David Anthony: The Horse, the Wheel, and Language

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David Anthony: The Horse, the Wheel, and Language Jul 23, 2019 18:04:47 GMT

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3. The third split in the Ringe et al. phylogeny is the departure of groups that would laterengender Italic and Celtic, and perhaps Germanic, a branch with an unresolved root. This complex movement should flow from the Pontic-Caspian steppes to the west, perhaps divided into southern (Italo-Celtic) and northern (Pre-Germanic) streams. It should be dated later than the Tocharian migration, although since these two migration streams flowed from the eastern and western margins of the PIE language community, they probably spoke different regional dialects of PIE, so some of the linguistic differences between them (supporting their chrono-logical split) could have been partly geographic-dialectical, or synchronic, rather than entirely chronological-developmental, or diachronic. The third cluster of archaeologically documented migrations meets these complicated criteria, Fig. 4.

Fig. 4. The third migration, 3000–2800 bc, of the Yamnaya immigrants into the Danube valley,and penetration of Usatovo-type and Yamnaya-type contacts with Tripol’ye CIIand pre-Corded Ware communities on the upper Vistula

The southern stream was the Yamnaya-culture migration into the Danube valley and the Balkan uplands of Bulgaria, dated about 3000–2800 bc. The migrants probably came from the Bug-Dnieper-Azov steppes, and targeted the lower Danube valley and Bulgaria, in one direc-tion; another series of movements pushed farther up the Danube to the middle Danube valley in eastern Hungary, where thousands of intrusive Yamnaya kurgan graves are assigned to this event (Ecsedy 1994), contemporary with late Baden/Cernavoda III. The rare ceramic gifts in these graves were largely derived from local Cotsofeni traditions, typical of a culture centered in the strategic Iron Gates passes, which seems to have been integrated with the Yamnaya immigrants. Pre-Celtic and Pre-Italic might have emerged from dialects spoken during this se-ries of migrations, but after the movement started, about 3000 bc, it would be perhaps 1500 years before the probable formation of Proto-Celtic (in Austria?) or Proto-Italic (in Italy?). Pre-Celtic was not a language but rather designates a phase of language history, unfortunately al-most unknown, bridging PIE and Proto-Celtic, lasting for at least 1500 years. Proto-Celtic can be regarded as a language, the reconstructable language immediately ancestral to the Celtic languages, and presumably was spoken about 1500–1000 bc. In each daughter branch there was a Pre-phase of varying lengths. We should not expect to be able to track the intervening steps in convenient language-coded pottery types.The northern stream in this third migration moved a shorter distance but was more obvi-ously and thoroughly integrated with a local agricultural population, the village farmers of the late Tripol’ye CII culture north and east of the Carpathians. At the mouth of the Dniester in the coastal steppes, dagger-holding patrons were buried under Usatovo-culture kurgans in the Dniester steppes. Tripol’ye CII people seem to have lived in the Usatovo settlement, and very similar people lived far up the Dniester, where the settlements that made fine Usatovo pottery styles (Brynzeni III) were located (Anthony 2008; Patokova et al. 2009). But Usatovo cemeteries exhibited a hierarchy in which some people were buried in flat graves with poor grave goods,like the cemeteries near the Tripol’ye settlements just upriver in the farming zone; and others were buried under Yamnaya-style kurgans with rich gifts of arsenical bronze weapons and fine painted Tripol’ye CII pots. The Usatovo culture probably was the product of a group of steppe warriors becoming patrons of late Tripol’ye clients, beginning about 3300 bc, a century or two before the Yamnaya migrations into the Danube valley. Tripol’ye CII groups might well have shifted to the speech of their Usatovo patrons, making Tripol’ye CII groups a vector for the spread of IE languages (pre-Germanic?) up the Dniester into Poland, where there aremany indications of contact between pre-Corded Ware (Zimne, Gródek Nadbużny) and Tri-pol’ye C II communities before 3000 bc (Klochko and Kośko 2009). Through this geographic path, where many interpenetrating cultural influences can be seen archaeologically, IE dialects from the steppes could have been adopted in Poland, eventually becoming a pre-Germanic ar-ray of languages in the northern European plain.What was the social mechanism for inter-cultural accommodation in these episodes of con-tact? Mobile steppe pastoral societies, documented archaeologically, must have developed a social and political infrastructure to manage mobility and social relations at a distance, and the recon-structed PIE vocabulary suggests how they did it. The great increase in mobility that occurred in the Pontic-Caspian steppes at the opening of the Yamnaya period, about 3300 calBC, probably re-sulted from the initial combination of ox-wagons with horseback-riding, which greatly increased the potential geographic range and productivity of pastoral economies. Increased mobility is seen archaeologically in the disappearance of settlements in large regions where thousands of kurgan cemeteries are known, and by the appearance of some kurgan cemeteries in the inte-rior steppes, outside major river valleys. This shift in living patterns and economy (see final section, economy 2) cannot have happened without social effects.

