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 22:01 GMT)
https://muse.jhu.edu/book/36661
134
Chapter Eight
First Farmers and Herders
The Pontic-Caspian Neolithic
At the beginning of time there were two brothers, twins, one named Man
(*Manu, in Proto-Indo-European) and the other Twin (*Yemo). They traveled
through the cosmos accompanied by a great cow. Eventually Man and
Twin decided to create the world we now inhabit. To do this, Man had to
sacrifice Twin (or, in some versions, the cow). From the parts of this sacrificed
body, with the help of the sky gods (Sky Father, Storm God of War,
Divine Twins), Man made the wind, the sun, the moon, the sea, earth, fire,
and finally all the various kinds of people. Man became the first priest, the
creator of the ritual of sacrifice that was the root of world order.
After the world was made, the sky-gods gave cattle to “Third man”
(*Trito). But the cattle were treacherously stolen by a three-headed, six-eyed
serpent (*Ngw
hi, the Proto-Indo-European root for negation). Third man
entreated the storm god to help get the cattle back. Together they went to
the cave (or mountain) of the monster, killed it (or the storm god killed it
alone), and freed the cattle. *Trito became the first warrior. He recovered
the wealth of the people, and his gift of cattle to the priests insured that the
sky gods received their share in the rising smoke of sacrificial fires. This
insured that the cycle of giving between gods and humans continued.1
These two myths were fundamental to the Proto-Indo-European system
of religious belief. *Manu and *Yemo are reflected in creation myths preserved
in many Indo-European branches, where *Yemo appears as Indic
Yama, Avestan Yima, Norse Ymir, and perhaps Roman Remus (from *iemus,
the archaic Italic form of *yemo, meaning “twin”); and Man appears as Old
Indic Manu or Germanic Mannus, paired with his twin to create the world.
The deeds of *Trito have been analyzed at length by Bruce Lincoln, who
found the same basic story of the hero who recovered primordial lost cattle
from a three-headed monster in Indic, Iranian, Hittite, Norse, Roman and
Greek myths. The myth of Man and Twin established the importance of
the sacrifice and the priest who regulated it. The myth of the “Third one”
defined the role of the warrior, who obtained animals for the people and
the gods. Many other themes are also reflected in these two stories: the
Indo-European fascination with binary doublings combined with triplets,
two’s and three’s, which reappeared again and again, even in the metric
structure of Indo-European poetry; the theme of pairs who represented
magical and legal power (Twin and Man, Varuna-Mitra, Odin-Tyr); and
the partition of society and the cosmos between three great functions or
roles: the priest (in both his magical and legal aspects), the warrior (the
Third Man), and the herder/cultivator (the cow or cattle).2
For the speakers of Proto-Indo-European, domesticated cattle were
basic symbols of the generosity of the gods and the productivity of the
earth. Humans were created from a piece of the primordial cow. The ritual
duties that defined “proper” behavior revolved around the value, both
moral and economic, of cattle. Proto-Indo-European mythology was, at
its core, the worldview of a male-centered, cattle-raising people—not necessarily
cattle nomads but certainly people who held sons and cattle in the
highest esteem. Why were cattle (and sons) so important?
Domesticated Animals and Pontic-Caspian Ecology
Until about 5200–5000 BCE most of the people who lived in the steppes
north of the Black and Caspian Seas possessed no domesticated animals at
all. They depended instead on gathering nuts and wild plants, fishing, and
hunting wild animals; in other words, they were foragers. But the environment
they were able to exploit profitably was only a small fraction of the
total steppe environment. The archaeological remains of their camps are
found almost entirely in river valleys. Riverine gallery forests provided
shelter, shade, firewood, building materials, deer, aurochs (European wild
cattle), and wild boar. Fish supplied an important part of the diet. Wider
river valleys like the Dnieper or Don had substantial gallery forests, kilometers
wide; smaller rivers had only scattered groves. The wide grassy
plateaus between the river valleys, the great majority of the steppe environment,
were forbidding places occupied only by wild equids and saiga
antelope. The foragers were able to hunt the wild equids, including horses.
The wild horses of the steppes were stout-legged, barrel-chested, stiffmaned
animals that probably looked very much like modern Przewalski
horses, the only truly wild horses left in the world.3
The most efficient
hunting method would have been to ambush horse bands in a ravine, and
the easiest opportunity would have been when they came into the river
First Farmers and Herders 135
valleys to drink or to find shelter. In the steppe regions, where wild horses
were most numerous, wild equid hunting was common. Often it supplied
most of the foragers’ terrestrial meat diet.
The Pontic-Caspian steppes are at the western end of a continuous
steppe belt which rolls east all the way to Mongolia. It is possible, if one is
so inclined, to walk, 5,000 km from the Danube delta across the center of
the Eurasian continent to Mongolia without ever leaving the steppes. But
a person on foot in the Eurasian steppes feels very small. Every footfall
raises the scent of crushed sage, and a puff of tiny white grasshoppers skips
ahead of your boot. Although the flowers that grow among the fescue and
feathergrass (Festuca and Stipa) make a wonderful boiled tea, the grass is
inedible, and outside the forested river valleys there is not much else to eat.
The summer temperature frequently rises to 110–120°F (43–49°C), although
it is a dry heat and usually there is a breeze, so it is surprisingly
tolerable. Winter, however, kills quickly. The howling, snowy winds drive
temperatures below −35°F (−37°C). The bitter cold of steppe winters (think
North Dakota) is the most serious limiting factor for humans and animals,
more restricting even than water, since there are shallow lakes in most
parts of the Eurasian steppes.
The dominant mammal of the interior steppes at the time our account
begins was the wild horse, Equus caballus. In the moister, lusher western
steppes of Ukraine, north of the Black Sea (the North Pontic steppes),
there was another, smaller equid that ranged into the lower Danube valley
and down to central Anatolia, Equus hydruntinus, the last one hunted to
extinction between 4000 and 3000 BCE. In the drier, more arid steppes
of the Caspian Depression was a third ass-like, long-eared equid, the onager,
Equus hemionus, now endangered in the wild. Onagers then lived in
Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Iran, and in the Caspian Depression. PonticCaspian
foragers hunted all three.
The Caspian Depression was itself a sign of another important aspect
of the Pontic-Caspian environment: its instability. The Black and Caspian
Seas were not placid and unchanging. Between about 14,000 and 12,000
BCE the warming climate that ended the last Ice Age melted the northern
glaciers and the permafrost, releasing their combined meltwater in a
torrential surge that flowed south into the Caspian basin. The late Ice-Age
Caspian ballooned into a vast interior sea designated the Khvalynian Sea.
