Environmental Setting

Today the spine of the Great Caucasus Range forms the international border between the Russian Federation to the north and the newly established independent states of Georgia and Azerbaijan to the south; still farther south lies the landlocked Republic of Armenia with its borders north and east with Georgia and Azerbaijan and to the south with Turkey and Iran (Map 3.11.1). The political geography of the Caucasus has, of course, changed greatly over the millennia, but it has also always reflected the tremendous ethnic and linguistic diversity for which the area is renowned. The Great Caucasus Range represents an imposing physical barrier that impedes movements across it, creating relatively well-defined cultural differences, as well as commonalities, among the numerous peoples of the northern Caucasus and those of the southern Caucasus (or, in Russian, Transcaucasia). In other words, the Great Caucasus Range, which extends roughly 1200 km northwest to southeast between the Black and Caspian Seas, forms a distinct geographic boundary between the western Eurasian steppes of southern Russia to the north and the highland plateaus of Anatolia and Iran to the south.

The entire Caucasus region, which encompasses an area of about 440,000 sq km, contains extremely diverse environments, particularly marked by altitudinal differences, ranging from the perennial glaciers to countless steep and well-protected mountain valleys, to open volcanic highland plateaus, to broader plains, and even to subtropical depressions such as the Colchidean Plain of western Georgia bordering the Black Sea. Such environmental diversity partially explains the area’s long-established diversity manifest in its numerous peoples, speaking distinct, mutually incomprehensible languages. Nevertheless, this human cultural diversity is above all the product of a long history of movements of peoples into the Caucasus who then zealously defended the separate valleys and environmental zones that they had entered and occupied.

In 1897 N. I. Veselovskii excavated the very large, nearly 11 meter high Oshad kurgan or barrow in the town of Maikop in the Kuban region near the foothills of the northwestern Caucasus (the present-day capital of the Adygei Republic). The kurgan contained a spectacularly rich burial assemblage, including bronze weapons and cauldrons; scores of figured gold appliqués, which had been sewn on the clothes of the principal male burial; six silver rods (some more than a meter long) with gold and silver terminals depicting bulls (Fig. 6.1); silver, gold, stone, and ceramic vessels; and numerous turquoise and carnelian beads. This discovery stimulated the excavation of other large kurgans located in the same general region, some of which seemed royal-like in their dimensions and, when not robbed in antiquity, in their materials. This research has continued to the present day and spectacular discoveries are still being unearthed, such as hoards from the Klady kurgan necropolis near the village of Novosvobodnaya that have been excavated from 1979 on (Rezepkin 2000), containing distinct but clearly Maikop-related bronze, gold, silver, polished stone, ceramic, turquoise, and carnelian artifacts.

The Maikop materials were initially brought to the attention of Western scholars through the writings of A. M. Tallgren, M. I. Rostovtseff, and, later, V. G. Childe. The absolute dating of these large kurgans was debated for years, with some scholars (Degen-Kovalevskii 1939, cited in Munchaev 1994 : 159–160) relating them to the Scythians or immediately pre-Scythians and dating them as late as the early first millennium bce, while most (Iessen 1950) dated them back to the middle to second half of the third millennium bce.

Broadly defined, the Eurasian steppe consists of the belt of open grasslands stretching latitudinally from Hungary in the west to Manchuria in the east, the largest expanse of such open grasslands in the world (Frontispiece). Our geographical horizons necessarily are more restricted, and our concern is principally to trace late prehistoric developments across the western Eurasian steppe, or the belt extending north of the Black Sea (Pontic steppe) from the mouth of the Danube east across the South Russian steppe beyond the Lower and Middle Volga to the southern trans-Urals region bordering western Siberia and Kazakhstan. Throughout this area, the open grasslands of the steppe proper are sandwiched between the more wooded boreal and broad-leafed forest and then forest-steppe belts to the north and the highland zones of the Caucasus and the Anatolian and Iranian plateaus west and south of the Caspian Sea, and the Central Asian Kyzyl Kum and Kara Kum deserts east of the Caspian. These latitudinal bands can be further subdivided north to south into distinct vegetation zones consisting of forest, forest-steppe, steppe, desert-steppe, and Artemisia and sandy desert zones (Hiebert 2000: 52–53; Figs. 4.1 and 4.2).

