The Horse, the Wheel, and Language
David W. Anthony
Published by Princeton University Press
Anthony, W..
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.
Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/.
For additional information about this book
Access provided by Harvard University (15 Oct 2018 22:00 GMT)
https://muse.jhu.edu/book/36661
123
Chapter Seven
How to Reconstruct a Dead Culture
The archaeology of Indo-European origins usually is described in terms
that seem arcane to most people, and that even archaeologists define differently.
So I offer a short explanation of how I approach the archaeological
evidence. To begin at the beginning, surprisingly enough, we must
start out in Denmark.
In 1807 the kingdom of Denmark was unsure of its prospects for survival.
Defeated by Britain, threatened by Sweden, and soon to be abandoned
by Norway, it looked to its glorious past to reassure its citizens of
their greatness. Plans for a National Museum of Antiquities, the first of its
type in Europe, were developed and promoted. The Royal Cabinet of Antiquities
quickly acquired vast collections of artifacts that had been plowed
or dug from the ground under a newly expanded agricultural policy. Amateur
collectors among the country gentry, and quarrymen or ditch diggers
among the common folk, brought in glimmering hoards of bronze and
boxes of flint tools and bones.
In 1816, with dusty specimens piling up in the back room of the Royal
Library, the Royal Commission for the Preservation of Danish Antiquities
selected Christian J. Thomsen, a twenty-seven-year-old without a
university degree but known for his practicality and industry, to decide
how to arrange this overwhelming trove of strange and unknown objects
in some kind of order for its first display. After a year of cataloguing and
thinking, Thomsen elected to put the artifacts in three great halls. One
would be for the stone artifacts, which seemed to come from graves or
sediments belonging to a Stone Age, lacking any metals at all; one for the
bronze axes, trumpets, and spears of the Bronze Age, which seemed to
come from sites that lacked iron; and the last for the iron tools and weapons,
made during an Iron Age that continued into the era of the earliest
written references to Scandinavian history. The exhibit opened in 1819
and was a triumphant success. It inspired an animated discussion among
European intellectuals about whether these three ages truly existed in
this chronological order, how old they were, and whether a science of archaeology,
like the new science of historical linguistics, was possible. Jens
Worsaae, originally an assistant to Thomsen, proved, through careful excavation,
that the Three Ages indeed existed as distinct prehistoric eras,
with some qualifications. But to do this he had to dig much more carefully
than the ditch diggers, borrowing stratigraphic methods from geology.
Thus professional field archaeology was born to solve a problem, not to
acquire things.1
It was no longer possible, after Thomsen’s exhibit, for an educated person
to regard the prehistoric past as a single undifferentiated era into
which mammoth bones and iron swords could be thrown together. Forever
after time was to be divided, a peculiarly satisfying task for mortals,
who now had a way to triumph over their most implacable foe. Once chronology
was discovered, tinkering with it quickly became addictive. Even
today chronological arguments dominate archaeological discussions in
Russia and Ukraine. Indeed, a chief problem preventing Western archaeologists
from really understanding steppe archaeology is that Thomsen’s
Three Ages are defined differently in the steppes than in western Europe.
The Bronze Age seems like a simple concept, but if it began at different
times in places very close to each other, it can be complicated to apply.
The Bronze Age can be said to begin when bronze tools and ornaments
began to appear regularly in excavated graves and settlements. But what is
bronze? It is an alloy, and the oldest bronze was an alloy of copper and
arsenic. Arsenic, recognized by most of us simply as a poison, is in fact a
naturally occurring whitish mineral typically in the form of arsenopyrite,
which is frequently associated with copper ores in quartzitic copper deposits,
and is probably how the alloy was discovered. In nature, arsenic rarely
comprises more than about 1% of a copper ore, and usually much less than
that. Ancient metalsmiths discovered that, if the arsenic content was
boosted to about 2–8% of the mixture, the finished metal was lighter in
color than pure copper, harder when cool, and, when molton, less viscous
and easier to cast. A bronze alloy even lighter in color, harder, and more
workable was copper and about 2–8% tin, but tin was rare in the ancient
Old World, so tin-bronzes only appeared later, after tin deposits were discovered.