For two thousand years the northern shoreline stood near Saratov on the
middle Volga and Orenburg on the Ural River, restricting east-west movement
south of the Ural Mountains. The Khvalynian Sea separated the already
noticeably different late-glacial forager cultures that prospered east
136 Chapter 8
and west of the Ural Mountains.4
Around 11,000–9,000 BCE the water
finally rose high enough to overflow catastrophically through a southwestern
outlet, the Manych Depression north of the North Caucasus Mountains,
and a violent flood poured into the Black Sea, which was then well
below the world ocean level. The Black Sea basin filled up until it overflowed,
also through a southwestern outlet, the narrow Bosporus valley,
and finally poured into the Aegean. By 8000 BCE the Black Sea, now
about the size of California and seven thousand feet deep, was in equilibrium
with the Aegean and the world ocean. The Caspian had fallen back
into its own basin and remained isolated thereafter. The Black Sea became
the Pontus Euxeinos of the Greeks, from which we derive the term Pontic
for the Black Sea region in general. The North Caspian Depression, once
the bottom of the northern end of the Khvalynian Sea, was left an enormous
flat plain of salty clays, incongruous beds of sea shells, and sands,
dotted with brackish lakes and covered with dry steppes that graded into
red sand deserts (the Ryn Peski) just north of the Caspian Sea. Herds of
saiga antelopes, onagers, and horses were hunted across these saline
plains by small bands of post-glacial Mesolithic and Neolithic hunters.
But, by the time the sea receded, they had become very different culturally
and probably linguistically on the eastern and western sides of the UralCaspian
frontier. When domesticated cattle were accepted by societies
west of the Urals, they were rejected by those east of the Urals, who remained
foragers for thousands of years.5
Domesticated cattle and sheep started a revolutionary change in how
humans exploited the Pontic-Caspian steppe environment. Because cattle
and sheep were cultured, like humans, they were part of everyday work
and worry in a way never approached by wild animals. Humans identified
with their cattle and sheep, wrote poetry about them, and used them as a
currency in marriage gifts, debt payments, and the calculation of social
status. And they were grass processors. They converted plains of grass,
useless and even hostile to humans, into wool, felt, clothing, tents, milk,
yogurt, cheese, meat, marrow, and bone—the foundation of both life and
wealth. Cattle and sheep herds can grow rapidly with a little luck. Vulnerable
to bad weather and theft, they can also decline rapidly. Herding was a
volatile, boom-bust economy, and required a flexible, opportunistic social
organization.
Because cattle and sheep are easily stolen, unlike grain crops, cattle-raising
people tend to have problems with thieves, leading to conflict and warfare.
Under these circumstances brothers tend to stay close together. In Africa,
among Bantu-speaking tribes, the spread of cattle raising seems to have
First Farmers and Herders 137
led to the loss of matrilineal social organizations and the spread of malecentered
patrilineal kinship systems.6
Stockbreeding also created entirely
new kinds of political power and prestige by making possible elaborate
public sacrifices and gifts of animals. The connection between animals,
brothers, and power was the foundation on which new forms of malecentered
ritual and politics developed among Indo-European-speaking
societies. That is why the cow (and brothers) occupied such a central place
in Indo-European myths relating to how the world began.
So where did the cattle come from? When did the people living in the
Pontic-Caspian steppes begin to keep and care for herds of dappled cows?
The First Farmer-Forager Frontier in the
Pontic-Caspian Region
The first cattle herders in the Pontic-Caspian region arrived about
5800–5700 BCE from the Danube valley, and they probably spoke languages
unrelated to Proto-Indo-European. They were the leading edge of
a broad movement of farming people that began around 6200 BCE when
pioneers from Greece and Macedonia plunged north into the temperate
forests of the Balkans and the Carpathian Basin (figure 8.1). Domesticated
sheep and cattle had been imported from Anatolia to Greece by
their ancestors centuries before, and now were herded northward into forested
southeastern Europe. Genetic research has shown that the cattle did
interbreed with the native European aurochs, the huge wild cattle of Europe,
but only the male calves (traced on the Y chromosome) of aurochs
were kept, perhaps because they could improve the herd’s size or resistance
to disease without affecting milk yields. The cows, probably already kept
for their milk, all were descended from mothers that had come from Anatolia
(traced through MtDNA). Wild aurochs cows probably were relatively
poor milk producers and might have been temperamentally difficult
to milk, so Neolithic European farmers made sure that all their cows were
born of long-domesticated mothers, but they did not mind a little crossbreeding
with native wild bulls to obtain larger domestic bulls.7
Comparative studies of chain migration among recent and historical
pioneer farmers suggest that, in the beginning, the farming-and-herding
groups that first moved into temperate southeastern Europe probably
spoke similar dialects and recognized one another as cultural cousins.
The thin native population of foragers was certainly seen as culturally
and linguistically Other, regardless of how the two cultures interacted.8
After an initial rapid burst of exploration (sites at Anzabegovo, Karanovo
138 Chapter 8
I, Gura Baciului, Cirçea) pioneer groups became established in the Middle
Danube plains north of Belgrade, where the type site of Starčevo and
other similar Neolithic settlements are located. This central Danubian
lowland produced two streams of migrants that leapfrogged in one direction
down the Danube, into Romania and Bulgaria, and in the other
up the Mureş and Körös Rivers into Transylvania. Both migration
streams created similar pottery and tool types, assigned today to the Criş
culture (figure 8.2).9
First Farmers in the Pontic Region: The Criş Culture
The names Criş in Romania and Körös in eastern Hungary are two variants
of the same river name and the same prehistoric culture. The northern
Criş people moved up the Hungarian rivers into the mountains of
Transylvania and then pushed over the top of the Carpathian ridges into
Dnieper
Dniester
Don
Volga
Ural
CARPATHIANMts
CAUCASUS Mts.
URALMts.
B L A C K S E A
M
E D I T E R R A N E A N S E A
CASPIAN
SEA
Volga
FORAGERS
FORAGERS
FORAGERS
STARCEVO
CRIS
BALKAN
NEOLITHIC
GREEK
NEOLITHIC ANATOLIAN
NEOLITHIC
WEST
MEDITERRANEAN
NEOLITHIC
ELSHANKA
NEOLITHIC
Figure 8.1 The migrations of pioneer farmers into Greece and across Europe
between 6500 and 5500 BCE, including the colonization of the eastern Carpathian
piedmont by the Criş culture.
First Farmers and Herders 139
an ecologically rich and productive piedmont region east of the Carpathians.
