Life on the Pontic-Caspian Steppe

Mesolithic Life on the Steppes

The Pontic-Caspian steppe is a vast sea of grass, stretching 1800 miles from the lower Danube in the Great Hungarian plain, past the Carpathian mountains, north of the Black Sea (called the Pontic, Greek for "sea"), through Moldova, Ukraine and Russia, ending above the Caspian Sea south of the Urals.  The Great Eurasian Steppe continues through Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia and Manchuria for another 3200 miles.  The steppes generally get drier as you go east and south.  To the north are the Forest Steppe: areas of grassland interspersed with woodlands.  

During the last ice age, humans hunted wooly mammoths on the Eurasian steppe.  Following the retreat of the great ice sheets about 15,000 years ago, during the Mesolithic period, small bands of Eastern Hunter Gatherers colonized the forests north of the Pontic Caspian steppe.  While there are shallow lakes on the steppes, there's not a lot to eat, and it gets down to -35 degrees F in the winter, so the Eastern Hunter Gatherers lived mostly in the Forest Steppe zones and along the major river valleys.  Like most hunter gatherers, they were mobile, traveling from place to place, foraging for grasses, tubers, fruits, seeds, and nuts, and fishing, and hunting wild horses and aurochs (extinct huge cattle).  Mobile hunter gatherers don't leave much of a footprint for archeologists, so much of what we know we've learned from a few dwelling sites and cemeteries where the hunter-gatherers settled in permanent camps, by food rich areas on the major rivers.  The Elshanka culture lived on the middle Volga River and developed the earliest pottery in Europe, dating from the seventh millennium.  Pottery spread from there to settlements on the Dnieper Rapids by 6200 BCE.  Since most of the archeological sites are found around rivers, here's a river map for reference.  We'll be focusing mostly between the Volga River and the delta of the Danube River where it empties into the Black Sea, a distance of around 1000 miles.

The Dnieper Donets Culture 5200-4200 BCE

Life started to change dramatically starting around 5200 BCE, with the advent of the Dnieper-Donets II Culture.  The hunter gatherers who had settled on the rapids of the Dnieper river started keeping domesticated animals.  Cattle sheep/goat and pigs accounted for 30-75% of the bones in the settlements, with fish more common on the rapids, and domesticated animals more common farther away.  Herding spread throughout the steppes, reaching settlements on the Volga river by 4700 BCE.  Grain growing was  not as readily adopted, there is no evidence of cultivated grains east of the Dnieper before 4200 BCE, as evidenced by a lack of dental caries.  

Few children were buried in the grave at Mariupol, but one child had a rich selection of grave goods.  The extreme inequality in mortuary practices is similar to the nearly contemporaneous chief buried at Varna (4500 BCE), and suggests a new social structure.  The polished stone mace heads, which are only used as weapons, suggest a change in power and status: the emergence of chiefs.

Changes on the Volga: The Khvalynsk Cemetery 4500-4300 BCE

In the far east of the Pontic-Caspian steppes, on the middle Volga near Khvalynsk, a large cemetery was found.  It dates to a two hundred year period around 4400 BCE, just a few centuries after cattle herding made it to the Volga.  201 graves were found, with 373 copper objects, four stone maces and the sacrificed remains of sheep/goats, cattle and  horses.  The site was located by a large wetland of forested islands and marshes.  Large marshes are ideal for supplying fodder to cattle over the harsh Russian winter.   David Anthony wrote a comprehensive review paper on the site in 2022 titled The Eneolithic cemetery at Khvalynsk on the Volga River.   A few of the highlights of the report:

• 80% of the skeletons were found in individual graves on their backs with knees tightly raised, in contrast to the Dnieper-Donets culture which buried their dead in a supine position.  Like the Dnieper-Donets graves, red ocher was liberally sprinkled on the floor of each grave.  Orientation varied, but many graves were aligned towards the north.

• In one section of the cemetery, Khvalynsk I, 158 graves were found with 54% male and 46% female.   This seemed like a family section.  Six adult males and five adult females had copper ornaments (beads, rings or bracelets).  The other section of the cemetery, Khvalynsk II had 43 graves with 77% male and 23% female; about 30% had copper ornaments.  