The Bronze Age, therefore, marks that moment when metalsmiths
regularly began to mix molten minerals to make alloys that were
superior to naturally occurring copper. From that perspective, it immediately
becomes clear that the Bronze Age would have started in different
places at different times.
124 Chapter 7
Reconstructing a Dead Culture 125
The Three Ages in the Pontic-Caspian Steppes
The oldest Bronze Age in Europe began about 3700–3500 BCE, when
smiths started to make arsenical bronze in the North Caucasus Mountains,
the natural frontier between the Near East and the Pontic-Caspian
steppes. Arsenical bronzes, and the Bronze Age they signaled, appeared
centuries later in the steppes and eastern Europe including the lower Danube
valley, beginning about 3300–3200 BCE; and the beginning of the
Bronze Age in central and western Europe was delayed a thousand years
after that, starting only about 2400–2200 BCE. Yet, an archaeologist
trained in western Europe may commonly ask why a Caucasian culture
dated 3700 BCE is called a Bronze Age culture, when this would be the
Stone Age (or Neolithic) in Britain or France. The answer is that bronze
metallurgy appeared first in eastern Europe and then spread to the west,
where it was adopted only after a surprisingly long delay. The Bronze Age
began in the Pontic-Caspian steppes, the probable Indo-European homeland,
much earlier than in Denmark.
The age preceding the Bronze Age in the steppes is called the Eneolithic;
Christian Thomsen did not recognize that period in Denmark. The
Eneolithic was a Copper Age, when metal tools and ornaments were used
widely but were made of unalloyed copper. This was the first age of metal,
and it lasted a long time in southeastern Europe, where European copper
metallurgy was invented. The Eneolithic did not appear in northern or
western Europe, which skipped directly from the Neolithic to the Bronze
Age. Experts in southeastern Europe disagree on how to divide the Eneolithic
internally; the chronological boundaries of the Early, Middle, and
Late Eneolithic are set at different times by different archaeologists in different
regions. I have tried to follow what I see as an emerging interregional
consensus among Russian and Ukrainian archaeologists, and
between them and the archaeologists of eastern Poland, Bulgaria, Romania,
Hungary, and the former Yugoslavia.2
Before the Eneolithic was the Neolithic, the later end of Thomsen’s
Stone Age. Eventually the Stone Age was divided into the Old, Middle,
and New Stone Ages, or the Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic. In Soviet
archaeology and in current Slavic or post-Soviet terminology the word
Neolithic is applied to prehistoric societies that made pottery but had not yet
discovered how to make metal. The invention of ceramics defined the beginning
of the Neolithic. Pottery, of course, was an important discovery.
Fire-resistant clay pots made it possible to cook stews and soups all day
over a low fire, breaking down complex starches and proteins so that they
were easier to digest for people with delicate stomachs—babies and elders.
Soups that simmered in clay pots helped infants survive and kept old people
alive longer. Pottery also is a convenient “type fossil” for archaeologists,
easily recognized in archaeological sites. But Western archaeologists defined
the Neolithic differently. In Western archaeology, societies can only
be called Neolithic if they had economies based on food production—herding
or farming or both. Hunters and gatherers who had pottery are called
Mesolithic. It is oddly ironic that capitalist archaeologists made the mode of
production central to their definition of the Neolithic, and Marxist archaeologists
ignored it. I’m not sure what this might say about archaeologists
and their politics, but here I must use the Eastern European definition of
the Neolithic—which includes both foragers and early farmers who made
pottery but used no metal tools or ornaments—because this is what Neolithic
means in Russian and Ukrainian archaeology.
