pig (*sus and *porkos),
horse (ekwo-ekwa), goat (*aigis, os), and dog (*kwon-kun-) in most of the Indo-European
languages. There is another name for “cows and sheep”: *peku(s): Latin pecus,
Old Indic pasu, Baltic peku. Since this word has a family of related words connected with
the meaning “fleece,” “hair,” and “to comb” (Greek pekos, “fleece”; Old High German
fahs, "skin hair”; Lathi pectere, “to comb”), it is assumed that peku originally connoted a
woolly animal, probably a sheep, and that there was a stage when only sheep were
domesticated and the other animals were not. The words for wool and weaving are clearly
PIE (Old Church Slavic vluna, Lithuanian vilna, German Wolle, Old
Indic wina; German weben, “weave,” Old Indic vabh-) and may date back to the early phase of animal
domestication. Cattle must have been the treasured possession of a family, clan, or tribe and were used in exchange, the trend also attested by words and early historic records. In Sanskrit, the term for lord means “lord of cattle.” The earliest written sources, the Iliad and the Rigveda, speak of how a bride or weapons are obtained in exchange for cattle. Cattle (pecus) were the main possession that had the meaning of our word money. Hence, the Latin name for money, pecunia. This role of cattle continued up to the 20th century (as dowry for instance, in rural areas). Activities associated with cattle in Indo-European mythic and epic literature very clearly illustrate the importance of cattle raiding. The growth of private ownership derived a powerful impetus from the domestication of cattle. The name for the domesticated horse is preserved as Latin equos, Gothic aihva-, Lithuanian asva. The PIE form is reconstructed as *ekwos or *ekwa. Comparative Indo-European mythological research indicates the unquestionably prime role of the horse (particularly the white horse) as a sacred and sacrificial animal, the incarnation of divine power of the God of the Shining Sky. Archeology supports the linguistic and mythological evidence for an early date of horse domestication, probably no later than the end of the 6th millennium BC. The horse was a sacrificial and riding animal and as such was used in warfare from at least the middle of the 5th millennium BC. The earliest warriors were equipped with spear points, daggers, bows and arrows, and were able to shoot from horseback much like the historic Indo-Europeans, Scythians, Sarmatians, and others. In cult, the horse as a divine and sacrificial animal is attested as early as its known use for riding. Metallurgy Linguistics has failed to reconstruct a common word for metallurgy. This should not be surprising since the early Kurgans (Kurgan I) did not have this technology. Copper items were introduced to them by the Old Europeans through barter with the Cucutenians. Metallurgy was acquired considerably later, in the second half of the 4th millennium BC from Transcaucasia when it was transmitted north of the Black Sea, and with Wave No. 2 to east-central Europe. Weapons The following words can be reconstructed from original Indo-European terms for weapons. 124 *(H)nsi, a cutting and slashing weapon, “sword,” originally a flint knife or dagger (Germanic xsaxsaz “sword” often substitutes for “knife”); Old Indic asi-, Lat. ensis (Türkic gücü, Rumanian kucit [c = ts], alt. Türkic kılıç = kılıch, Old Türkic kingirak => Greek akinak => Chinese ge) *keru, “spearhead,” “blade,” or some sort of casting weapon (Vedic saru- meant “dart,” “arrow,” or “spear”; Germanic cognate is *xeruz) *Eengh-es-u, “spear,” thrusting weapon; and *ghai-so-s, “casting spear,” “a javelin” (the source of Old Irish gae and Proto Germanic *zaizas, Old Indic hesas, “missile”) *taqso-m, “bow”; Greek tokson, M Persian taxs, Latin taxus (Germanic forms for are cognates of Türkic: Türkic bük- “bend”, bükle- “lay down by bending”, bükir “hunchback; bent”, Turkish iğri büğrü “curve”, böğür “side”, and in Germanic: Old English bäc, Modern English bow “bow weapon, to bow, to bend”, back “back”, German bogen “bow weapon, to bow, bend, arch, vault”, biegen “to bend, to arch”, bug “a bend; a joint”, bücken “to bend”, bückel “hump; back”, Old High German buogen “to bend”, Slavic bok “side”. The M Persian is useless without detail etymology, much of its vocabulary is non-IE borrowings. The Türkic “bow weapon” is jaj, yay) *isu- arrow(head) (Türkic oq/uq, aka ok/uk) *gwiH, “bowstring” (Old Indic jya, Avestan jya, Lith. gija “thread,” “sinew”) (All cognates or forms of Türkic “bow weapon” jaj, yay, aja/əja) *Aek-on, “slingstone” *Aek-mon-, “stone hammer” These words support an early use of weapons which is in agreement with archeological evidence (see figs. 10-2, 10-4, 10-7, 10-35, 10-41, 10-42, 10-43, 10-45, 10-46) (and totally irrelevant for the author's cause, because 120,000 years ago the hunter-gatherers already had weapons and their names, so what?). Vehicles Mobility is unquestionably a PIE characteristic, since horse riding was the prime means of Kurgan mobility.
