david anthony the horse the wheel and language

Lawrence M.My journey through this book, not unlike the prehistoric Eurasian steppe cultures' journey south to the Mesopotamian world, was long, fascinating, and sometimes laborious.Mount Desert Isle Part II: Sargent Mountain.Renaissance Shipwreck in the Baltic Sea.In fact some of the Yamnaya people still were settled in farming communities along the great rivers of the region. Of course sometimes they also traded with settled people almost all nomads in history maintained trading relationships with settled communities. Sometimes they stole horses or other animals from each other, and sometimes they raided settled people to steal things to make their lives on the steppes easier. They developed some of the characteristics we associate with steppes nomads: they were violent, patriarchal, and much given to raiding. Radiocarbon dating has not settled the question because the dates for the earliest wagons in each place are about the same, suggesting that whoever invented them the idea spread very quickly.Īnyway wagons allowed the Yamnaya people to spread out across the steppes, which in turn allowed them to accumulate huge herds of animals. Some say it happened in Mesopotamia, others that it happened on the steppes. Incidentally nobody knows who invented the wheeled wagon. So, anyway, what does archaeology tell us about those Bronze Age steppes people who had such a huge impact on the future of Eurasia?ĭepiction of a war wagon from the Standard of Ur Middle Bug-Dniester sites (Samchin phase), dates about 5600-5400 BCE, contained more domesticated pigs and cattle: at Soroki I/level 1a, a Middle-phase site, cattle and swine make up 49% of the 213 bones recovered (32% MNI). The basic problem with David Anthony's book is that while he tried to make it accessible to non-archaeologists he was unwilling to jettison the vast weight of archaeological terminology, I suppose because he also wanted it to seem professional to his peers.

These days archaeologists are also very interested in climate change over time and thus our work fills up with arcana like Bond Events and the Piora Oscillation. In Eastern Europe these are unpronounceable mishmashes like Starčevo–Körös–Criş or Krivodol-Sălcuţa-Bubanj. Plus, we have no idea what the people we study called themselves, so we dream up names for them based on the archaeological sites where they were first found. Archaeological arguments turn on questions like how much one set of pots resembles another set, how different one way of making stone arrowheads is from another way, and whether cultural change in a region is sudden or gradual, and to really answer these questions you have do dig deep into the muck of pottery decoration, flint knapping, the calibration of radiocarbon dates, and the like. As I have mentioned several times before, it is really hard to write about archaeology.

David anthony the horse the wheel and language