Dating and the Radiocarbon Revolution
Radiocarbon dating created a revolution in prehistoric archaeology. From
Christian Thomsen’s museum exhibit until the mid-twentieth century archaeologists
had no clear idea how old their artifacts were, even if they knew
how to place them in a sequence of types. The only way even to guess their
age was to attempt to relate dagger or ornament styles in Europe to similar
styles of known age in the Near East, where inscriptions provided dates going
back to 3000 BCE. These long-distance stylistic comparisons, risky at
best, were useless for dating artifacts older than the earliest Near Eastern
inscriptions. Then, in 1949, Willard Libby demonstrated that the absolute
age (literally the number of years since death) of any organic material (wood,
bone, straw, shell, skin, hair, etc.) could be determined by counting its 14
C
content, and thus radiocarbon dating was born. A radiocarbon date reveals
when the dated sample died. Of course, the sample had to have been alive at
some point, which disqualified Libby’s discovery for dating rocks or minerals,
but archaeologists often found charred wood from ancient fireplaces or
discarded animal bones in places where humans had lived. Libby was
awarded a Nobel Prize, and Europe acquired its own prehistory independent
of the civilizations of the Near East. Some important events such as
the invention of copper metallurgy were shown to have happened so early in
Europe that influence from the Near East was almost ruled out.3
Chronological schemes based on radiocarbon dates have struggled
through several significant changes in methods since 1949 (see the appendix
126 Chapter 7
Reconstructing a Dead Culture 127
in this volume). The most significant changes were the introduction of a
new method (Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, or AMS) for counting how
much 14
C remained in a sample, which made all dates much more accurate;
and the realization that all radiocarbon dates, regardless of counting
method, had to be corrected using calibration tables, which revealed large
errors in old, uncalibrated dates. These periodic changes in methods and
results slowed the scientific reception of radiocarbon dates in the former
Soviet Union. Many Soviet archaeologists resisted radiocarbon dating,
partly because it sometimes contradicted their theories and chronologies;
partly because the first radiocarbon dates were later proved wrong by changes
in methods, making it possible that all radiocarbon dates might soon be
proved wrong by a newer refinement; and partly because the dates themselves,
even when corrected and calibrated, sometimes made no sense—the
rate of error in radiocarbon dating in Soviet times seemed high.
A new problem affecting radiocarbon dates in the steppes is that old
carbon in solution in river water is absorbed by fish and then enters the
bones of people who eat a lot of fish. Many steppe archaeological sites are
cemeteries, and many radiocarbon dates in steppe archaeology are from human
bones. Analysis of 15
N isotopes in human bone can tell us how much
fish a person ate. Measurements of 15
N in skeletons from early steppe cemeteries
show that fish was very important in the diet of most steppe societies,
including cattle herders, often accounting for about 50% of the food
consumed. Radiocarbon dates measured on the bones of these humans
might come out too old, contaminated by old carbon in the fish they ate.
This is a newly realized problem, one still without a solution widely agreed
on. The errors should be in the range of 100–500 radiocarbon years too
old, meaning that the person actually died 100–500 years after the date
given by the count of 14
C. I note in the text places where old carbon contamination
might be a problem making the dates measured on human
bones too old, and, in the appendix, I explain my own interim approach to
fixing the problem.4
Attitudes toward radiocarbon dating in the CIS have changed since
1991. The major universities and institutes have thrown themselves
into new radiocarbon dating programs. The field collection of samples
for dating has become more careful and more widespread, laboratories
continuously improve their methods, and the error rate has fallen. It is
difficult now to keep up with the flow of new radiocarbon dates. They
have overthrown many old ideas and chronologies, including my own.
Some of the chronological relationships outlined in my 1985 Ph.D. dissertation
have now been proved wrong, and entire cultures I barely knew
about in 1985 have become central to any understanding of steppe
archaeology.5
But to understand people we need to know more than just when they
lived; we also need to know something about their economy and culture.
And in the specific case of the people of the Pontic-Caspian region, some
of the most important questions are about how they lived—whether they
were wandering nomads or lived in one place all year, whether they had
chiefs or lived in egalitarian groups without formal full-time leaders, and
how they went about getting their daily bread, if indeed they ate bread at
all. But to talk about these matters I first need to introduce some additional
methods archaeologists use.
What Did They Eat?