The reconstructed PIE form for vehicle (German Wagen, Lithuanian vezimas, Polish woz) is a form with the root *wegh-. Even parts of the vehicle are reconstructible: wheel — *rotha (Lithuanian ratas, German Rad, Old Indic rathah, "chariot,” Latin rota); axis — *ak'sis, lynch *pin (tulis in Lithuanian, Greek, and Germanic); and yoke — yugom (very well attested). The family of the root wegh- is associated with words for lifting, carrying, lever, and sleigh. This may imply that the original “vehicle” was for weight lifting or levering, or was a sledge. Even if it was not a four-wheeled cart in its original form, the proto-Indo-Europeans must have been acquainted with wheeled wagons from Kurgan I times (Attaching proto-Indo-European cart to Kurgans is a slippery slope, without Kurgans the proto-Indo-European cart hangs in thin air, which it should not do, as wheeled transportation appears simultaneously in far-away and patently non-IE places. References to *forms are dubious, the IE Indians were the last ones to get the idea). So far, the earliest evidence for the existence of wheels are miniature clay models of wheels found in Old European settlements (Cucuteni A and Karanovo VI phases) dating from the middle of the 5th millennium BC. No parts of actual vehicles of this period have ever been found. The question as to who first invented the vehicle cannot as yet be solved (Accordingly, the source of the IE borrowings has not been established) The mobility of the Kurgans before their infiltration into Europe was probably similar to
that of the later inhabitants of the steppe — the Scythians, Sarmatians, and others
(Of unnamed “others” we know Guties ~ Guzes, and Tukri ~
Türks, then Zhou with their compatriots Chunwei, Xunyu, Shanrong, Xianyun, and Hunyu
before the Scythians and Sarmatians, all of them horseback riders
who probably had a word for their horseback riding).
Herodotus describes the Scythians as having no permanent structures or crops to defend,
free to move about with their wagons, their possessions, and their livestock, and able to
elude an enemy or to shoot at him from horseback whenever they chose. Indeed, it was easy
for the Kurgans to burn their pit dwellings and set out for the next territory. Social Structure The PIE culture, as shown by comparative Indo-European linguistics and historical evidence and supported by archeology, can be described as a patrilineal society under the patriarchal leadership of a warrior chief. Age was the determining factor for leadership by this chief, who may have played an active role only in times of stress when greater group cohesion was necessary. Exogamous marriage occurred between small, mobile patrilocal families, members of a larger clan or tribe. A separate class of priests is unlikely to have been established by the proto period. Females possessed inferior status, elevated only by association with their male relations. The husband's strong rights over his wife is evidenced by epic songs and legal texts. Under the influence of the Indo-European culture, Neolithic women's influence collapsed and they became private property in the new trading and raiding society. (These descriptions totally conflict with the descriptions of the oldest sources, e.g. Herodotus, which were astounded by the egalitarian customs of their Kurgan contemporaries, in contrast with their own sexist customs. This astonishment also applies to the non-IE Etruscans, which only emphasizes the primitive patriarchy of the IE's vs. Kurgans and and other non-IE's. Piling together the mute archeology and voiced historical evidence makes the line of logic both confused and profoundly inaccurate. Kurgans were egalitarian, IE were not.) The evidence for patriliny, patrilocality, and patripotency furnished by proto-Indo-European kinship terminology is excellent. 125 There is general agreement among philologists and linguists that the PIE terms which concern familial and marital relationships describe a system of patrilineal inheritance and post-marital residence. For example, the basic terms that exist for one's parents' generation imply the domination of the male relations: father — *pHte:r; mother — *maHte:r; mother's brother or mother's father — *awyos; and father's brother — *pHtrwos. Common terms for both the maternal and paternal aunts are conspicuously absent. The terms for a person's own generation include; the brother — *bkraHte:r, which comprises a wide range of male peers (who traditionally form a patrilineal group with important ritual and political functions); the sister — *sweso:r which means “own” (“the woman of my clan”); the son- — *swHnws [*swH, “to give birth,” suggesting a strong tie between mother and son); and daughter — *dhwgHte:r (which seems to be related to milking, “to milk” or “milkmaid”). Words also exist for the husband's parents (*swekwHs and *swekwios), the husband's siblings (*gHlows, feminine; “daHywe:r, masculine), in addition to the son's wife (*snwsos) and daughter/sister's husband (*genHi). The widow (*wydh, meaning “to be empty, inadequate”) is recognized as a discrete status, where the widower is not. There is no corresponding similarity of terms for the bride's family. The Indo-European wife would have joined her husband's household where she lived together with his father and brothers. This can further be interpreted as evidence of an exogamous pattern of marriage. (The exogamous