They herded their cattle and sheep down the eastern slopes into the
upper valleys of the Seret and Prut rivers about 5800–5700 BCE. (Criş
radiocarbon dates are unaffected by reservoir effects because they were not
measured on human bone; see table 8.1.) The other migration stream in
the lower Danube valley moved into the same eastern Carpathian piedmont
from the south. These two groups created a northern and a southern
variant of the East Carpathian Criş culture, which survived from about
5800 to about 5300 BCE. Criş farms in the East Carpathian piedmont
Figure 8.2 Criş-culture ceramic shapes and decorative motifs (top half ), flint
blades and cores (left), antler and bone tools (right), and ceramic rings (bottom)
dated 5700–5300 BCE. After Dergachev 1999; and Ursulescu 1984.
140 Chapter 8
Table 8.1
Radiocarbon Dates for the Late Mesolithic and Early Neolithic of the
Pontic−Caspian Region.
Lab Number BP Date Sample Calibrated Date
1. Criş Culture Farming Settlements
Trestiana (Romania), phase III of the Cri culture
GrN−17003 6665±45 Charcoal 5640–5530 BCE
Cârcea−Viaduct (Romania), phase IV of the Cri culture
Bln−1981 6540±60 ? 5610–5390 BCE
Bln−1982 6530±60 ? 5610–5380 BCE
Bln−1983 6395±60 ? 5470–5310 BCE
2. Linear Pottery (LBK) Farming Settlements
Tirpeti, Siret River, (Romania)
Bln−800 6170±100 ? 5260–4960 BCE
Bln−801 6245±100 ? 5320–5060 BCE
3. Bug−Dniester Mesolithic−Neolithic Settlements
Soroki II, level 1 early Bug−Dniester, Dniester valley
Bln−586 6825±150 ? 5870–5560 BCE
Soroki II, level 2 pre−ceramic Bug−Dniester, Dniester valley
Bln−587 7420±80 ? 6400–6210 BCE
Savran settlement, late Bug−Dniester, Dniester valley
Ki−6654 6985±60 ? 5980–5790 BCE
Bazkov Ostrov settlement, with early ceramics, South Bug valley
Ki−6651 7235±60 ? 6210–6010 BCE
Ki−6696 7215±55 ? 6200–6000 BCE
Ki−6652 7160±55 ? 6160–5920 BCE
Sokolets II settlement, with early ceramics, South Bug valley
Ki−6697 7470±60 ? 6400–6250 BCE
Ki−6698 7405±55 ? 6390–6210 BCE
4. Early Neolithic Elshanka−type Settlements, Middle Volga Region
Chekalino 4, Sok River, Samara oblast
Le−4781 8990±100 shell 8290–7960 BCE
First Farmers and Herders 141
Table 8.1 (continued)
Lab Number BP Date Sample Calibrated Date
GrN−7085 8680±120 shell 7940–7580 BCE
Le−4783 8050±120 shell 7300–6700 BCE
Le−4782 8000±120 shell 7080–6690 BCE
GrN−7086 7950±130 shell 7050–6680 BCE
Le−4784 7940±140 shell 7050–6680 BCE
Chekalino 6, Sok River, Samara oblast
Le−4883 7940±140 shell 7050–6650 BCE
Ivanovka, upper Samara River, Orenburg oblast
Le−2343 8020±90 bone 7080–6770 BCE
5. Steppe Early Neolithic Settlements
Matveev Kurgan I, very primitive ceramics, Azov steppes
GrN−7199 7505±210 charcoal 6570–6080 BCE
Le−1217 7180±70 charcoal 6160–5920 BCE
Matveev Kurgan II, same material culture, Azov steppes
Le−882 5400±200 charcoal 4450–3980 BCE
Varfolomievka, Layer 3 (bottom ceramic layer), North Caspian steppes
GIN−6546 6980±200 charcoal 6030–5660 BCE
Kair−Shak III, North Caspian steppes
GIN−5905 6950±190 ? 6000–5660 BCE
GIN 5927 6720±80 ? 5720–5550 BCE
Rakushechni Yar, lower Don shell midden, layers 14–15
Ki−6479 6925±110 ? 5970–5710 BCE
Ki−6478 6930±100 ? 5970–5610 BCE
Ki−6480 7040±100 ? 6010–5800 BCE
Surskii Island, Dnieper Rapids forager settlement
Ki−6688 6980±65 ? 5980–5780 BCE
Ki−6989 7125±60 ? 6160–5910 BCE
Ki−6690 7195±55 ? 6160–5990 BCE
Ki−6691 7245±60 ? 6210–6020 BCE
142 Chapter 8
were the source of the first domesticated cattle in the North Pontic region.
The Criş pioneers moved eastward through the forest-steppe zone in the
piedmont northwest of the Black Sea, where rainfall agriculture was possible,
avoiding the lowland steppes on the coast and the lower courses of
the rivers that ran through them into the sea.
Archaeologists have identified at least thirty Criş settlement sites in
the East Carpathian piedmont, a region of forests interspersed with natural
meadows cut by deep, twisting river valleys (figure 8.3). Most Criş
farming hamlets were built on the second terraces of rivers, overlooking
the floodplain; some were located on steep-sided promontories above the
floodplain (Suceava); and a few farms were located on the high forested
ridges between the rivers (Sakarovka I). Houses were one room, built with
timber posts and beams, plaster-on-wattle walls, and probably reedthatched
roofs. Larger homes, sometimes oval in outline, were built over
dug-out floors and contained a kitchen with a domed clay oven; lighter,
smaller structures were built on the surface with an open fire in the center.
Most villages consisted of just a few families living in perhaps three to ten
smoky thatched pit-dwellings, surrounded by agricultural fields, gardens,
plum orchards, and pastures for the animals. No Criş cemeteries are
known. We do not know what they did with their dead. We do know,
however, that they still prized and wore white shell bracelets made from
imported Spondylus, an Aegean species that was first made into bracelets
by the original pioneers in Early Neolithic Greece.10
Criş families cultivated barley, millet, peas, and four varieties of wheat
(emmer, einkorn, spelt, and bread wheats). Wheat and peas were not native
to southeastern Europe; they were exotics, domesticated in the Near
East, carried into Greece by sea-borne immigrant farmers, and propagated
through Europe from Greece. Residues inside pots suggest that
grains were often eaten in the form of a soup thickened with flour. Charred
fragments of Neolithic bread from Germany and Switzerland suggest that
wheat flour was also made into a batter that was fried or baked, or the
grains were moistened and pressed into small whole-grain baked loaves.