The PIE vocabulary suggests that Yamnaya groups recognized mutual obligations of ‘hospitality’ between guest-hosts, a re-ciprocal relationship (*ghos-ti). This institution redefined who belonged under the social um-brella, extending protection to non-kin who might be moving through others’ pastures. It would have been very useful first as an adaptation to mobility in a pastoral economy, and later as away to incorporate outsiders as people with clearly defined rights and protections, as it was used from The Odyssey to medieval Europe (Kristiansen and Larsson 2005: 238).Steppe societies already recognized differences in rank and prestige, probably the beginning of the patron-client system suggested by PIE vocabulary for leaders and followers, and for gifts and the institutionalized praise of gifts. Beginning rather suddenly in the Eneolithic, when they first acquired domesticated cattle and sheep from neighboring (Afro-Asiatic?) farmers, Pontic-Caspian steppe societies made funerals into a theatre of social and political competition, particu-larly for community leaders, who were buried with multiple cattle, sheep, and horse sacrifices;elaborate costumes of exotic ornaments, including copper rings and beads; and weapons, in-cluding polished-stone-headed maces or axes, as at Khvalynsk on the Volga and Nikol’skoe on the Dnieper. The new public theatre continued into the EBA Yamnaya period, expressed in the construction of a kurgan, the sacrifice of domesticated animals, deposition of symbolic parts of the animals in the kurgan ditch and in the grave, and (presumed) feasts using the remainder of the carcass. PIE contained a vocabulary related to gift-giving and gift-taking that is interpreted as referring to potlatch-like feasts meant to build prestige and display wealth (Benveniste 1973: 61–63; Mallory and Adams 1997: 224–225; Markey 1990). The public performance of praise poetry,animal sacrifices, and the distribution of meat and mead were central parts of the performance.Calvert Watkins (1995: 73–84) identified a special kind of song, the 'praise of the gift' in Vedic,Greek, Celtic and Germanic, and therefore almost certainly in late Proto-Indo-European. Praise poems proclaimed the generosity of a patron and enumerated his gifts. These performances were both acclamations of identity and recruiting events through which the language of power might be learned first as songs sung over free food and drink. But equally likely, the PIE vocabulary suggests, was that the patron’s language was learned from a more unsettling institution: roamingwar-bands of youths who were initiated into manhood by going raiding for livestock and/orwomen, the famous PIE institution of the Mannerbünde, or Kouros (Falk 1986; Kershaw 2000).Guest-host institutions (egalitarian), patron-client institutions (hierarchical), wealth and gen-erosity, the threat of violence from seasonally active war-bands, and a new, more productive herding system probably brought prestige and power to the identities associated with Proto-Indo-European dialects after 3300 bc. The institution of oath-bound obligation between the strong and the weak and the guest-host institution extended those protections to new social groups.These mechanisms made it possible for a patron to accept and integrate outsiders as clients with-out shaming them or assigning them permanently to submissive roles. Patrons were themselves clients of other patrons. Praise poetry at public feasts encouraged the patrons to be generous, and validated the language of the songs as a vehicle for communicating with the gods who regulated everything. All of these factors taken together suggest that the spread of Proto-Indo-European probably was more like a franchising operation than an invasion. Although the initial penetration of a new region (or ‘market’ in the franchising metaphor) required an actual migration from the steppes and military confrontations, once it began to reproduce new patron-client agreements(franchises) its connection to the original steppe immigrants became genetically remote, while themyths, rituals, and institutions that maintained the system were reproduced, in the properwords, down the generations.