conclusion totally conflicts with the historical records, which allow incestuous IE marriage within the family, necessitated by sedentary farming that precludes infinite subdivision of the farmland. In contrast, the Türkic Kurgans are strictly and exaggeratedly exogamous, at times disallowing marriages between lines that are separated by 40+ generations, or more then a millennia in time. Here again, interpretation replaces facts) The proto-Indo-European *pot denotes the male family head, patri potestas, or chief. An additional pair of correspondences, *genH-os/*genH-r provides further evidence of a patriarchal society: *genH-os is used to describe the patrilineal group into which an individual married, while the masculine noun *genH-r refers to the most prominent member of that group. The picture of an Indo-European community leader (*pot or *dompoti) painted by mythological and legal texts appears to be a despotic, and probably polygynous, warrior-patriarch who ruled his family or clan with absolute power over life and death. (This MO may only apply to the sedentary societies; in the mobile societies the escape capabilities are infinite, which necessitates a consensus rule, attested in millennium-old near-parliamentary system of leadership that is superbly documented and preserved to this day in elected Khans, Kagans, Sheikhs, and Aldermen. This consensus structure extends to the state forms, which out of necessity maintain a high degree of autonomy for its constituents, who may at any time vote with their feet and leave a despotic leader) The status of women was clearly inferior. The term for “bride price” derives from *wedh, "to lead” evocative of chattel. It has been suggested that females represent a “positive nuisance” to the stability of a mobile, warlike tribe. (This IE tradition is utterly incompatible with Kurgans, and conflicts with historically attested and widely popularized facts about Kurgans) Linguistic paleontology has provided evidence for the social organization above the immediate family. The *domos (*dreb in western PIE) or house belonging to a single family, also belonged to a small patrilocal extended family, or *weik. Residents of a *weik might further identify themselves as members of a common descent group, the *gen or clan, and chose marriage partners from within their largest ethnic group or tribe, the *teuta. (For Kurgans, this conflicts with historically attested facts) Agriculture and Its Increase in the European Branch In the Kurgan culture of the steppe, agriculture was secondary to a pastoral economy. However, considerable knowledge of agricultural terminology in the European branch of the Indo-Europeans is suggested by lexical studies. It follows that the increase of agriculture is synchronous with a decrease of nomadism after the incursion of the Kurgan (Maikop) people into Europe, and especially into the territories where agriculture was a millennial tradition. Some agriculture was practiced by the proto-Indo-Europeans. There are common names for "grain,” “grinding” and “quern,” “to sow,” and “to cut”; and the word for “hoe”, mat(e)ya, is widespread. Of great importance is the preservation of the names for millet (*meli, *melyom, *melya) for a lesser kind of wheat or grass, couch grass, sedge, spelt, rye grass: *puras, os; and for cereal used for fermentation and brewing: “yewos, pl. *yewoi. The root yew- is associated with the family of words having the meaning to gush or emanate, boil, ferment, agitate, rouse. So far only millet has been identified in Kurgan sites of the Dnieper-Volga steppe. There is no trace of einkorn and emmer wheat, barley, oats, or rye, although stone hoes, sickle blades of flint, and quern stones have been found in settlements. Large hoe-like tools known from several settlements are considered to be primitive plowshares. It seems that the Kurgan people in their original home engaged in an extensive form of wild-grass economy. Except for millet, a “ground” cereal; *yewos, a cereal used for fermentation; and *pwis, a grass or spelt wheat, there are no other well-attested words for cereals, and there is no archeological evidence for their existence. (We can only be impressed by the amazing inertia in the Kurgan cultures, on their way to, and entering the New Age, the assortment of the grains used by the Kurgan peoples almost did not change, displaying remarkable conservatism for over 7,000 years. For millennia, millet remained the predominant grain of Kurgans from Danube to Huanhe. Only in the northern belts it was replaced by a bulbous substitute. In the 17th-18th cc millet was replaced in the west with the maize grain in areas where maize corn can be cultivated. In most cases, the dependent farming people provided alternate grains, like rice and wheat. Chinese annual tithe to the Hun's Shanyu, of which we have data, was “10 thousand dans of rice wine, 5 thousand hu of millet”, which required supply trains in tens of thousands horse-drawn lorries. The “extensive form of wild-grass economy” , implying any degree of cultivation, is as much nonsense, the steppes and horses remained wild, hence the nomadic economy. The difference between the horse breeding Kurgans and farming IE's is of a day and night character, absolutely impossible to err.) Common names for rye, barley, and oats are found only in the European branch of the
Indo-European languages. *rughis “rye” is known in.