Criş harvesting sickles used a curved red deer antler inset with flint blades
5–10cm long, angled so that their corners formed teeth. Their working
corners show “sickle gloss” from cutting grain. The same type of sickle and
flint blade is found in all the Early Neolithic farming settlements of the
Danube-Balkans-Carpathians. Most of the meat in the East Carpathian
Criş diet was from cattle and pigs, with red deer a close third, followed by
sheep—a distribution of species reflecting their largely forested environment.
Their small-breed cows and pigs were slightly different from the
First Farmers and Herders 143
Figure 8.3 Mesolithic and Neolithic sites from the Carpathian Mountains to the Ural River.
forest-steppe
steppe
m m
m
m m
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x
Bug-Dniester
Surskii
Cris
Crimean
Neolithic
Mesolithic
LBK
Dnieper-
Donets
Steppe Early
Neolithic
L E G E N D
Danube
Seret
Prut
Dnies
ter
S.Bug
Dnieper
Donets
Volga
Don
Samara
Ural
URALMts.
Volga
C A U C A S U S M t s .
CASPIAN
SEA
Dnieper
Rapids
Danube
Delta
B L A C K S E A
C
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S P I A N
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SAKAROVASAKAROVA
MIRNOEMIRNOE
SOROKI
SOROKI
GIRLIGIRLI
GIRZHEVO
GIRZHEVO
KAMENNAYAKAMENNAYA
MOGILAMOGILA
SURSKII
SURSKII VASILIEVKA IIVASILIEVKA II
RAKUSHECHNI YARRAKUSHECHNI YAR
MATVEEVMATVEEV
KURGANKURGAN
VARFOLOMIEVKAVARFOLOMIEVKA
SUEK-TESUEK-TE
JE-KALGANJE-KALGAN
KUGATKUGAT
KAIR-SHAKKAIR-SHAKIGRENIGREN
DANUBIANDANUBIAN
NEOLITHICNEOLITHIC
SAKAROVA
MIRNOE
SOROKI
GIRLI
GIRZHEVO
KAMENNAYA
MOGILA
SURSKII VASILIEVKA II
RAKUSHECHNI YAR
MATVEEV
KURGAN
VARFOLOMIEVKA
SUEK-TE
JE-KALGAN
KUGAT
KAIR-SHAKIGREN
DANUBIAN
NEOLITHIC
IVANOVSKAYA
DZHANGAR
local wild aurochs or wild boar but not markedly so. The sheep, however,
were exotic newcomers, an invasive species like wheat and peas, brought
into the steep Carpathian valleys by strange people whose voices made a
new kind of sound.11
Criş ceramic vessels were hand-made by the coiling method, and included
plain pots for cooking and storage, and a variety of fine wares with
polished reddish-brown surfaces—tureens, bowls, and cups on pedestals
(figure 8.2). Decorative designs were incised with a stick on the clay surface
before firing or were impressed with a fingernail. Very rarely they
were painted in broad brown stripes. The shapes and designs made by Criş
settlers in the East Carpathians were characteristic of periods III and IV
of the Criş culture; older sites of stages I and II are found only in eastern
Hungary, the Danube valley, and Transylvania.
Criş farmers never penetrated east of the Prut-Dniester watershed. In
the Dniester valley they came face-to-face with a dense population of local
foragers, known today as the Bug-Dniester culture, named after the two
river valleys (Dniester and South Bug) where most of their sites are found.
The Bug-Dniester culture was the filter through which farming and stockbreeding
economies were introduced to Pontic-Caspian societies farther
east (figure 8.3).
The Criş people were different from their Bug-Dniester neighbors in
many ways: Criş flint tool kits featured large blades and few scrapers,
whereas the foragers used microlithic blades and many scrapers; most Criş
villages were on the better-drained soils of the second terrace, convenient
for farming, and most foragers lived on the floodplain, convenient for fishing;
whereas Criş woodworkers used polished stone axes, the foragers used
chipped flint axes; Criş pottery was distinct both in the way it was made
and its style of decoration; and Criş farmers raised and ate various exotic
foods, including mutton, which has a distinctive taste. Four forged cylindrical
copper beads were found at the Criş site of Selishte, dated 5800–5600
BCE (6830±100 BP).12
They show an early awareness of the metallic
minerals in the mountains of Transylvania (copper, silver, gold) and the
Balkans (copper), something the foragers of southeastern Europe had
never noticed.
Some archaeologists have speculated that the East Carpathian Criş
culture could have been an acculturated population of local foragers who
had adopted a farming economy, rather than immigrant pioneers.13
This is
unlikely given the numerous similarities between the material culture and
economy of Criş sites in the Danube valley and the East Carpathians, and
the sharp differences between the East Carpathian Criş culture and the
First Farmers and Herders 145
146 Chapter 8
local foragers. But it really is of no consequence—no one seriously believes
that the East Carpathian Criş people were genetically “pure” anyway. The
important point is that the people who lived in Criş villages in the East
Carpathians were culturally Criş in almost all the material signs of their
identity, and given how they got there, almost certainly in nonmaterial
signs like language as well. The Criş culture came, without any doubt,
from the Danube valley.
The Language of the Criş Culture
If the Starcevo–Criş–Karanovo migrants were at all similar to pioneer
farmers in North America, Brazil, southeast Asia, and other parts of the
world, it is very likely that they retained the language spoken in their parent
villages in northern Greece. Forager languages were more apt to decline
in the face of agricultural immigration. Farmers had a higher birth
rate; their settlements were larger, and were occupied permanently. They
produced food surpluses that were easier to store over the winter. Owning
and feeding “cultured” animals has always been seen as an utterly different
ethos from hunting wild ones, as Ian Hodder emphasized. The material
and ritual culture and economy of the immigrant farmers were imposed
on the landscapes of Greece and southeastern Europe and persisted there,
whereas the external signs of forager identity disappeared. The language
of the foragers might have had substrate effects on that of the farmers, but
it is difficult to imagine a plausible scenario under which it could have
competed with the farmers’ language.14
What languages were spoken by Starčevo, Criş, and Karanovo I pioneers?