Each of these three episodes of migration is suggested by dated archaeological evidence.The sequence and direction of apparent prehistoric movements out of the Pontic-Caspian steppes and into neighboring regions can be matched with the first three splits in the sequence and direction of movements suggested by the Ringe phylogeny, which adds weight to the hy-pothesis of the Pontic-Caspian homeland for PIE. A Pontic-Caspian PIE homeland is plausible archaeologically, and also is consistent with internal linguistic evidence for wheeled vehicles,an environment with horses and honey bees, and loans between PIE and Proto-Uralic.

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David Anthony: The Horse, the Wheel, and Language Jul 24, 2019 18:09:39 GMT

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Post by Admin on Jul 24, 2019 18:09:39 GMT

Four Kinds of Pastoralism

In the final part of this paper, I address the organization and content of Pontic-Caspian steppe economies during the period of interest for understanding the expansion of the IE languages.It is necessary to move beyond arguments about the homeland in order to understand the speakers of Proto-Indo-European as people rather than as icons. We cannot understand the process of linguistic expansion until we understand how the societies that spoke PIE were or-ganized economically.Between 1995 and 2001 Dorcas Brown and I, with colleagues from Samara, directed theSamara Valley Project. The Samara River flows westward into the Volga from the southern slopes of the Ural Mountains through the northern edge of the steppe zone. Nikolai Merpertexcavated a final Bronze Age settlement at Suskanskoe near Samara early in his career, and he was a mentor for Igor Vasiliev, whose energetic and ambitious excavations redefined the ar-chaeology of the middle Volga region. We started our project working with Vasiliev, and when he passed the command to his students, we were lucky to work with Pavel Kuznetsov,Oleg Mochalov, and Aleksandr Khokhlov. Our project was designed to investigate the role of agriculture in Bronze Age pastoral economies in the Samara River Valley. We produced some original archaeological evidence that can be combined with other recent studies to suggest that there were four distinct kinds of pastoralism in the middle Volga steppes (Anthony et al. 2005;Anthony et al. forthcoming).1. In the Eneolithic the population buried at Khvalynsk and one other cemetery had aminimal reliance on domesticated animals in their daily diet, which was strongly based on fish, according to new evidence obtained from stable isotopes in human bone (Fig. 5). But do-mesticated animals were 100% of the food sacrificed in funeral rituals at the Khvalynsk ceme-tery, dated about 4500–4200 bc, where sacrifices of a minimum 29 cattle (22.3%), 85 sheep-goat(65.4%), and 16 horses (12.3%) were concentrated principally in or near graves containing in-dividuals with elite ornaments and stone maces (Agapov 2010). (These numbers add the fauna reported by Agapov for Khvalynsk II with the fauna in the original zoological reports from Khvalynsk I, only partly included in the Agapov report.) Horses were grouped with domesti-cated cattle and sheep in graves that contained no obvious wild animals, so horses might have been domesticated.In the Dnieper Rapids region, elite individuals like Dereivka grave 49 showed stable iso-topes that might suggest a diet containing more domesticated animals and less fish than oth-ers (Lillie et al. 2012: 86). We have previously suggested that the earliest and first domesticated animals in the western steppes might have been used more as an elite currency for feast-hosting and ritual-hosting than as a principal source of daily food (Anthony 2007: 220, 225;Anthony and Brown 2011: 138). The Eneolithic diet probably depended to a large extent onfish, and was significantly different isotopically from the diet that characterized Bronze Age pastoralists in the middle Volga steppes beginning with Yamnaya. In Ukraine, unlike the middle Volga steppes, some Eneolithic pottery contains imprints of wheat, barley, and millet,

Fig. 5. Stable isotopes of 15N and 13C in human bone in individuals from the Eneolithic through the LBA in the middle Volga steppes.