The word for “oats” with the root *aw- is known in Slavic, Baltic, and Latin. “Barley”
apparently designated “food derived from cereals” as Latin, Germanic, and Slavic forms
suggest: Latin far and farina-, Old Nardic barr, “barley”; Gothic
barizeins, “of barley”; Old Church Slavic brasno, “food”; Serbian brashno, “flour”; and Russian
borosno, “rye flour” (The words common to such divergent groups as Slavic,
Baltic, Germanic, and Celtic point to a “Sprachbund” unrelated to the either the alleged
proto-IE nor to the Kurgan languages. The unexplained difference in the farming lexicon
between the European and Asian branches of the Indo-European languages points to the
demographical insignificance of the 2nd mill. BC TRB migrants to India, who could not
impact the local farming lexicon. Incidentally, these TRB farmers did not bring
archeologically detectable horses to India, nor did they bring over their kurgan tombs,
once again demonstrating that they were no horse-breeding Kurgans). Some names are common to the Indo-European speakers in southern Europe: beans, peas,
vetch, and poppies are attested in Latin, Albanian, and Greek. All of these plants are
well known from the Neolithic in southeastern Europe, and it is quite possible that their
names were later inherited by Indo-European speakers. The name for flax, linum, is known in
Latin, Greek, Slavic, Baltic, and Germanic. The word for hemp, *kannabis, is preserved in
Greek, Albanian, Germanic, Slavic, and Baltic, but is not known among the eastern
Indo-European speakers (Naturally, cannabis is a loanword from the
Türkic “kenevir” - hemp, attested not only in Greek, Albanian, Germanic, Slavic, and
Baltic, but in the Scythian too: Κανναβις = cannabis = hemp [Herodotus IV 74]. It is funny that in the M.Gimbutas advocacy section, the Indo-European-speaking Herodotus testifies not only about
non-Indo-European origin of the term, but of its Kurgan origin). The above suggest that Indo-European speakers in Europe were acquainted with many cereals and pulses and with flax and hemp. Some of the names are
common to a larger group of languages and therefore may hark back in time to the
formative period as an after-effect of Wave No. 2, to the second half of the 4th
millennium BC. The pulses were apparently inherited from the Old European population of
southeastern Europe. It is clear that the agricultural terminology became enriched.
(As the case of cannabis demonstrates, some enrichment happened
to the Old European languages as the The Collision of Two Ideologies The Old European and Indo-European belief systems are diametrically opposed (The corrected phrase should read “The amalgamated Old European/Kurgan and Indo-European belief systems are diametrically opposed”). The Indo-European society was warlike, exogamic, patriarchal, patrilineal, and and patrilocal, with a strong clanic organization and social hierarchy which gave prominence to the warrior class (Other unsustainable adjectives aside, “the warrior class” did not exist in the Kurgan societies, all historical evidence states that the whole Kurgan society consisted of mounted riders ready to be called up as a militia army, and trained for cavalry service from the childhood. The concept of juxtaposition of the warrior class/farming class is purely sedentary farming reflection transposed on wrong soil, and is dead on arrival. The statistics confirms that: the whole army of the Byzantine Empire had in one record a “warrior class” cavalry numbering 700 knights, many of them Türkic (aka Scythian) mercenaries, whereas their opponents had 20-30,000 cavalry called up from a single tribe. Ditto for the Chinese Empire, it could only amass cavalry from the “allied” nomadic tribes, and even the enormously expensive horse farms were supplied and maintained by the “allied” nomads, there was no ethnically-Chinese cavalry). Their main gods were male and depicted as warriors (This is baloney, the images that reached us are not of the “gods”, but of the deceased warriors and their wifes. Zillions of these images were scattered from the Danube to Huanghe, the later portraits carrying inscriptions describing the deeds of the departed and dates of their lives). There is no possibility that this pattern of social organization could have developed out of the Old European matrilineal, matricentric, and endogamic balanced society. Therefore, the appearance of the Indo-Europeans in Europe represent a collision of two ideologies, not an evolution. The building of temples, a long-lasting tradition of Old Europe, stopped with the Kurgan incursions into Europe, except in the Aegean and Mediterranean regions. The masterfully produced religious paraphernalia — beautiful vases, sacrificial containers, models of temples, altars, sculptures, and sacred script-disappeared as well. Not a single temple directly associated with the Kurgan people is known, either in the north Pontic or Volga steppe nor in the Kurgan influenced zone of Europe during and after the migrations. The absence of any temples or even structured altars is consistent with the life of pastoralists. (The North Pontic or Volga steppe or the Kurgan influenced zone of Europe did not produce masterful religious paraphernalia before the spread of Kurgans. And where they were produced, in the Aegean and Mediterranean regions, they continued unimpeded, and probably added some