The parent language for all of them was spoken in the Thessalian
plain of Greece, where the first Neolithic settlements were founded about
6700–6500 BCE probably by seafarers who island-hopped from western
Anatolia in open boats. Katherine Perlés has convincingly demonstrated
that the material culture and economy of the first farmers in Greece was
transplanted from the Near East or Anatolia. An origin somewhere in
western Anatolia is suggested by similarities in pottery, flint tools, ornaments,
female figurines, pintadera stamps, lip labrets, and other traits. The
migrants leapfrogged to the Thessalian plain, the richest agricultural land
in Greece, almost certainly on the basis of information from scouts (probably
Aegean fishermen) who told their relatives in Anatolia about the
destination. The population of farmers in Thessaly grew rapidly. At least
120 Early Neolithic settlements stood on the Thessalian plain by 6200–
6000 BCE, when pioneers began to move north into the temperate forests
of southeastern Europe. The Neolithic villages of Thessaly provided the
original breeds of domesticated sheep, cattle, wheat, and barley, as well
as red-on-white pottery, female-centered domestic rituals, bracelets and
beads made of Aegean Spondylus shell, flint tool types, and other traditions
that were carried into the Balkans. The language of Neolithic Thessaly
probably was a dialect of a language spoken in western Anatolia about
6500 BCE. Simplification and leveling should have occurred among the
first colonist dialects in Thessaly, so the 120 villages occupied five hundred
years later spoke a language that had passed through a bottleneck and
probably was just beginning to separate again into strongly differentiated
dialects.15
The tongue spoken by the first Criş farmers in the East Carpathian
foothills about 5800–5600 BCE was removed from the parent tongue
spoken by the first settlers in Thessaly by less than a thousand years—the
same interval that separates Modern American English from AngloSaxon.
That was long enough for several new Old European Neolithic
languages to have emerged from the Thessalian parent, but they would
have belonged to a single language family. That language family was not
Indo-European. It came from the wrong place (Anatolia and Greece) at
the wrong time (before 6500 BCE). Curiously a fragment of that lost language
might be preserved in the Proto-Indo-European term for bull,
*tawro-s, which many linguists think was borrowed from an Afro-Asiatic
term. The Afro-Asiatic super-family generated both Egyptian and Semitic
in the Near East, and one of its early languages might have been spoken in
Anatolia by the earliest farmers. Perhaps the Criş people spoke a language
of Afro-Asiatic type, and as they drove their cattle into the East Carpathian
valleys they called them something like *tawr-.16
Farmer Meets Forager: The Bug-Dniester Culture
The first indigenous North Pontic people to adopt Criş cattle breeding and
perhaps also the Criş word for bull were the people of the Bug-Dniester
culture, introduced a few pages ago. They occupied the frontier where the
expansion of the Criş farmers came to a halt, apparently blocked by the
Bug-Dniester culture itself. The initial contact between farmers and foragers
must have been a fascinating event. The Criş immigrants brought herds
of cultured animals that wandered up the hillsides among the deer. They
introduced sheep, plum orchards, and hot wheat-cakes. Their families
lived in the same place all year, year after year; they cut down the trees to
make houses and orchards and gardens; and they spoke a foreign language.
First Farmers and Herders 147
148 Chapter 8
The foragers’ language might have been part of the broad language family
from which Proto-Indo-European later emerged, although, since the ultimate
fate of the Bug-Dniester culture was extinction and assimilation,
their dialect probably died with their culture.17
The Bug-Dniester culture grew out of Mesolithic forager cultures that
dwelt in the region since the end of the last Ice Age. Eleven Late Mesolithic
technological-typological groups have been defined by differences in
flint tool kits just in Ukraine; other Late Mesolithic flint tool-based groups
have been identified in the Russian steppes east of the Don River, in the
North Caspian Depression, and in coastal Romania. Mesolithic camps
have been found in the lower Danube valley and the coastal steppes northwest
of the Black Sea, not far from the Criş settlement area. In the Dobruja,
the peninsula of rocky hills skirted by the Danube delta at its
mouth, eighteen to twenty Mesolithic surface sites were found just in one
small area northwest of Tulcea on the southern terraces of the Danube
River. Late Mesolithic groups also occupied the northern side of the estuary.
Mirnoe is the best-studied site here. The Late Mesolithic hunters at
Mirnoe hunted wild aurochs (83% of bones), wild horse (14%), and the
extinct Equus hydruntinus (1.1%). Farther up the coast, away from the
Danube delta, the steppes were drier, and at Late Mesolithic Girzhevo, on
the lower Dniester, 62% of the bones were of wild horses, with fewer aurochs
and Equus hydruntinus. There is no archaeological trace of contact
between these coastal steppe foragers and the Criş farmers who were advancing
into the upland forest-steppe.18
The story is different in the forest-steppe. At least twenty-five BugDniester
sites have been excavated in the forest-steppe zone in the middle
and upper parts of the South Bug and Dniester River valleys, in the transitional
ecological zone where rainfall was sufficient for the growth of forests
but there were still open meadows and some pockets of steppe. This environment
was favored by the Criş immigrants. In it the native foragers had
for generations hunted red deer, roe deer, and wild boar, and caught riverine
fish (especially the huge river catfish, Siluris glanis). Early Bug-Dniester flint
tools showed similarities both to coastal steppe groups (Grebenikov and
Kukrekskaya types of tool kits) and northern forest groups (Donets types).
Pottery and the Beginning of the Neolithic
The Bug-Dniester culture was a Neolithic culture; Bug-Dniester people
knew how to make fired clay pottery vessels. The first pottery in the
Pontic-Caspian region, and the beginning of the Early Neolithic, is asso-
ciated with the Elshanka culture in the Samara region in the middle
Volga River valley. It is dated by radiocarbon (on shell) about 7000–6500
BCE, which makes it, surprisingly, the oldest pottery in all of Europe.
The pots were made of a clay-rich mud collected from the bottoms of stagnant
ponds. They were formed by the coiling method and were baked in
open fires at 450–600°C (figure 8.4).19
From this northeastern source ceramic
technology diffused south and westward. It was adopted widely by
most foraging and fishing bands across the Pontic-Caspian region about
6200–6000 BCE, before any clear contact with southern farmers. Early
Neolithic pottery tempered with vegetal material and crushed shells appeared
at Surskii Island in the Dnieper Rapids in levels dated about
6200–5800 BCE. In the lower Don River valley a crude vegetal-tempered
pottery decorated with incised geometric motifs appeared at Rakushechni
Yar and other sites such as Samsonovka in levels dated 6000–5600 BCE.20
Similar designs and vessel shapes, but made with a shell-tempered clay
fabric, appeared on the lower Volga, at Kair Shak III dated about 5700–
5600 BCE (6720±80 BP). Older pottery was made in the North Caspian
at Kugat, where a different kind of pottery was stratified beneath Kair
Shak-type pottery, possibly the same age as the pottery at Surskii Island.
Primitive, experimental ceramic fragments appeared about 6200 BCE
also at Matveev Kurgan in the steppes north of the Sea of Azov. The oldest
pottery south of the middle Volga appeared at the Dnieper Rapids
(Surskii), on the lower Don (Rakushechni Yar), and on the lower Volga
(Kair Shak III, Kugat) at about the same time, around 6200–6000 BCE
(figure 8.4).