The Eneolithic diet was significantly different from the Bronze Age diet.The EBA, MBA, and LBA diets showed no difference in stable isotopes although the numbers are very small (Kotova 2008: 124–125); and stable isotopes in human bone are more variable than in the middle Volga region and show less reliance on fish. So in the Dnieper steppes, domesticated animals might have been more important in the daily diet,while in the Volga steppes domesticated animals were used principally in a new field of social competition between elites. During the Suvorovo/Skelya era, intense exchange in high-prestige copper goods between the Pontic-Caspian steppes and the Varna-period cultures of southeastern Europe ended about 4300–4100 bc with a migration into the Danube valley fromwestern Ukraine and the extinction of tell settlements in that region. The migrants might havebeen mounted on horses but had no wagons and might have regarded domesticated animals largely as status and ritual symbols in a growing field of political competition revolving around public feasting.2. About a thousand years after the collapse of the tell cultures in the Danube valley, at the start of the Early Bronze Age (EBA) about 3300 bc, the population in the middle Volga steppes adopted a new, entirely pastoral economy, probably stimulated to do so by the inven-tion of wheeled vehicles (Merpert 1974). Wagons made portable things that had never been portable in bulk — shelter, water, and food. Herders who had always lived in the forested river valleys and grazed their herds timidly on the edges of the steppes now could take their tents, water, and food supplies to distant pastures far from the river valleys. The wagon was a mobile home that permitted herders to follow their animals deep into the grasslands and live in the open. Yamnaya communities dispersed across the interior steppes, building kurgans in places that earlier had been almost useless economically. Significant wealth and power could be extracted from larger herds spread over larger pastures.

A nomadic form of steppe pastoralism appeared with the first wheeled vehicles and horseback riding (for which there is clear evidence at contemporary Botai in Kazakhstan) in the EBA. The archaeological expression of the first age of equestrian, wagon-aided pastoralism was the Yamnaya horizon, which extended from the Dnieper to the Ural Rivers, the first cul-tural horizon to spread across all of the western steppes and perhaps an economic vector for the spread of PIE across the western steppes.Again in this period, as in the Eneolithic, Yamnaya herding communities west of the DonRiver (eg, at Mikhailovka on the Dnieper) were occasionally tethered to small fortified settle-ments where some agriculture has been found. It was probably these western Yamnaya com-munities that migrated into the Danube valley and central Europe. The departure of Pre-Anatolian-speakers from SE Europe into Anatolia could have been a reaction to the arrival of this new wave of steppe immigrants.But eastern Yamnaya communities in the Volga-Ural steppes left no evidence of settle-ments or cultivated grain and they seem to have lived in wagons — a Bronze Age form of pastoral nomadism not articulated with farming. Yamnaya individuals in the middle Volga steppes had no caries in their teeth, dental health not seen among bread-eaters. Yamnaya sta-ble isotopes do not suggest millet in their diet (Fig. 5 above). The daily diet for the middle Volga Yamnaya population probably depended entirely on domesticated animals, probably principally sheep and goat products, according to stable isotopes. After this new pastoral dietwas established, its isotopic signature did not change throughout the Bronze Age, not even in the Late Bronze Age when the Srubnaya population settled in permanent settlements.3. In the Late Bronze Age (LBA), beginning about 1900 bc, previously mobile pastoral communities in the middle Volga steppes and across the Eurasian steppes settled down in permanent homes near marshes, during a climatic period of arid, cold conditions when river-ine marshes became smaller. This settling process was assumed to be connected with the adoption of agriculture and the spread of a new agro-pastoral settled economy(Ostroshchenko 2003). However, the cause of the settling process might have been climatechange and competition for good winter pastures near marshes, which became so important that herding groups settled near large marshes rather than leaving them open to be claimed byothers. Again, as in earlier periods, the LBA Srubnaya settlements west of the Don exhibit some evidence for the cultivation of millet. But in spite of a large flotation effort designed to recover charred grains (Popova 2007), we found no evidence for agriculture at the excavated Pokrovka-Srubnaya settlements of Krasnosamarskoe or Kibit in Samara oblast, dated 1900–1700 bc, and Diaz del Rio et al. (2006) found no evidence of agriculture at the Srubnaya mining settlement of Gorny, nor did Lebedeva (2005) find any evidence of agriculture in flotation ex-periments at 11 other Srubnaya settlements in the Volga-Ural steppes. Srubnaya settlements in this region were occupied permanently, year-round, but there is no evidence of agriculture at Srubnaya settlements tested with flotation.