The Copper Age settlements and cemeteries of southeastern Europe, extending from the northern Balkan Peninsula to the northeast across Romania and western Ukraine to the Dnieper, have long been recognized as exceptionally rich and significant. The history of the research on Chalcolithic sites found throughout this interconnected area extends back into the late nineteenth century when scholars first began to excavate the upper levels of what were recognized as settlement mounds with thick cultural deposits (for summary accounts of the histories of research cf. Todorova 1978: 3–6; 1995: 79–82; Fol and Lichardus 1988: 19–26; Monah and Monah 1997: 21–34; Arkheologiya Ukrainskoi SSR 1985: 189–193).

State-funded archaeological research led to an enormous compilation of archaeological materials, a record which for sixth- and fifth-millennia times is arguably as, or more, complete than any other area of the world. Numerous artificially raised settlement hills, tepes and tells of the Near Eastern type, are distributed throughout Bulgaria and southern Romania (Figs. 2.1–2.3).

Archaeologists gather data about the past and interpret it within distinct research traditions that structure the data they select to find and analyze, and that provide them with the necessary support to carry on their work. The activity of reconstructing the past through the analysis of material cultural remains is necessarily constrained by the social context in which the archaeologist must function. This observation is self-evident, but, during the past twenty years or so, there has been an increasing recognition that these separate traditions of research divide themselves along cultural, linguistic, and, most interestingly, national lines. This too is not surprising, particularly when one considers the very practical nature of conducting archaeological research, that is, obtaining financial support, typically or at least in part, from the state to excavate sites that are now nearly universally considered to form part of some state's – usually the archaeologist's own – national heritage or patrimony. That there exist national traditions of archaeological research also is not surprising when one examines the historical development of the discipline: rooting a people or a nation in the distant past was one of the main stimuli for the development of archaeology, particularly prehistoric archaeology, during the past two hundred years or, not coincidentally, during the period that witnessed the rise of modern nation-states as the world's fundamental unit of political organization.

The Copper Age of the Caucasus – or, more precisely, the immediately pre-Maikop and pre-Kura-Araxes horizons of the northern and southern Caucasus, respectively – appears remarkably impoverished relative to the spectacular Chalcolithic developments considered in the previous chapter. Nothing comparable to the Cucuteni-Tripol'ye complexes exists in the Caucasus during the sixth through the first half of the fourth millennium BC; even more striking is the underdevelopment of the northern Caucasus before the emergence of the famous Maikop culture, which most specialists (Munchaev 1994: 169–170) now date as beginning at least towards the second half of the fourth millennium, if not somewhat earlier (Trifonov 1996, 2001; Lyonnet 2000, n.d.c.; Chernykh and Orlovskaya 2004a; cf. later discussion).

In a sense, this study has been in the “making” since my first field experiences in southeastern Iran in the late 1960s; ideas first germinated decades ago as a graduate student have taken a long time to mature. The conception and initial writing of this narrative began in fall 1999 when I was completing a Humboldt Fellowship at the Eurasien Abteilung, DAI, in Berlin under the sponsorship of H. Parzinger, then Direktor of this division of the German institute. My stay in Berlin was sandwiched in between participation in two international conferences that were seminal for the formulation of many of the ideas in this account. In late August 1999 I had the good fortune of participating in an international conference at Arkaim in the southern Urals, which was organized by G. B. Zdanovich and which now has been published as Complex Societies of Central Eurasia from the 3rd to the 1st Millennium BC: Regional Specifics in Light of Global Models (Jones-Bley and Zdanovich 2002). A few months later, in January 2000, I attended a conference held at Cambridge University entitled Late Prehistoric Exploitation of the Eurasian Steppe, which was also the title of a book previously published by the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research (Levine, Rassamakin, Kislenko, and Tatarintseva 1999). The papers from this conference were published subsequently in two volumes, both of which are extensively cited in this study: Ancient Interactions: East and West in Eurasia (Boyle, Renfrew, and Levine 2002); and Prehistoric Steppe Adaptation and the Horse (Levine, Renfrew, and Boyle 2003).