The earliest pottery in the South Bug valley was excavated by Danilenko
at Bas’kov Ostrov and Sokolets II, dated by five radiocarbon dates about
6200–6000 BCE, about the same age as Surskii on the Dnieper.21
In the
Dniester River valley, just west of the South Bug, at Soroki II, archaeologists
excavated two stratified Late Mesolithic occupations (levels 2 and 3)
dated by radiocarbon to about 6500–6200 BCE. They contained no pottery.
Pottery making was adopted by the early Bug-Dniester culture about
6200 BCE, probably the same general time it appeared in the Dnieper
valley and the Caspian Depression.
Farmer-Forager Exchanges in the Dniester Valley
After about 5800–5700 BCE, when Criş farmers moved into the East
Carpathian foothills from the west, the Dniester valley became a frontier
between two very different ways of life. At Soroki II the uppermost
First Farmers and Herders 149
Figure 8.4 Top: Early Neolithic ceramics of Elshanka type on
the middle Volga (7000–6500 BCE); middle: ceramics and flint
tools from Kugat (perhaps 6000 BCE), North Caspian; bottom:
ceramics and flint tools from Kair-Shak III (5700–5600 BCE)
North Caspian. After (top) Mamonov 1995; and (middle and bottom)
Barynkin and Kozin 1998.
occupation level (1) was left by Bug-Dniester people who clearly had
made contact with the incoming Criş farmers, dated by good radiocarbon
dates at about 5700–5500 BCE. Some of the ceramic vessels in level
1 were obvious copies of Criş vessels—round-bodied, narrow-mouthed
jars on a ring base and bowls with carinated sides. But they were made
locally, using clay tempered with sand and plant fibers. The rest of the
pottery in level 1 looked more like indigenous bag-shaped South Bug
ceramics (figure 8.5). Continuity in the flint tools between level 1 and
the older levels 2 and 3 suggests that it was the same basic culture, and
all three levels are traditionally assigned to the Bug-Dniester culture.
The Bug-Dniester people who lived at Soroki II in the level 1 camp
copied more than just Criş pottery. Botanists found seed impressions in
the clay vessels of three kinds of wheat. Level 1 also yielded a few bones
from small domesticated cattle and pigs. This was the beginning of a significant
shift—the adoption of an imported food-production economy by
the native foragers. It is perhaps noteworthy that the exotic ceramic types
copied by Soroki II potters were small Criş pedestaled jars and bowls,
probably used to serve drink and food rather than to store or cook it. Perhaps
Criş foods were served to visiting foragers in jars and bowls like these
inside Criş houses, inspiring some Bug-Dniester families to re-create both
the new foods and the vessels in which they were served. But the original
decorative motifs on Bug-Dniester pottery, the shapes of the largest pots,
the vegetal and occasional shell temper in the clay, and the low-temperature
firing indicate that early Bug-Dniester potters knew their own techniques,
clays, and tempering formulas. The largest pots they made (for cooking?
storage?) were shaped like narrow-mouthed baskets, unlike any shape
made by Criş potters.
Three kinds of wheat impressions appeared in the clay of early BugDniester
pots at two sites in the Dniester valley: Soroki II/level 1 and
Soroki III. Both sites had impressions of emmer, einkorn, and spelt.22
Was the grain actually grown locally? Both sites had a variety of wheats,
with impressions of chaff and spikelets, parts removed during threshing.
The presence of threshing debris suggests that at least some grain was
grown and threshed locally. The foragers of the Dniester valley seem to
have cultivated at least small plots of grain very soon after their initial
contact with Criş farmers. What about the cattle?
In three Early Bug-Dniester Neolithic sites in the Dniester valley occupied
about 5800–5500 BCE, domesticated cattle and swine averaged
24% of the 329 bones recovered from garbage pits, if each bone is counted
for the NISP; or 20% of the animals, if the bones are converted into a
First Farmers and Herders 151
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minimum number of individuals, or MNI. Red deer and roe deer remained
more important than domesticated animals in the meat diet. Middle
Bug-Dniester sites (Samchin phase), dated about 5600–5400 BCE,
contained more domesticated pigs and cattle: at Soroki I/level 1a, a
Middle-phase site, cattle and swine made up 49% of the 213 bones recovered
(32% MNI). By the Late (Savran) phase, about 5400–5000 BCE,
domesticated pigs and cattle totaled 55% of the animal bones (36% MNI)
in two sites.23
In contrast, the Bug-Dniester settlement sites in the South
Figure 8.5 Pottery types of the Bug-Dniester culture. The four vessels in the
top row appear to have been copied after Criş types seen in Figure 8.2. After
Markevich 1974; and Dergachev 1999.
Bug valley, farther away from the source of the domesticated animals,
never showed more than 10% domesticated animal bones. But even in the
South Bug valley a few domesticated cattle and pigs appeared at Bas’kov
Ostrov and Mit’kov Ostrov very soon after the Criş farmers entered the
Eastern Carpathian foothills. The “availability” phase, in Zvelebil’s threephase
description of farmer-forager interactions, was very brief.24
Why?
What was so attractive about Criş foods and even the pottery vessels in
which they were served?
There are three possibilities: intermarriage, population pressure, and
status competition. Intermarriage is an often-repeated but not very convincing
explanation for incremental changes in material culture. In this
case, imported Criş-culture wives would be the vehicle through which
Criş-culture pottery styles and foods should have appeared in Bug-Dniester
settlements. But Warren DeBoer has shown that wives who marry into a
foreign tribe among tribal societies often feel so exposed and insecure that
they become hyper-correct imitators of their new cultural mores rather
than a source of innovation. And the technology of Bug-Dniester ceramics,
the method of manufacture, was local. Technological styles are often better
indicators of ethnic origin than decorative styles. So, although there may
have been intermarriage, it is not a persuasive explanation for the innovations
in pottery or economy on the Dniester frontier.25
Was it population pressure? Were the pre-Neolithic Bug-Dniester foragers
running out of good hunting and fishing grounds, and looking for
ways to increase the amount of food that could be harvested within their
hunting territories? Probably not. The forest-steppe was an ideal hunting
territory, with maximal amounts of the forest-edge environment preferred
by deer. The abundant tree pollen in Criş-period soils indicates that the
Criş pioneers had little impact on the forest around them, so their arrival
did not greatly reduce deer populations. A major component of the BugDniester
diet was riverine fish, some of which supplied as much meat as
a small adult pig, and there is no evidence that fish stocks were falling.
Cattle and pigs might have been acquired by cautious foragers as a hedge
against a bad year, but the immediate motive probably was not hunger.