4. The final phase in Eurasian pastoralism was the era of nomadic pastoralism that began in the Iron Age and continued through the Medieval period. In Lebedeva’s flotation experi-ments (Lebedeva 2005), the average frequency of charred cultivated grains in flotation samples from 36 Srubnaya settlements was 0.06 grains per 10 liters of floated soil. In Final Bronze Ages amples (1200–800 bc) the frequency increased to 2.7 grains per 10 liters, and the grains in-cluded wheat (emmer, T. dicoccum, and bread wheat, T. aestivum) and barley, not just millet(Lebedeva 2005: 66). The Iron Age settlements (after 800 bc) she sampled, in the Kuban pied-mont, Crimea, and the upper Don forest-steppe, yielded 40 grains per 10 liters of soil, an in-crease of almost 15 times over the Final Bronze Age and 80 times over the Srubnaya samples.Surprisingly, the age of Iron Age pastoral nomadism was also the age of agriculture. The con-sumption of grain might have become common in many parts of the Eurasian steppes only during the era of pastoral nomadism, thought to represent the antithesis of agriculture. Mur-phy’s (2003) paleopathological study of Iron Age nomad skeletons at the cemetery of Ay-myrlyg in Tuva in the Altai Mountains documented significantly more caries among nomadic Saka and Hunnic Iron Age herders in the Altai, who almost certainly regularly ate bread, than among the settled Late Bronze Age herders of the Samara Valley, who didn’t.In the middle Volga steppes recent flotation campaigns connected with the excavation of Medieval nomadic sites found that the pastoral nomads of the Golden Horde cultivated millet,rye, and wheat (Nedashkovskii 2009), unlike the sedentary LBA people of the same region;and Scythian-era pits dated 300–200 bc on the lower Donets contained the seeds of cultivated hulled barley (Hordeum vulgare) and broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum), together with seeds of Chenopodium album, which the authors noted could have been a food, not a weed(Motuzaite-Matuzeviciute, Telizhenko and Jones 2012). The authors suggested that Scythian nomads occasionally cultivated plots of grain in the riverine floodplains of the steppe zone.In some parts of the Eurasian steppes, bread was an Iron Age novelty that only became widespread with the rise of pastoral nomadism, which was closely articulated with agricul-tural communities at the edges of the steppes, from the upper Don and the Kuban piedmont to the Talgar settlements in the piedmont of the Tien Shan (Chang 2008). It appears that Iron Age nomads chose to eat bread, not because they needed it — their Bronze Age ancestors had sur-vived very well without it — but because farming was adopted as a major source of food in and at the edges of the steppes only in the Final Bronze (1200–800 bc) and Iron Ages (after 800 bc). Iron Age nomads ate bread because they liked it, not because they needed it, and they obtained it from local agricultural settlements like those tested by Lebedeva, or they grew itthemselves.In each era we investigated we found surprises that we did not expect. Steppe economies have been stereotyped, and these stereotypes have retarded our understanding of the evolu-tion of Eurasian pastoralism and the economic dynamics of the Indo-European expansion. In my view, the most significant spread of Indo-European languages was connected with migra-tions number 2 and 3 and economy number 2, the Yamnaya-era expansions. Yamnaya social groups seem to have been nomadic, often lived in wagons, and moved in significant numbers into the Danube valley and toward the Carpathians. This was not an invasion as we under-stand that word, but rather a search for new clients by would-be patrons who were seeking to start new franchises that perhaps would carry their name. The adoption of wagon transport across Europe after 3500 bc encouraged the spread of new, mobile economies, necessarily based more on animal herding than agriculture, and the Corded Ware horizon was their mate-rial expression across much of the northern European plain. Yamnaya societies inherited well-tested political and social structures to integrate communities across geographic distances, and these institutions and the language in which they were encoded were adopted in many parts of Europe with the new mobile economy.