• Genetic analysis showed that two extended families were buried in Khvalynsk II, one with eight members over seven generations, and one with five members over two generations.

• All the copper ornaments originated in the Balkans, from the Varna culture which had perfected ore processing at 1000 degrees C.  Some crude brazing was done in Khvalynsk at lower temperatures.  There are several sources of copper ore nearby Khvalynsk, and especially in the northern Caucasus mountains, but the expertise to extract the ore at high temperatures was limited to the Balkans at this time.

• The remains of 106 sheep/goats, 29 domesticated cattle, and 16 horses were found; two thirds were in graves, and one third were on red-ochre stained deposits above the graves.  Most of the remains were head and leg bones, perhaps the result of 'head-and-hoof' deposits in which the hide of the animal with head and legs attached is left at a ritual site as the symbol of the gods' portion, while the meat is consumed by the human participants.  One grave of three people, with the leg bones of one horse and eight cattle, would have yielded 3000 pounds of meat, enough to supply thousands of participants in a feast.  Ritual feasting can accomplish many goals: including increasing group solidarity, payment of debts, collection of tribute, recalling past glories, amassing labor surplus, promoting prestige, displaying opulence, soliciting allies, frightening enemies, equilibrating and exchanging valuables, seeking marriage partners, celebrating a life passage, arbitrating disputes, maintaining social control, making peace, instigating war, communicating with the deities, and honoring the dead. [Hastorf 2017:195]  How does feasting work in modern society?

• Analysis of the bones of the Khvalynsk people show that fish represented around 70% of their meat diet.  Horses, sheep and cattle seemed to be more important for ritual sacrifice than daily diet.

• 14% of the graves included copper ornaments and 14% of the graves included sacrificed animals, but there was no overlap.  Anthony thinks the two types of graves may denote two different classes of people.  Perhaps the copper ornaments were owned by a rich class of people involved in the copper trade.  The sacrifice receivers may have included people who had special religious status in the community, or on the other hand, may have been sacrifice victims themselves.

• Three graves had stone mace heads.  It is notable that these three graves were unique in that they each also had sacrifices and copper ornaments.  Anthony suggest that these were chiefs, like the former chief at Mariupol.  Anthony then goes out on a limb to suggest that the advent of cattle on the Volga steppe led initially to warfare and raiding.  As a consequence, chiefs rose up and using feasting and rituals, found ways to impose peace on an increasingly socially stratified population.  Here is Anthony's summary:

Khvalynsk was an exceptionally large cemetery of the mid-to-late-fifth millennium (4500–4300 BCE from dates on terrestrial animal bones), used by a heterogeneous, admixed population. Cranio-facial measurements and genetic ancestry indicate mixture between northern (forest-zone, EHG) and southern (lower Don-Caucasus, CHG) population components. The admixed Khvalynsk population exhibited significant genetic and family diversity. It seems to have been a central place for the ritual integration and unification of a population that normally lived dispersed up and down the Volga in isotopically different catchments. At least one female buried at Khlopkov Bugor, 130 km south on the Volga, was a 2nd-degree relative (grandmother or great-aunt) of a Yellow-family male buried at Khvalynsk, but the cemetery at Khvalynsk was ten times larger than at Khlopkov Bugor. The exclusive use of domesticated cattle, sheep-goats, and horses for funeral sacrifices at Khvalynsk indicates the acceptance of a new set of religious ideas about the desires of the gods and ancestors, who now could be satisfied only by the sacrifice of domesticated animals (horses included). An early phase in the evolution of this cult might be indicated by the few sheep, goat, and horse sacrifices at the older cemeteries at Ekaterinovka Mys and the related site of Sy’ezzhe about 4700–4500 BCE.  