One of the most salient signals of cultural identity is food. Long after immigrants
give up their native clothing styles and languages, they retain
and even celebrate their traditional food. How the members of a society
get food is, of course, a central organizing fact of life for all humans. The
supermarkets we use so casually today are microcosms of modern Western
life: they would not exist without a highly specialized, capital-financed,
market-based economic structure; a consumer-oriented culture of profligate
consumption (Do we really need fifteen kinds of mushrooms?);
interstate highways; suburbs; private automobiles; and dispersed nuclear
families lacking a grandma at home who could wash, chop, process, and
prepare meat and produce. Long ago, before all these modern conveniences
appeared, getting food determined how people spent much of their day,
every day: what time they woke in the morning, where they went to work,
what skills and knowledge they needed there, whether they could live in
independent family homes or needed the much larger communal labor
resources of a village, how long they were away from home, what kind of
ecological resources they needed, what cooking and food-preparation
skills they had to know, and even what foods they offered to the gods. In a
world dominated by the rhythms and values of raising crops and caring for
animals, clans with productive fields or large herds of cattle were the envy
of everyone. Wealth and the political power it conveyed were equated with
cultivated land and pasture.
To understand ancient agricultural and herding economies, archaeologists
have to collect the animal bones from ancient garbage dumps with
the same care they devote to broken pottery, and they must also make
special efforts to recover carbonized plant remains. Luckily ancient people
128 Chapter 7
Reconstructing a Dead Culture 129
often buried their food trash in dumps or pits, restricting it to one place
where archaeologists can find it more easily. Although cow bones and
charred seeds cannot easily be displayed in the national museum, archaeology
is not about collecting pretty things but about solving problems, so
in the following pages much attention is devoted to animal bones and
charred seeds.
Archaeologists count animal bones in two principal ways. Many bones
in garbage dumps had been broken into such small pieces for cooking that
they cannot be assigned to a specific animal species. Those that are big
enough or distinctive enough to assign to a definite species constitute the
NISP, or the “number of identified specimens,” where identified means assignable
to a species. Thus, the NISP count, which describes the number
of bones found for each species, is the first way to count bones: three hundred
cattle, one hundred sheep, five horse. The second counting method is
to calculate the MNI, or the “minimum number of individuals” those
bones represent. If the five horse bones were each from a different animal,
they would represent five horses, whereas the hundred sheep bones might
all be from a single skeleton. The MNI is used to convert bones into minimum
meat weights—how much beef, for example, would be represented,
minimally, by a certain number of cattle bones. Meat weight, comprised of
fat and muscle, in most adult mammals averages about half the live body
weight, so by identifying the minimum number, age, and species of animals
butchered at the site, the minimum meat weight, with some qualifications,
can be estimated.
Seeds, like wheat and barley, were often parched by charring them
lightly over a fire to help preserve them for storage. Although many
charred seeds are accidentally lost in this process, without charring they
would soon rot into dust. The seeds preserved in archaeological sites have
been charred just enough to carbonize the seed hull. Seeds tell us which
plant foods were eaten, and can reveal the nature of the area’s gardens,
fields, forests, groves, and vineyards. The recovery of charred seeds from
excavated sediments requires a flotation tank and a pump to force water
through the tank. Excavated dirt is dumped into the tank and the moving
water helps the seeds to float to the surface. They are then collected in
screens as the water flows out the top of the tank through an exit spout. In
the laboratory the species of plants are identified and counted, and domesticated
varieties of wheat, barley, millet, and oats are distinguished from
wild plant seeds. Flotation was rarely used in Western archaeology before
the late 1970s and was almost never used in Soviet archaeology. Soviet
paleobotanical experts relied on chance finds of seeds charred in burned
pots or on seed impressions preserved in the damp clay of a pot before it
had been fired. These lucky finds occur rarely. A true understanding of the
importance of plant foods in the steppes will come only after flotation
methods are widely used in excavations.
Archaeological Cultures and Living Cultures
The story that follows is populated rarely by individuals and more often
by cultures, which, although created and reproduced by people, act quite
differently than people do. Because “living cultures” contain so many
subgroups and variants, anthropologists have difficulty describing them
in the abstract, leading many anthropologists to discard the concept of a
“unitary culture” entirely. However, when cultural identities are contrasted
with other bordering cultures, they are much easier to describe.