Kurgan heroes to their pantheons [like for example Herkules (Hercules) = the “Lake Man”]. The anthropomorphic images are not compatible with Tengriism, and accordingly are incompatible the temples dedicated to anthropomorphic images; instead, the Tengrian ritual included sacral trees, groves, and mountains, documented from Scandinavia to Caucasus to Otukan/Otuken. Still, in one aspect Prof. Marija Gimbutas is right: the Indo-European pantheon conflicted violently with the Old Europe and Kurgan religions) The New Symbols and Deities of Europe The Old European worship of the Goddess was partially truncated by Kurgan Wave No. 1 toward the end of the 5th millennium BC. Horse-head scepters and cord-impressed solar motifs on pots appeared in Dobruja and in almost the whole Danube basin, but the Old European religion continued to be practiced in the Aegean and the Mediterranean, in the Cucuteni culture of Moldavia and the western Ukraine, in the TRB of northwestern and central Europe, and in all parts of the western European Neolithic. A renewed change of symbolism and mythical imagery occurred in the second half of the 4th millennium BC. Not only did sun and horse symbols appear, but images of male gods with their weapons and animals also emerged. The Goddess religion of the still extant Old European population was subdued. A completely new symbolic system with no roots in Europe is one of the strongest arguments for the presence in central Europe of new lords and their creeds. The best witness of a new religion in Europe, typified by male gods, weapons, and solar
symbols, are engraved stone stelae from the second half of the 4th millennium BC found
in the Alpine valleys, in Bulgaria, in Romania with close analogs north of the Black Sea,
and in the Caucasus. Their symbolism differs sharply from those of the French and Italian
statue-menhirs which portray the owl-faced female goddess before she was masculinized in
the Bronze Age. The Kurgan stelae display solar symbols and masculine paraphernalia,
including daggers, halberds, axes, bows, quivers and arrows, belts, breast plates,
double-spiral pendants; male horses, stags, and he-goats; vehicles, and ox teams pulling
a plow. (FIGURES 10-41 to 10-44) These are a prime source for the reconstruction of
mythical imagery and are a great value in the accurate representation of
hilted daggers, shafted halberds and axes, bows, quivers, vehicles, belts, and breast
plates, objects rarely preserved in graves. Double-spiral pendants, breast plates, bronze
daggers with triangular blades, flat axes, and flint halberd blades such as appear
engraved on stelae are known from depots and graves of the Baden and Remedello (Po River
Valley) cultures (And from Po to Altai, and from Altai to
Manchuria, across 3 millennia).
The engravings on stelae reveal a great deal about the new ideology. In fact, they constitute the richest source for the study of the earliest Indo-European (I.e. Kurgan, i.e. Türkic) symbolism and god images (I.e. images of Kurgan people). These symbols are characteristically grouped, making possible the study of their interrelationships. Their consistent association on the roughly anthropomorphic stelae leaves no doubt that the engraved weapons, animals, and solar symbols are linked, that their concurrence is not accidental. The following symbols are recorded: solar signs (circles, radiating suns, and a circle with groups of long rays) engraved in the area of the head; breast plate (a semicircle of multiple concentric lines); double-spiral pendant, one or a pair, on the chest or at the solar sign; a circle at either side of the radiating sun, hilted dagger — one, two, five, seven daggers or more — shown in the middle part of the stela; shafted halberd, one or many; shafted axe, one or more; belt of parallel lines (beaded fabric?) or of zigzag or diamond pattern (woven?); four-wheeled vehicle (shown below the belt); bow, quiver, and arrows; footprints; plow pulled by two yoked oxen; horse(s), stag(s), and he-goat(s). The content and association of the symbolic groups are of particular interest. The most frequent are the solar groups: the radiating sun, the circle on either side of the radiating sun, the double spiral pendants, and the breast plate. This group of symbols is further associated with the belt, dagger, halberd, horse, stag, plowing scene, and a vehicle. To the specialist in comparative Indo-European mythology (An objective evaluation would surely require other ethnic or linguistic comparisons, like Enisean, Türkic, Finnic, and especially the groups who retained Kurgan traditions, etiology, and myths, to ensure absence of parochial advocacy), such combinations of symbols will certainly recall the image of the God of the Shining Sky (Is that a direct indirect reference to Tengri?), who bestows progeny and promotes vegetation. This deity is known in various Indo-European groups from early historic records and is still extant in folklore: the Indic Mitra, Baltic Dievas, Roman Dius Fidius, Janus, and Mars, Celtic Lug (called “Sun faced”), German *Tiwaz (from *deiuos) (This is funny, a *reconstructed, i.e. non-attested, *name of a deity), Anglo Saxon Tiw, German Ziu, Icelandic Tyr (Icelandic Tyr and Norse Thor), northwestern Slavic Jarovit-Sventovit, and others. This god is associated with morning and daylight, and with the spring, summer, autumn, and