The third possibility is that the foragers were impressed by the abundance
of food available for feasting and seasonal festivals among Criş
farmers. Perhaps some Bug-Dniester locals were invited to such festivals
by the Criş farmers in an attempt to encourage peaceful coexistence. Socially
ambitious foragers might have begun to cultivate gardens and raise
cattle to sponsor feasts among their own people, even making serving
bowls and cups like those used in Criş villages—a political explanation,
First Farmers and Herders 153
154 Chapter 8
and one that also explains why Criş pots were copied. Unfortunately neither
culture had cemeteries, and so we cannot examine graves to look for
evidence of a growing social hierarchy. Status objects seem to have been
few, with the possible exception of food itself. Probably both economic
insurance and social status played roles in the slow but steady adoption of
food production in the Dniester valley.
The importance of herding and cultivation in the Bug-Dniester diet
grew very gradually. In Criş settlements domesticated animals contributed
70–80% of the bones in kitchen middens. In Bug-Dniester settlements
domesticated animals exceeded hunted wild game only in the latest phase,
and only in the Dniester valley, immediately adjacent to Criş settlements.
Bug-Dniester people never ate mutton—not one single sheep bone has
been found in a Bug-Dniester site. Early Bug-Dniester bakers did not use
Criş-style saddle querns to grind their grain; instead, they initially used
small, rhomboidal stone mortars of a local style, switching to Criş-style
saddle querns only in the middle Bug-Dniester phase. They preferred their
own chipped flint axe types to the smaller polished stone Criş axes. Their
pottery was quite distinctive. And their historical trajectory led directly
back to the local Mesolithic populations, unlike the Criş culture.
Even after 5500–5200 BCE, when a new farming culture, the Linear
Pottery culture, moved into the East Carpathian piedmont from southern
Poland and replaced the Criş culture, the Dniester valley frontier survived.
No Linear Pottery sites are known east of the Dniester valley.26
The
Dniester was a cultural frontier, not a natural one. It persisted despite the
passage of people and trade goods across it, and through significant cultural
changes on each side. Persistent cultural frontiers, particularly at the
edges of ancient migration streams, usually are ethnic and linguistic frontiers.
The Bug-Dniester people may well have spoken a language belonging
to the language family that produced Pre-Proto-Indo-European, while
their Criş neighbors spoke a language distantly related to those of Neolithic
Greece and Anatolia.
Beyond the Frontier: Pontic-Caspian Foragers
before Cattle Arrived
The North Pontic societies east of the Dniester frontier continued to live
as they always had, by hunting, gathering wild plants, and fishing until
about 5200 BCE. Domesticated cattle and hot wheatcakes might have
seemed irresistibly attractive to the foragers who were in direct contact
with the farmers who presented and legitimized them, but, away from
that active frontier, North Pontic forager-fishers were in no rush to become
animal tenders. Domesticated animals can only be raised by people
who are committed morally and ethically to watching their families go
hungry rather than letting them eat the breeding stock. Seed grain and
breeding stock must be saved, not eaten, or there will be no crop and no
calves the next year. Foragers generally value immediate sharing and generosity
over miserly saving for the future, so the shift to keeping breeding
stock was a moral as well as an economic one. It probably offended the old
morals. It is not surprising that it was resisted, or that when it did begin it
was surrounded by new rituals and a new kind of leadership, or that the
new leaders threw big feasts and shared food when the deferred investment
paid off. These new rituals and leadership roles were the foundation
of Indo-European religion and society.27
The most heavily populated part of the Pontic-Caspian steppes was the
place where the shift to cattle keeping happened next after the BugDniester
region. This was around the Dnieper Rapids. The Dnieper Rapids
started at modern Dnepropetrovsk, where the Dnieper River began to
cut down to the coastal lowlands through a shelf of granite bedrock, dropping
50m in elevation over 66 km. The Rapids contained ten major cascades,
and in early historical accounts each one had its own name, guardian
spirits, and folklore. Fish migrating upstream, like the sudak (Lucioperca),
could be taken in vast quantities at the Rapids, and the swift water between
the cascades was home to wels (Silurus glanis), a type of catfish that
grows to 16 feet. The bones of both types of fish are found in Mesolithic
and Neolithic camps near the Rapids. At the southern end of the Rapids
there was a ford near Kichkas where the wide Dnieper could be crossed
relatively easily on foot, a strategic place in a world without bridges.
The Rapids and many of the archaeological sites associated with them
were inundated by dams and reservoirs built between 1927 and 1958.
Among the many sites discovered in connection with reservoir construction
was Igren 8 on the east bank of the Dnieper. Here the deepest level F
contained Late Mesolithic Kukrekskaya flint tools; levels E and E1 above
contained Surskii Early Neolithic pottery (radiocarbon dated 6200–5800
BCE); and stratum D1 above that contained Middle Neolithic DnieperDonets
I pottery tempered with plant fibers and decorated with incised
chevrons and small comb stamps (probably about 5800–5200 BCE but
not directly dated by radiocarbon). The animal bones in the DnieperDonets
I garbage were from red deer and fish. The shift to cattle keeping
had not yet begun. Dnieper-Donets I was contemporary with the BugDniester
culture.28
First Farmers and Herders 155
156 Chapter 8
Campsites of foragers who made Dnieper-Donets I (DDI) pottery
have been excavated on the southern borders of the Pripet Marshes in the
northwest and in the middle Donets valley in the east, or over much of
the forest-steppe and northern steppe zone of Ukraine. At Girli (figure
8.6) on the upper Teterev River near Zhitomir, west of Kiev, a DDI settlement
contained eight hearths arranged in a northeast-southwest line of
four pairs, each pair about 2–3m apart, perhaps representing a shelter
some 14m long for four families. Around the hearths were thirty-six
hundred flint tools including microlithic blades, and sherds of pointbased
pots decorated with comb-stamped and pricked impressions. The
food economy depended on hunting and gathering. Girli was located on a
trail between the Dnieper and South Bug rivers, and the pottery was
similar in shape and decoration to some Bug-Dniester ceramics of the
middle or Samchin phase. But DDI sites did not contain domesticated
animals or plants, or even polished stone axes like those of the Criş and
late Bug-Dniester cultures; DDI axes were still chipped from large pieces
of flint.29
Figure 8.6 Dnieper-Donets I camp at Girli, Ukraine, probably about 5600–5200
BCE. After Neprina 1970 , Figures 3, 4, and 8.