 About 4500 BCE new long-distance exchange systems connected Khvalynsk with the Varna-era Balkans. Imported copper metal began to flow into the social and political world of steppe societies. These two new imports, copper ornaments and domesticated animals, gave ambitious families at Khvalynsk, ‘aggrandizers’ in Hayden’s terms, two different kinds of status enhancers that could be used to build alliances in a political context that featured war and human trophy-taking. Imported copper was consumed individually, so enhanced individual status; while locally-raised feast animals were consumed communally, so enhanced group solidarity and the generosity of the hosts. At death, people who wore copper ornaments did not normally receive animal sacrifices, and people who received animal sacrifices in the grave did not normally wear copper ornaments, signaling the presence of distinct social segments marked by the two new status enhancers. Polished stone maces were used at Khvalynsk to identify the only adult males who belonged to both segments (copper-users and sacrifice-receivers) simultaneously, arguably to represent the union of both. These mace-chiefs seem to signal the emergence of hierarchy during the Eneolithic, but their maces also symbolized alliance and the agreement of at least two social segments to accept one adult male as their joint representative. Khvalynsk can be regarded as ‘coalescent culture’, a culture resulting from the integration of cultural components that originally were geographically (north-south), genetically (EHG-CHG), and culturally distinct. Coalescence is different from the concept of hybridity developed in post-colonial studies, in that coalescence focuses on hybrid communities and bridge-building institutions rather than on individual agency and alterity. The coalescent community model, originally developed to characterize multi-ethnic indigenous societies in the post-Contact U.S. southeast, was revised to provide an explanatory framework for the dramatic migrations and community reorganizations of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in the U.S. southwest and the League of the Iroquois. In the American examples, coalescent communities represented the initial phase of cultural integration during a period of population movement, when cultural assimilation and hybridization processes were incomplete, under political conditions where all forms of extra-familial authority were relatively weak. Pre-existing ethnic and tribal identities as well as indigenous political authority were sustained through metaphors of kinship, common origin, or co-residence that were deeply ingrained and resistant to change even after periods of conflict, chaos, and reorganization. Coalescent communities overcame these deeply ingrained identities through the creation of new meta-identities that functioned beside the older, more limited ones. These meta-identities were founded upon new religious beliefs and rituals such as the Kachina Cult that provided new institutions and sodalities that were accorded a level of prestige equal to those of family or clan. Similarly, at Khvalynsk we witness the appearance of new funeral rituals in which domesticated mammals were the mandatory medium for the ceremonies of a social minority that apparently distributed funeral feasts to hundreds of mourners. This new set of rituals and feasts could have sustained a regional meta-identity that overcame divisions based on local kinship and co-residence. Khvalynsk II might even have been a burial place for a new multi-generational male sodality, an example of a bridging institution. As was mentioned above (see Mace Holders), the League of the Iroquois shared many features of a coalescent community but was understood by those inside the league as the product of a religious awakening inspired by a culture hero who introduced new, integrative, bridge-building rituals at a time of debilitating warfare and sorcery. The most important ritual, the Condolence Ceremony, was conducted when one of the five (originally) League chiefs died. This was perhaps paralleled in the funerals of the mace holders at Khvalynsk. The League also functioned partly to facilitate and sustain trade between previously hostile communities after intensely desired European trade goods were introduced. The Balkan copper trade could have stimulated integrative institutions in the same way. The new religious ideas and rituals at Khvalynsk can be seen as elements in the creation of a new meta-identity that unified the previously disparate populations of the Volga-Don-Caucasus steppes. 

Explaining the Suvorovo Culture 4300-4000 BCE

As we saw in the last chapter, just after the time of the Khvalynsk culture by the Volga, the first kurgans were being erected along the delta of the Danube, 1000 miles away.  The graves underneath the kurgans were very similar to the Khvalynsk graves with beads of shells, copper and horse teeth, copper rings, pendants and bracelets,  and polished stone maces.  Graves were oriented toward the east or northeast and bodies were buried on their backs with knees tightly flexed.  The floor of the graves was often covered with ochre.  Several graves had deposits of cattle skulls or bones.

Anthony theorizes that the colder weather at the end of the fifth millennium increased the importance of access to winter food for cattle herds.  The marshes by the Danube delta were the largest of any other place on the Black Sea.  Another attraction may have been access to the abundant copper in the Balkans.  If the Suvorovo cultures were horseback riders, they may have been tempted to raid the towns of Old Europe to obtain copper prestige goods.  These goods would have been valuable political tools to cement alliances among tribes, especially with the difficult stresses of climactic change.  

