The Sea of Azov, the Khvalynsk culture and the Maikop culture
Although southern Caucasia may have some claim to have been the PIE homeland, northern Caucasia and the steppe north along the Don and the Volga have a better one.54 This area in the fourth millennium bc had antecedents distant in both time and place. Late in the seventh or early in the sixth millennium bc Neolithic colonists seem to have made their way along the shore of the Black Sea, through the Kerch Strait to the Sea of Azov and the rivers that flow into it: especially the Kalmius, the Don and the Kuban. The land along the Kalmius and Don was inhabited by foragers and hunters, who preyed especially upon the wild horses that roamed the grassland steppe. The Mesolithic population is best known from burials associated with the Dnieper-Donets culture. Although they did not produce their own food, the hunter-gatherers did make pottery and usually decorated it with a comb.55
At some point in the seventh millennium bc the first Neolithic settlements in the area were planted, just to the west of the Don estuary on the Sea of Azov. The Neolithic settlers, who must have come by sea, brought with them the four domesticates familiar in western Anatolia and the Balkans: cattle, sheep, goats and pigs.56 Although it is not certain where the colonists came from, the available evidence ties the Chalcolithic cultures of the northeastern Black Sea to the settlements along the rivers that empty into the northwestern shore of the Black Sea. According to Mariya Ivanova, the earliest settlements in northern Caucasia were “a distant extension of the Copper Age culture of southeastern Europe.”57 If that is correct, I would assume that the colonists from the east brought with them an Indo-Hittite language.
The newcomers were apparently accepted by the locals, and for over three millennia the Neolithic and the indigenous populations seem to have lived side- by-side. Calibration of carbon dates indicates that several Neolithic cemeteries on the lower Don and its estuary, the most important one at Mariupol, were in use at least as early as 6000 bc.58 From the Sea of Azov the Neolithic economy moved up the Don and especially up the Volga, which at its Volgograd bend lies less than 100 km east of the Don. Along the middle Volga the Khvalynsk archaeological culture began ca. 5000 bc, and it continued all through the fifth millennium bc.59 Many small cemeteries from this culture have been found, but most information comes from a large cemetery (with more than 200 graves) excavated at Khvalynsk, a city on the right bank of the middle Volga some 500 km upstream from the Volgograd bend. For their meat the people in the Volga villages depended on the usual domestic animals, but also on the horse, which was so well adapted to the grassland steppe. Bones of cattle, sheep, goats and horses found in the graves indicate that these animals were regularly sacrificed at funerals. The bones at Khvalynsk are probably, as Anthony noted, the earliest evidence we have for horse domestication.
By the middle of the fifth millennium bc Chalcolithic settlers had also filtered up the Kuban river into northern Caucasia.60 Here the annual precipitation was
Figure 1.1 The pre-Maikop (Map 1) and Maikop (Map 2) culture sites. Maikop itself is number 11 on the lower map. From Ivanova 2007, p. 31. Courtesy Maria Ivanova and Aramazd: Armenian Journal of Near Eastern Studies
much greater than on the steppe. The soil in northern Caucasia is rich, and in the western and central region agriculture was very productive. In the central upland area of north Caucasia oak and beech trees were once common. The eastern stretches of north Caucasia are more arid, verging toward desert. It is in the Kuban drainage region that the great Maikop kurgan stands, the Bronze Age kurgan whose rich grave goods (discovered in 1897) give the Maikop culture its name.61
The Maikop culture was once dated late in the third millennium BC but is now dated a millennium earlier. A “pre-Maikop” culture in north Caucasia, belonging to the Neolithic period, was likewise once placed no earlier than the fourth millennium bc, but Maria Ivanova’s analysis concludes that it began in the middle of the fifth.62 Basing her conclusions on carbon dates, Ivanova dates the Maikop culture from ca. 3500 to ca. 3000 bc, and the pre-Maikop culture to the late fifth and early fourth millennium BC.
With the advent of metallurgy the Kuban settlements began to play a pivotal role. The steppe had no copper, and the people in its valleys would have had to acquire copper either from the Ural mountains far to the east, or from the Caucasus. It is not yet known when metal began to be extracted from the northern Caucasus. Most specialists have assumed that the Maikop culture depended on the Kura-Araxes for its metal. In his survey of early Caucasian metallurgy, however, Antoine Courcier challenges the assumption and observes that—in addition to gold and silver—the northern Caucasus mountains have fifty-seven deposits of copper ore, in several of which arsenic is associated with copper.63
Toward the middle of the fourth millennium bc the availability of arsenical bronze saws made possible the fashioning of wooden wheels and so of wheeled vehicles. Where first this happened is uncertain: wheeled vehicles are attested almost simultaneously as far apart as southern Mesopotamia and northern Europe.64 What is certain is that the people who made the most of the invention lived north of the Caucasus, in the Kuban drainage area. They had access to arsenical bronze, to plenty of hardwood, and to oxen that were accustomed to pulling ards, plows and sledges. It is also clear that through the Early and Middle Bronze Age the inhabitants of the Kuban region placed an unusually high value on their vehicles: in funerals a wagon often served to carry the body of a distinguished man to his grave, and went with him to the Underworld. The wagons are as strong an argument as we are likely to find that PIE speakers should be located along the northern face of the Caucasus. It is likely that PIE was also spoken along the middle Volga, the Don and the smaller rivers flowing into the Sea of Azov, but the Maikop culture may have been an especially important part of the PIE homeland.
Because of its home-grown terms for wheeled vehicles we know (contra Heggarty and Renfrew)65 that the maturation of PIE occurred between ca. 3500 and 3000 BC, and that it occurred in a land where wheeled vehicles were made and prized. Very few places meet that requirement. One of the earliest wagons was found under a kurgan at Bal’ki, on the left bank of the lower Dnieper and about 100 miles upstream from the coast. Many other wagons were found near the Dnieper in kurgan burials of the third millennium BC. These burial wagons, however, were probably not made in the grassland steppe. It is possible that they were built in southeastern Crimea, where in antiquity the northern foothills of the Crimean mountain range were covered with hardwood trees: oak, beech, hornbeam and ash. We have, however, no evidence of wagons or settlements (and, as noted above, very little evidence even of food production) in Crimea in the fourth millennium bc.
The earliest in corpore evidence of wheeled vehicles anywhere comes from the Maikop culture. When Anthony wrote The Horse the Wheel and Language the earliest such evidence seemed to date ca. 3100 bc and came from two kurgan burials, one near the lower Dnieper and the other near the Kuban.66 Still earlier evidence, available for some time, has only recently received attention.67 In 1985 archaeologists at Starokorsunskaya, near the city of Krasnodar on the Kuban river, found the remains of a funeral wagon in a burial dating ca. 3300 bc. Atop the wooden cover of a pit-grave were poorly preserved remains of at least two (solid) wooden wheels. Enough of one wheel was preserved to determine that its diameter was ca. 60 cm, with an axle perforation of 18 cm.68
For a long time wheeled vehicles remained a very important feature of life and death in the Kuban region. Archaeologists digging in the Novotitarovskaya area of the Kuban steppe have found 115 graves with wagons or wagon parts.69 Wagons were also included in burials in other parts of the Kuban steppe, and Aleksandr Gej has observed that of all the wagons found in Early and Middle Bronze Age burials on the Eurasian steppe almost half have been found in the quite small Kuban territory.70 Until a better candidate comes along, I will consider it likely that PIE was spoken along the Kuban—as well as along the Don and the middle Volga—during the pre-Maikop culture, and that during the subsequent Maikop period PIE matured.