winter sun. His powers are transmitted by his weapon, the dagger (or sword, later in prehistory and early history); by his animals, the stag and horse; and by the shining vehicle in which he travels. As protector of vegetation, particularly of the grain, he is associated with his pair of oxen and with plowing (Funny, grains and plowing among people who as Kurgans did not want to know grain farming). Other compositions and groupings represent other Indo-European deities. The axe is connected with the Thunder God; the club, bow, quiver, and arrows are also his. (FIGURES 10-45, 10-46) Present knowledge of stelae would indicate that the majority represent the God of the Shining Sky. In Indo-European mythology, the image of this god is linked with kingship. The erection of stelae, therefore, may have marked the death of important personages, either chieftains or fallen heroes; a hero may substitute for a god and his weapons became divine. The second of importance was the Thunder God, the hunter and warrior, fighting with the evil and adversary of the God of Death and Underworld, the purifier and fructifier of earth. This god is best preserved in all Indo-European mythologies. The representations of male gods on stelae are quite overwhelmingly Indo-European. (But representations of the deceased on the stelae is overwhelmingly human and specifically Türkic, and these surmised “IE's” somehow lost this “quite overwhelmingly Indo-European tradition”, without a trace, millennia before their conversion to Christianity in Europe as late as in the 13th c. AD, and the same in India, and in every other place where these “IE's” put their foot. The facts on the ground conflict with the “quite overwhelmingly Indo-European” assertion.) The Contrasting Sets of Goddesses and Gods The main theme of Old European goddess symbolism is the cyclic mystery of birth, death, and the renewal of life, involving not only human life but all life on earth. Symbols and images cluster around the parthenogenetic (self-generating) Goddess who is the single source of all life, Her energy is manifest in springs and wells, in the moon, sun, and earth, and in all animals and plants. She is the Giver-of-Life, Wielder-of-Death, Regeneratrix, and the Earth Fertility Goddess, rising and dying with the plants. Male gods also exist, not as creators but as guardians of wild nature, or as metaphors of life energy and the spirits of seasonal vegetation. The proto-Indo-European pantheon of gods was a socially and economically oriented ideology. This system was well suited to a pastoralist/mixed farming economy with prominent sovereign and warrior classes which had mastered the horse and weapons of war. The life-creating and death-wielding functions belonged to the principal male gods who also rode horses and brandished weapons. Female goddesses, like the Dawn and Sun Maiden, were not creatrixes but were simply brides or wives of male deities. This religion was oriented toward the rotating sun and other sky phenomena such as thunder and lightning. Their sky gods shone as “bright as the sky” and, in Bronze Age representations, carried shining weapons — daggers, swords, and shields — and were adorned with copper or gold chest plates, gold or amber discs, and copper-plated belts. The Indo-Europeans worshiped the swiftness of arrow and spear and the sharpness of the blade. The touch of the axe blade was thought to awaken the powers of nature and transmit the fecundity of the Thunder God. The frightening black God of Death and the Underworld marked the warrior for death with the touch of his spear tip, glorifying him as a fallen hero. Differing Beliefs in an Afterlife These two systems exhibit very different sets of beliefs concerning an afterlife. The Old
Europeans had a strong belief in cyclic regeneration in which the main idea in grave
architecture is “tomb is womb.” Graves are egg shaped, uterus shaped, or anthropomorphic,
the latter being conceived as the body of the Goddess. The generative triangle also
figures in grave and shrine outlines and architecture. Engravings on stones of megalithic
graves are symbols of regeneration, life-giving water and life energy (cupmarks,
concentric circles with central dot, concentric arcs, winding snakes, snake coils, bull heads as uteri, triangles,
lozenges, hourglass shapes, zigzags, lunar cycles); or images of the Goddess of
Regeneration herself engraved with labyrinths, vulvas, and breasts. It was thought that
the afterworld was in the West, and that a barrier of water existed between this world
and the next that was crossed by ships, themselves symbols of regeneration. Communal burials were a typical Old European practice. The megaliths of western Europe were sacred centers of the community, and the burial of de-fleshed bones to these central shrines meant a return to the ancestors. Furthermore, the bones were compared to seed which produced rebirth. Indeed, all Old European burials were, in various forms, a return to the body of the Mother for regeneration within the womb of nature. The Indo-Europeans believed in a linear continuity of the individual from this world into another “life” in the world of the dead. Therefore, mortuary houses were built in which the dead took their belongings — tools, weapons, and ornaments that represented their rank — to the afterworld. Royal tombs and those of other