Throughout history farmers have been vulnerable to attacks by mounted pastoralists.  In the first chapter we saw how the Slavic tribes raided and destroyed all the towns in the Balkans in the sixth century.  In the seventh century BCE the Scythians from the steppe looted their way through the Assyrian Empire.  In the fifth century Attila the Hun swept west from the steppes and conquered much of eastern Europe.  In the eleventh century Genghis Khan rode out of the Mongolian steppes and conquered all of northern Asia from the Ukraine to Korea.

Warring pastoralists can attract recruits from settled farming communities.  Anthony describes conflict between farmers and pastoralists in Afghanistan: 

"Among the Pathans (today usually called Pashtun) on the Kandahar plateau, status depended on agricultural surpluses that came from circumscribed river-bottom fields. Pathan landowners competed for power in local councils (jirga) where no man admitted to being subservient and all appeals were phrased as requests among equals. The Baluch, a neighboring ethnic group, lived in the arid mountains and were, of necessity, pastoral herders. Although poor, the Baluch had an openly hierarchical political system, unlike the Pathan. The Pathan had more weapons than the Baluch, more people, more wealth, and generally more power and status. Yet, at the Baluch-Pathan frontier, many dispossessed Pathans crossed over to a new life as clients of Baluchi chiefs. Because Pathan status was tied to land ownership, Pathans who had lost their land in feuds were doomed to menial and peripheral lives. But Baluchi status was linked to herds, which could grow rapidly if the herder was lucky; and to political alliances, not to land. All Baluchi chiefs were the clients of more powerful chiefs, up to the office of sardar, the highest Baluchi authority, who himself owed allegiance to the khan of Kalat. Among the Baluch there was no shame in being the client of a powerful chief, and the possibilities for rapid economic and political improvement were great. So, in a situation of chronic low-level warfare at the Pathan-Baluch frontier, former agricultural refugees tended to flow toward the pastoral Baluch, and the Baluchi language thus gained new speakers. Chronic tribal warfare might generally favor pastoral over sedentary economies as herds can be defended by moving them, whereas agricultural fields are an immobile target."  Anthony, David W.. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language (pp. 174-175). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition. 

We don't know if the Suvorovo chiefs rode horses or if the collapse of Old Europe was due in part to mounted raiding.  But changes were coming on the steppe.   The Cucuteni-Trypillia culture was the only culture in Old Europe to survive into the fourth millennium.  Let's look at why.

Usatovo Overlords and Trypillian Clients 3300-3000 BCE

The ultimate mixture of farmers and steppe people come in the Usatovo culture, between the Dniester and the Danube.  These settlements on the northwest corner of the Black Sea appeared around 3300 BCE, just after the sudden abandonment of all the Cucuteni-Trypillian sites from the Southern Bug river to Romania, including all the supertown settlements.  The Usatovo settlements appear to be hybrid Trypolye towns with steppe overlords.  The Tripolye farmers buried their dead in cemeteries with female figurines but without kurgans or weapons.  Close by there were kurgan burials of steppe people who were buried with fine Tripolye pottery and new bronze daggers and axes.  Some pottery was made in Tripolye shape but with coarse steppe tempering and new cord-impressed geometric designs.  Most of the faunal assemblage were sheep, indicating perhaps indicating wool weaving.   While sheep had been domesticated for millennia, they didn't have long hairs suitable for weaving.  But around this time, larger wooly sheep evolved, most likely in a cold steppe environment.  This textile would have been warmer than the previous linens woven from flax.  Wool also could be dyed and painted.  Wool may have been a major reason that some parts of the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture survived, as a valuable source of textiles and pottery to the steppe cultures.

The Yamnaya Culture 3400-2800 BCE

Prior to the invention of the wagon, steppe herders stayed close to river valleys which afforded shelter and winter forage for their cattle.  Starting from 3400 BCE, herders moved their herds into the vast open steppe, living in carts which carried everything they needed.  Some practiced transhumance, or seasonal movement between summer pastures on the steppes and winter pastures in the river valleys.  However, some may have stayed out on the steppe all winter, like the Blackfeet of Montana.  Cattle are not smart enough to dig through snow to reach grass and will starve.  But horses will dig away the snow and herds of horses with cattle can live together on the grasslands during the winter.