Frederik Barth’s investigations of border identities in Afghanistan suggested
that the reproduction and perhaps even the invention of cultural
identities often was generated by the continuous confrontation with Others
inherent in border situations. Today many anthropologists find this a
productive way to understand cultural identities, that is, as responses to
particular historical situations rather than as long-term phenomena, as
noted in the previous chapter. But cultural identities also carry emotional
and historical weight in the hearts of those who believe in them, and the
source of this shared emotional attachment is more complicated. It must
be derived from a shared set of customs and historical experiences, a font
of tradition that, even if largely imagined or invented, provides the fuel
that feeds border confrontations. If that font of tradition is given a geographic
location or a homeland it is often away from the border, dispersed,
for example, across shrines, burial grounds, coronation sites, battlefields,
and landscape features like mountains and forests, all thought to be imbued
with culture-specific spiritual forces.6
Archaeological cultures are defined on the basis of potsherds, grave
types, architecture, and other material remains, so the relationship between
archaeological cultures and living cultures might seem tenuous.
When Christian Thomsen and Jens Worsaae first began to divide artifacts
into types, they were trying to arrange them in a chronological sequence;
they soon realized, however, that a lot of regional variation also
cut across the chronological types. Archaeological cultures are meant to
capture and define that regional variation. An archaeological culture is a
recurring set of artifact types that co-occur in a particular region during
a set time period.
130 Chapter 7
Reconstructing a Dead Culture 131
In practice, pottery types are often used as the key identifiers of archaeological
cultures, as they are easy to find and recognize even in small
excavations, whereas the recognition of distinct house types, for example,
requires much larger exposures. But archaeological cultures should never
be defined on the basis of pottery alone. What makes an archaeological
culture interesting, and meaningful, is the co-occurrence of many similar
customs, crafts, and dwelling styles across a region, including, in addition
to ceramics, grave types, house types, settlement types (the arrangement
of houses in the typical settlement), tool types, and ritual symbols (figurines,
shrines, and deities.) Archaeologists worry about individual types
changing through time and shifting their areas of distribution, and we
should worry about these things, but we should not let problems with defining
individual tree species and ranges convince us that the forest is not
there. Archaeological cultures (like forests) are particularly recognizable
and definable at their borders, whereas regional variation in the back
country, away from the borders, might often present a more confusing
picture. It is at robust borders, defined by bundles of material-culture contrasts,
where archaeological cultures and living cultures or societies might
actually correspond. As I argued in the previous chapter, robust borders
that persist for centuries probably were not just archaeological or cultural
but also linguistic.
Within archaeological cultures a few traits, archaeologists have learned,
are particularly important as keys to cultural identity. Most Western archaeologists
accept that technological style, or the way an object is made,
is a more fundamental indicator of craft tradition than the way it is decorated,
its decorative style. The technology of production is more culturebound
and resistant to change, rather like the core vocabulary in linguistics.
So clay tempering materials and firing methods usually are better indicators
of a potter’s cultural origin than the decorative styles the potter produced,
and the same probably was true for metallurgy, weaving, and other
crafts.7
One important alternative to archaeological cultures is the archaeological
horizon. A horizon, more like a popular fashion than a culture, can be
defined by a single artifact type or cluster of artifact types that spreads
suddenly over a very wide geographic area. In the modern world the blue
jeans and T-shirt complex is a horizon style, superimposed on diverse
populations and cultures around the planet but still representing an important
diffusion of cultural influence, particularly youth culture, from an
area of origin in the United States. It is important, as it tells us something
about the place the United States occupied in world youth culture at the
moment of initial diffusion (the 1960s and 1970s), but it is not a migration
or cultural replacement. Similarly the Beaker horizon in Late Neolithic
Europe is defined primarily by a widespread style of decorated drinking
cups (beakers) and in many places by a few weapon types (copper daggers,
polished stone wrist-guards) that diffused with a new fashion in social
drinking. In most places these styles were superimposed on preexisting
archaeological cultures. A horizon is different from an archaeological culture
because it is less robust—it is defined on the basis of just a few traits—
and is often superimposed on local archaeological cultures. Horizons were
highly significant in the prehistoric Eurasian steppes.