important members of the society were lavishly equipped, providing the dead with status. Death in battle was particularly glorified. Kings and chieftains were often buried with their entire households — wives, servants, children — and animals, including horses, teams of oxen, and dogs. Gifts of food continued to be made after the funeral, considered necessary for the well-being of the shades. (This panegyric seems to project backwards the archeological findings belonging to Kurgan Culture and misattributed to Indo-Europeans. In respect to the afterlife, the Kurgan Tengriism was similar to the Old European belief in regeneration minus the cyclicity, the prominent dead enemies were hanged on the trees as a send-off to Tengri, to come back as friends. The souls (kuts) that went to Tengri were coming back, although not a single case of documented return has ever been recorded. The road to Tengri was perilous, and required proper travel supplies.) From comparative Indo-European mythologies and beliefs we know that the world of the dead was imagined as a cold, swampy, underground realm ruled by the sovereign male god. The journey to the gloomy underworld involved a road or a river, usually a three-day period of walking, riding, or travel in chariots. Souls drifted there in a pale and passive manner, and there was no belief in the possibility of rebirth (With the exception of rebirth, this description of the underworld seems to be take from the Tengrian book; the name of the Spirit of the Underworld is Erlikh, the spirits-kuts of those who were not given a proper send-off and could not reach Tengri had to linger in the Erlikh domain, but the kuts of those who reached Tengri were to come back in an endless reincarnation cycle. These Kurgan beliefs are not dead, although they are largely hidden under veneer of Christianity and Islam). These radically different beliefs could not have developed from the Old Europeans. With the formation of the Baden-Ezero culture in east-central Europe and the Globular Amphora culture in northern central Europe in the second half of the 4th millennium BC, the Indo-European mode of burial and beliefs in the other world took root in Europe and gradually replaced the burials of the Old European type. Examples of Contrasting Symbols in Old European and Indo-European Mythologies
The Contrast Between Old European and Indo-European Symbols The analysis of Old European and Indo-European symbols (i.e. Kurgan symbols with Indo-European misattribution) shows that these two religions and mythologies had entirely different sets of symbols which are still extant today in the mythologies and folklore of Europe. I shall give just a few examples, not the whole glossary of symbols (see chart on facing page). Examples are taken from the animal world, sky bodies, and colors. Conclusion (with editorial translation from Indo-European to Kurgan) East-central Europe in the period of 4500-2500 BC was in a constant state of transformation, due to repeated Kurgan incursions from the Volga and North Pontic steppe zone. There were several major stages of changing ethnic configurations. 1. Around 4300 BC, horse-riding pastoralists from south Russia (Wave No. 1) created the first shock wave and population shifts in the Danube basin. The flowering of Old Europe was truncated and the hybridization of two very different culture systems began. Most affected were the Black Sea littoral (Varna), Karanovo-Gumelni£a, Vinca, Lengyel, and LBK cultures. The Cucuteni culture survived. In the west, signs of Kurgan elements (single burials under round kurgans) appeared in England and in eastern Ireland before 3500 BC. 2. In the second half of the 4th millennium BC, from the North Pontic-North Caucasus
region, strong influences increased the transformation of central Europe. The conversion
of what was still Old European into an Indo-European (i.e.
Kurgan) social structure and ideology was
remarkably successful. Central Europe was now ruled from hill forts and by daggers made
of hard metal (copper-arsenic alloy). 3. The massive Kurgan Wave No. 3, from the lower Volga region after 3000 BC. into east-central Europe, caused new ethnic shifts. The Indo-Europeanized populations of central Europe migrated northeast to East Baltic and central Russia, northwest to southern Scandinavia, and south to Greece (Corded Pottery and Vucedol extensions). 4. The warlike and horse-riding Bell Beaker people of the middle and second half of the 3rd millennium BC, who diffused over western Europe, are likely to have originated from an amalgam of remnants of the Vucedol people with the Pit Grave colonists (after Wave No. 3) in Yugoslavia and Hungary. Their parent culture is called Vinkovci-Samogyvar. This was the largest and last outmigration, from east-central Europe into western Europe, up to the west Mediterranean and the British Isles, before the onset of a more stable period, and the formations of Bronze Age cultural units. By the third quarter of the 3rd millennium BC, almost all parts of Old Europe were transformed economically and socially. Pastoralism and seminomadism increased and tillage decreased. Old European patterns of habitation vanished except for territories and islands which were never completely Indo-Europeanized (i.e. Kurganized). The Indo-European (i.e. Kurgan) religion became official, but the Old European Goddess religion