The Yamnaya buried their dead beneath kurgans in a standard supine position with bent knees and covered with ochre.   The name Yamnaya is derived from a Russian word meaning "related to pits", as the Yamnaya were buried in pits beneath kurgans.   Starting from 3400 BCE, kurgans appeared in the deep steppe, far from river valleys, as well as throughout the river valleys of the Pontic-Caspian steppe.   East of the Don River, permanent settlements disappeared indicating people changed to a fully nomadic life. The culture spread rapidly so it is not clear where it originated, but Anthony thinks it came from the area of the Khvalynsk culture, by the middle Volga and Don rivers, based on pottery styles.   Yamnaya probably lived on a diet of meat, milk, yogurt, cheese, and soups made of wild seeds and greens.  The mobile eastern Yamnaya had no dental caries and were very tall: 5' 7" on average, compared to the Neolithic farmers 5'4".  Their increased height was probably due to a combination of genetic and dietary factors.

25% of kurgans contained just one burial and most had less than three.  Children were never buried in the principal grave; that was reserved for special adults.  More common people and infants may have been buried in shallow graves that have not been found.  In the eastern Volga-Don region, men were in 80% of the kurgans and women in 20%.  In the west and by the Caucasus, women and men had equal burial representation.  This may reflect an influence of the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture in the west, that did not affect the eastern steppe.  The women buried under the Volga kurgans may have represented females who occupied social positions normally assigned to men.  Anthony relates that about 20% of the first millenium BCE Scythian-Sarmatian warrior graves on the lower Don and lower Volga contained females dressed for battle as if they were men, a phenomenon that probably inspired the Greek tales about the Amazons.

Kurgans varied widely in size, from 30 feet to over 300 feet in diameter.  It is estimated that a 150 foot diameter kurgan would take more than 500 man-days to build.  Most graves contained only the body, with perhaps a bead or two, some clothing and a reed mat.  A copper dagger or axe was found in less than 5% of graves.  15% of kurgans contained the remains of domestic animals, usually the head with leg bones.  65% of the sacrifices were sheep or goats, cattle 15%, horses 8% and dogs 5%.  They weren't just sacrificing horses, they were also riding them; analysis of five Yamnaya skeletons show distinct pathologies associated with horseback riding.    One grave was found with three ram skulls next to the body and forty horse skulls arranged above the body in two neat rows.  It suggests a funeral feast of amazing size, with four thousand portions of 5 pounds of fresh meat.

The Yamnaya developed copper and bronze metallurgy which they probably obtained from the Maykop culture of the northern Caucasus.  Some metalworkers were buried with their tools: two-piece molds for a sleeved, one bladed axe, crucibles, and copper slag.  Some steppe people experimented with iron, making an iron knife long before iron began to be used in the Near East.

One interesting aspect of Yamnaya kurgans is the inclusion of large stone funeral stelae, many with carved human heads, arms, hands, belts, weapons, crooks and even animal scenes.  At least 300 of these have been found in Yamnaya kurgans, usually as grave pit covers.  However, very similar stelae have been found in Italy dating to the same time period, and part of a similar stela was found built into a stone building at the first level of Troy I.

The Yamnaya were very successful.  By 2800 BCE they had spread up the Danube into Hungary, and replaced all the cultures across the Pontic-Caspian Steppe.  The soil underneath some kurgans showed evidence of overgrazing, so perhaps they became so successful they ran out of grazing area on the steppe.

In 1956 Marija Gimbutas suggested that the "kurgan culture" began on the lower Volga and swept in three waves westwards across the steppes: a Suvorovo wave, a Sredny Stog wave, and the Yamnaya.  In a paper published this year, A genomic history of the North Pontic Region from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age  Nikitin analyzed the genomes of 78 skeletons from the Pontic-Caspian steppe and found that Gimbutas was exactly right.