The Big Questions Ahead
We will proceed on the assumption that Proto-Indo-European probably
was spoken in the steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas, the PonticCaspian
steppes, broadly between 4500 and 2500 BCE. But we have to
start somewhat earlier to understand the evolution of Indo-European–
speaking societies. The speakers of Proto-Indo-European were a cattlekeeping
people. Where did the cattle come from? Both cattle and sheep
were introduced from outside, probably from the Danube valley (although
we also have to consider the possibility of a diffusion route through the
Caucasus Mountains). The Neolithic pioneers who imported domesticated
cattle and sheep into the Danube valley probably spoke non–Indo-European
languages ultimately derived from western Anatolia. Their arrival in the
eastern Carpathians, northwest of the Black Sea, around 5800 BCE, created
a cultural frontier between the native foragers and the immigrant
farmers that persisted for more than two thousand years.
The arrival of the first pioneer farmers and the creation of this cultural
frontier is described in chapter 8. A recurring theme will be the development
of the relationship between the farming cultures of the Danube valley
and the steppe cultures north of the Black Sea. Marija Gimbutas called
the Danubian farming cultures “Old Europe.” The agricultural towns of
Old Europe were the most technologically advanced and aesthetically sophisticated
in all of Europe between about 6000 and 4000 BCE.
Chapter 9 describes the diffusion of the earliest cattle-and-sheepherding
economy across the Pontic-Caspian steppes after about 5200–
5000 BCE. This event laid the foundation for the kinds of power politics
and rituals that defined early Proto-Indo-European culture. Cattle herding
was not just a new way to get food; it also supported a new division of
132 Chapter 7
Reconstructing a Dead Culture 133
society between high-status and ordinary people, a social hierarchy that
had not existed when daily sustenance was based on fishing and hunting.
Cattle and the cleavage of society into distinct statuses appeared together.
Right away, cattle, sheep—and horses—were offered together in sacrifices
at the funerals of a select group of people, who also carried unusual weapons
and ornamented their bodies in unique and ostentatious ways. They
were the new leaders of a new kind of steppe society.
Chapter 10 describes the discovery of horseback riding—a subject of intense
controversy—by these archaic steppe herding societies, probably before
4200 BCE. The intrusion into Old Europe of steppe herders, probably
mounted on horses, who either caused or took advantage of the collapse of
Old Europe, is the topic of chapter 11. Their spread into the lower Danube
valley about 4200–4000 BCE likely represented the initial expansion of
archaic Proto-Indo-European speakers into southeastern Europe, speaking
dialects that were ancestral to the later Anatolian languages.
Chapter 12 considers the influence of the earliest Mesopotamian urban
civilizations on steppe societies—and vice versa—at a very early age, about
3700–3100 BCE. The chiefs who lived in the North Caucasus Mountains
overlooking the steppes grew incredibly rich from long-distance trade
with the southern civilizations. The earliest wheeled vehicles, the first wagons,
probably rolled into the steppes through these mountains.
The societies that probably spoke classic Proto-Indo-European—the
herders of the Yamnaya horizon—are introduced in chapter 13. They were
the first people in the Eurasian steppes to create a herding economy that
required regular seasonal movements to new pastures throughout the year.
Wagons pulled by cattle allowed them to carry tents, water, and food into
the deep steppes, far from the river valleys, and horseback riding enabled
them to scout rapidly and over long distances and to herd on a large scale,
necessities in such an economy. Herds were spread out across the enormous
grasslands between the river valleys, making those grasslands useful,
which led to larger herds and the accumulation of greater wealth.
Chapters 14 through 16 describe the initial expansions of societies
speaking Proto-Indo-European dialects, to the east, the west, and finally
to the south, to Iran and the Indian subcontinent. I do not attempt to follow
what happened after the initial migrations of these groups; my effort
is just to understand the development and the first dispersal of speakers of
Proto-Indo-European and, along the way, to investigate the influence of
technological innovations in transportation—horseback riding, wheeled
vehicles, and chariots—in the opening of the Eurasian steppes.