was carried on to the present day through fragments of Old European culture. (The reference to “official” religion seems to be anachronistic, there are no records prior to the development of the alphabet, the 2nd millennium BC is a dark period, and there is no information on religious strife that may accompanied the migration of the Ionian Greeks, or the rise of the Latins. All indications, however, point to syncretism of the new and old, the Greek pantheon adopted all foreign main deities as their secondary, and sometimes primary gods. In Europe, the “official” religion seems to appear shortly before the fall of the Roman Empire, and in the Middle East it was introduced by Sassanid Ardashir I. before that, religions were adopted by popular acclaim.) The functions and images of Old European and Indo-European deities (Kurgans had no “deities”, the following speculation is without merits), beliefs in an afterlife, and the entirely different sets of symbols prove the existence of two contrasting religions and mythologies. Their collision in Europe resulted in the hybridization of two symbolic structures in which the Indo-European prevailed while the Old European survived as an undercurrent. Without this insight into different symbolic structures, the ideologies of European peoples and the genesis and meaning of their symbols, beliefs, and myths cannot be comprehended. The clash between these two ideologies and social and economic structures led to the
drastic transformation of Old Europe. These changes were expressed as the transition from
matrilineal to patrilineal order, from a learned theacracy to a militant patriarchy,
from a sexually balanced society to a male dominated hierarchy, and from a chthonic
goddess religion to the Indo-European sky-oriented pantheon of gods. CHAPTER 10 NOTES 1. Marija Gimbutas, Prehistory of Eastern Europe. Mesolithic,
Neolithic and Copper Age Culture in Russia and the Baltic Area. Peabody Museum, Harvard
University, Bulletin No. 20. (Cambridge, 1956). |
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GLOSSARY OF CULTURES AND MAJOR SITES |
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418 ACHILLEION AI-BUNAR ANGHELU RUJU ANZA Starcevo culture, 5900-5300
BC.; Anza IV: Early Vinca culture, c. 5300-5000 BC. ARGISA ASZOD AUVERNIER AVEBURY AZMAK BAALBERGE BADEN Culture BALATON BANDKERAMIK BANJICA BARNENEZ BATTLE AXE Culture BELL BEAKER Culture BODROGKERESZTUR BOIAN Culture BRONOCICE BRZESC KUJAWSKI BUCOVAT BÜKK Culture BURGASCHI BUTMIR BYLANY CARNAC CASCIOARELE CASTELNOVIAN CATAL HÜYÜK CERNAVODA CERNICA CHAERONEA CHASSEE Culture CORDED POTTERY Culture CORTAILLOD COTOFENI Culture CRTS Culture CUCUTENI CUCUTENI Culture COVA FOSCA DANILO DANTLO-HVAR Culture DIKILITASH DIMINI Culture DIVOSTIN DNIEPER-DONETS Culture DNIESTER-BUG Culture DONJA BRANJEVINA DOMICA DOWTH DURRINGTON WALLS EGOLZWIL 1-5 EHRENSTEIN ELATEIA (DRAKHMANI) ELLERBEK Culture ELSLOO ERTEB0LLE Culture EZERO FAFOS FILIESTRU FRUMUSHICA FUNNEL-NECKED BEAKER Culture GAVRINIS GGANTIJA (“Giants' Tbwer”) GLOBULAR AMPHORA Culture GOLDBERG GOMOLAVA GORSZA GRADESHNICA (GRADECHNITZA) GRIMES GRAVES GUMELNITA GUMELNITA Culture HABASHESHTI HACILAR HAGAR QIM HAL SAFLIENI HAMANGIA Culture HERPALY HLUBOKE MASUVKY HODMESOVASARHELY HOEDIC HORGEN HURBANOVO HVAR ISBISTER IZVOARE KARANOVO KARBUNA KNOSSOS KNOWTH KODZADERMEN KOKENYDOMB KOLN-LINDENTHAL KOROS Culture KOSTOLAC Culture KURGAN Culture LAGOZZA Period LARGA-JIJIEI LASINJA Culture LAZN'ANY LENGYEL Culture LENGYEL LEPENSKI VIR Culture LEPENSKI VIR LERNA LET LINEARBANDKERAMIK (LBK) Culture LIPARI LISICHICHI LUKA-VRUBLEVETSKAYA LUZIANKY MAES HOWE MAIKOP Culture MARICA MGARR (TA' HAGRAT) MICHELSBERG Culture MNAJDRA MOHELNICE MOLFETTA MONTE D'ACCODDI NARVA Culture NEA NIKOMEDEIA NEBO NEMUNAS Culture NEWGRANGE NITRA OBRE I OBRE II OCSOD-KOVASHALOM OLSZANICA OTZAKI OVCHAROVO OZIERI Culture PADINA PARTA PASSO DI CORVO PECEL PETRESHTI Culture PFYN PLOCHNIK POLJANICA (POLYANICA) PORODIN RADIAL-DECORATED POTTERY RAST RENDINA ROSSEN RUDNA GLAVA SALCUTA SALZMÜNDE SAMARA Culture SAMOGYVAR SARNATE SARNOWO SAVA A tell settlement near Vama, E Bulgaria. Eponymous site for cultural group on the Black Sea coast, preceding the cemetery of Varna and contemporary with Karanovo V (or “Marica”) in C Bulgaria; early 5th mill. BC. Lit.: M. Mircev and D. Zlatarski, “Selist-nata mogila pri selo Sava.” Izvestija na Varnenskoto Aicheol. Dmzestvo 11 (I960); H. Vaisova (Todorova), Slovenskd Arheoldgia 14 (1966). SCALORIA SEEBERG-BURGASCHI SUD SEINE-OISE-MARNE (SOM) SELEVAC SERRA D'ALTO SESKLO Culture SILBURY HILL SIPINTSI (SCHIPENITZ) SITAGROI SITTARD SKORBA SMILCHICH
STARCHEVO Culture STEIN STENTINELLO STONEHENGE STRELICE STROKED POTTERY SVENTOJI SZATMAR Culture SZEGVAR-TUZKOVES TABLE DES MARCHANDS TANGIRU TARTARIA TARXIEN TEVIEC THAYNGEN TIRPESHTI TISZA Culture TISZADOB TISZAPOLGAR-BASATANYA TISZAPOLGAR TRAIAN TRB TRIPOLYE TRUSHESHTI TURDASH (Tordos) USATOVO-GORODSK-FOLTESHTI VADASTRA VALACH VALCAMONICA VALEA LUPULUI VARNA VARVAROVKA (VARVARIVKA) VESELINOVO Karanovo tell of the Karanovo
in period, distr. of Jambol, E Bulgaria. Name also used for the culture of this period. VESZTO-MAGOK VIDRA VINCHA VINKOVCHI VLADIMIROVKA (VLADIMIRIVKA) VLASAC VUCHEDOL WALTEKNIENBURG WEST KENNET WINDMILL HILL XEMXIJA YAMNA ZEDMAR ZENGOVARKONY ZOK ZWENKAU |
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