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David Anthony: The Horse, the Wheel, and Language Mar 25, 2020 0:59:11 GMT

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Wheels are the archetype of a primitive, caveman-level technology. But in fact, they're so ingenious that it took until 3500 B.C. for someone to invent them. By that time — it was the Bronze Age — humans were already casting metal alloys, constructing canals and sailboats, and even designing complex musical instruments such as harps.

The tricky thing about the wheel is not conceiving of a cylinder rolling on its edge. It's figuring out how to connect a stable, stationary platform to that cylinder.

"The stroke of brilliance was the wheel-and-axle concept," said David Anthony, a professor of anthropology at Hartwick College and author of "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language" (Princeton, 2007). "But then making it was also difficult."

To make a fixed axle with revolving wheels, Anthony explained, the ends of the axle had to be nearly perfectly smooth and round, as did the holes in the center of the wheels; otherwise, there would be too much friction for the wheels to turn. Furthermore, the axles had to fit snugly inside the wheels' holes, but not too snugly — they had to be free to rotate. [What Makes Wheels Appear to Spin Backward?]

The success of the whole structure was extremely sensitive to the size of the axle. While a narrow one would reduce the amount of friction, it would also be too weak to support a load. Meanwhile, a thick axle would hugely increase the amount of friction. "They solved this problem by making the earliest wagons quite narrow, so they could have short axles, which made it possible to have an axle that wasn't very thick," Anthony told Life's Little Mysteries.

The sensitivity of the wheel-and-axle system to all these factors meant that it could not have been developed in phases, he said. It was an all-or-nothing structure.

Whoever invented it must have had access to wide slabs of wood from thick-trunked trees in order to carve large, round wheels. They also needed metal tools to chisel fine-fitted holes and axles. And they must have had a need for hauling heavy burdens over land. According to Anthony, "It was the carpentry that probably delayed the invention until 3500 B.C. or so, because it was only after about 4000 B.C. that cast copper chisels and gouges became common in the Near East."

The invention of the wheel was so challenging that it probably happened only once, in one place. However, from that place, it seems to have spread so rapidly across Eurasia and the Middle East that experts cannot say for sure where it originated. The earliest images of wheeled carts have been excavated in Poland and elsewhere in the Eurasian steppes, and this region is overtaking Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) as the wheel's most likely birthplace. According to Asko Parpola, an Indologist at the University of Helsinki in Finland, there are linguistic reasons to believe the wheel originated with the Tripolye people of modern-day Ukraine. That is, the words associated with wheels and wagons derive from the language of that culture.

Parpola thinks miniature models of wheeled wagons, which are commonly found in the Eurasian steppes, likely predated human-scale wagons. "It is … striking that so many models were made in the Tripolye culture. Such models are often thought to have been children's toys, but it seems more likely to me that they were miniature counterparts of real things," he said. "The primacy of the miniature models is suggested by the fact that wheeled images of animals even come from native Indian cultures of Central America, where real wheels were never made."

Toys or not, those popular models of old have their counterparts in today's Hot Wheels and miniature fire trucks. Who appreciates wheeled vehicles more fully than babies and toddlers? Their almost universal fascination with the way tiny vehicles can be rolled along the floor, and the joy they derive from transportation in life-size ones, calls attention to the remarkable ingenuity of the wheel.

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David Anthony: The Horse, the Wheel, and Language Mar 27, 2021 20:41:15 GMT

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Yamnaya: Ancient Steppe Genetics & Society — David W. Anthony 2021 Talk

The author of "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language" discusses the latest 2021 research on the archaeogenetics of the steppe Yamnaya culture, and their elusive societal organization.

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David Anthony: The Horse, the Wheel, and Language Mar 31, 2021 19:53:34 GMT

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Yamnaya: Source of their CHG Ancestry — David W. Anthony 2021

David W. Anthony, author of 'The Horse, the Wheel, and Language', discusses where he believes the CHG/West Asian ancestry of the Yamnaya/Proto-Indo-Europeans derives from.