Forager Cemeteries around the Dnieper Rapids
Across most of Ukraine and European Russia post-glacial foragers did not
create cemeteries. The Bug-Dniester culture was typical: they buried their
dead by ones and twos, often using an old campsite, perhaps the one where
the death occurred. Graveside rituals took place but not in places set aside
just for them. Cemeteries were different: they were formal plots of ground
reserved just for funerals, funeral monuments, and public remembrance
of the dead. Cemeteries were visible statements connecting a piece of
land with the ancestors. During reservoir construction around the Dnieper
Rapids archaeologists found eight Mesolithic and forager Neolithic
cemeteries, among them Vasilievka I (twenty-four graves), Vasilievka II
(thirty-two graves), Vasilievka III (forty-five graves), Vasilievka V (thirtyseven
graves), Marievka (fifteen graves), and Volos’ke (nineteen graves). No
comparable cluster of forager cemeteries exists anywhere else in the PonticCaspian
region.
Several different forager populations seem to have competed with one
another around the Dnieper Rapids at the end of the Ice Age. Already by
about 8000 BCE, as soon as the glaciers melted, at least three skull-andface
types, a narrow-faced gracile type (Volos’ke), a broad-faced mediumweight
type (Vasilievka I), and a broad-faced robust type (Vasilievka III)
occupied different cemeteries and were buried in different poses (contracted
and extended). Two of the nineteen individuals buried at Volos’ke
and two (perhaps three) of the forty-five at Vasilevka III were wounded by
weapons tipped with Kukrekskaya-type microlithic blades. The Vasilievka
III skeletal type and burial posture ultimately spread over the whole Rapids
during the Late Mesolithic, 7000–6200 BCE. Two cemeteries that
were assumed to be Early Neolithic (Vasilievka II and Marievka) because
of the style of the grave now are dated by radiocarbon to 6500–6000
BCE, or the Late Mesolithic.
Only one of the Dnieper Rapids cemeteries, Vasilievka V, is dated to the
Middle Neolithic DDI period by radiocarbon dates (5700–5300 BCE). At
Vasilevka V thirty-seven skeletons were buried in supine positions (on their
backs) with their hands near the pelvis, with their heads to the northeast.
Some were buried singly in individual pits, and others apparently were layered
in reused graves. Sixteen graves in the center of the cemetery seem to
represent two or three superimposed layers of burials, the first hint of a collective
burial ritual that would be elaborated greatly in the following centuries.
Eighteen graves out of thirty-seven were sprinkled with red ochre,
First Farmers and Herders 157
158 Chapter 8
again a hint of things to come. The grave gifts at Vasilievka V, however,
were very simple, limited to microlithic flint blades and flint scrapers.
These were the last people on the Dnieper Rapids who clung to the old
morality and rejected cattle keeping.30
Foragers on the Lower Volga and Lower Don
Different styles of pottery were made among the Early Neolithic foragers
who lived even farther east, a longer distance away from the forager/farmer
frontier on the Dniester. Forager camps on the lower Volga River dated
between 6000 and 5300 BCE contained flat-based open bowls made of
clay tempered with crushed shell and vegetal material, and were decorated
by stabbing rows of impressions with a triangular-ended stick or drawing
incised diamond and lozenge shapes. These decorative techniques were different
from the comb-stamps used to decorate DDI pottery in the Dnieper
valley. Flint tool kits on the Volga contained many geometric microliths,
60–70% of the tools, like the flint tools of the earlier Late Mesolithic foragers.
Important Early Neolithic sites included Varfolomievka level 3 (radiocarbon
dated about 5900–5700 BCE) and Kair-Shak III (also dated
about 5900–5700 BCE) in the lower Volga region; and the lower levels at
Rakushechni Yar, a dune on the lower Don (dated 6000–5600 BCE).31
At
Kair Shak III, located in an environment that was then semi-desert, the
economy was based almost entirely on hunting onagers (Equus hemionus).
The animal bones at Varfolomievka, located in a small river valley in the
dry steppe, have not been reported separately by level, so it is impossible to
say what the level 3 Early Neolithic economy was, but half of all the animal
bones at Varfolomievka were of horses (Equus caballus), with some
bones of aurochs (Bos primigenius). Fish scales (unidentified) were found
on the floors of the dwellings. At Rakushechni Yar, then surrounded by
broad lower-Don valley gallery forests, hunters pursued red deer, wild
horses, and wild pigs. As I noted in several endnotes in this chapter,
some archaeologists have claimed that the herding of cattle and sheep
began earlier in the lower Don-Azov steppes, but this is unlikely. Before
5200 BCE the forager-farmer frontier remained confined to the Dniester
valley.32
The Gods Give Cattle
The Criş colonization of the Eastern Carpathians about 5800 BCE created
a robust and persistent cultural frontier in the forest-steppe zone at
the Dniester valley. Although the Bug-Dniester culture quickly acquired
at least some domesticated cereals, pigs, and cattle, it retained an economy
based primarily on hunting and gathering, and remained culturally and
economically distinct in most ways. Beyond it, both in the forest-steppe
zone and the steppe river valleys to the east, no other indigenous societies
seem to have adopted cereal cultivation or domesticated animals until after
about 5200 BCE.
In the Dniester valley, native North Pontic cultures had direct, face-toface
contact with farmers who spoke a different language, had a different
religion, and introduced an array of invasive new plants and animals as if
they were something wonderful. The foragers on the frontier itself rapidly
accepted some cultivated plants and animals but rejected others, particularly
sheep. Hunting and fishing continued to supply most of the diet.
They did not display obvious signs of a shift to new rituals or social structures.
Cattle keeping and wheat cultivation seem to have been pursued
part-time, and were employed as an insurance policy against bad years and
perhaps as a way of keeping up with the neighbors, not as a replacement of
the foraging economy and morality. For centuries even this halfway shift
to partial food production was limited to the Dniester valley, which became
a narrow and well-defined frontier. But after 5200 BCE a new
threshold in population density and social organization seems to have been
crossed among European Neolithic farmers. Villages in the East Carpathian
piedmont adopted new customs from the larger towns in the lower
Danube valley, and a new, more complex culture appeared, the CucuteniTripolye
culture. Cucuteni-Tripolye villages spread eastward. The Dniester
frontier was breached, and large western farming communities pushed into
the Dniester and South Bug valleys. The Bug-Dniester culture, the original
frontier society, disappeared into the wave of Cucuteni-Tripolye immi-
grants.
But away to the east, around the Dnieper Rapids, the bones of domesticated
cattle, pigs, and, remarkably, even sheep began to appear regularly
in garbage dumps. The Dnieper Rapids was a strategic territory, and the
clans that controlled it already had more elaborate rituals than clans elsewhere
in the steppes. When they accepted cattle keeping it had rapid
economic and social consequences across the steppe zone.
First Farmers and Herders 159