Uruk migrants in the Caucasus
According to the text Uruk Migrants in the Caucasus by Konstantine Pitskhelauri the period between the 4th and 3rd millennia B.C. was the time of great cataclysmic events in the Caucasus; its cultural advances were influenced by changes within its boundaries as well as interactions with the outside world.
At the end of the 5th and in the 4th millennia B.C. large masses of Uruk migrants had settled in the South, and later in the North Caucasus. Assimilation of cultures of the newcomers and residents, as a result, caused their “explosive” development paving the way to the formation of the Maikop culture in the North Caucasus and the Kura-Araxes culture in the South Caucasus.
The most significant occurrence of this epoch was the appearance of a large number of peoples of Mesopotamian cultural identity who contributed to speeding up the rhythm of its cultural development, adding “explosive” character to its progress.
During this period the South Caucasus experienced two powerful waves of Middle Eastern expansion: the first at the time of Late Neolithic culture of Sioni in the 4th-5th millennia B.C., and the second at the period of Tsopi culture in the Late Neolithic Age, at the end of the 5th and the first half of the 4th millennium B.C., which is known as the Uruk expansion era. Later, in the second half of the 4th and throughout the 3 rd millennium B.C., during the Early Bronze Age the Kura-Araxes culture of the Caucasus spread throughout the greater part of the Caucasus, Eastern Anatolia, northern parts of Iran, Middle East and even Europe.
In this context, recent archaeological finds in the Southern and Northeastern Caucasus gave yet another, entirely new nuance to scientific researches into the ancient past of the Caucasus. They made it clear that incursion of these peoples into the Caucasus was not a onetime event, but continued for a significantly long period. Reasoning by the topography of the archaeological finds in Mesopotamia, it becomes clear that large masses of migrant settlers from that area did not move straight along the route to Transcaucasia in order to reach the destination faster. Actually, they settled down in every region of the Caucasus, in the mountains and flatlands, in areas where they could maintain a lifestyle familiar to them.
It seems obvious that from that period on, two cultures of the Caucasus that had been at different stages of development could coexist peacefully on the basis of their mutual participation in metallurgical manufacturing; it was this type of communal economy that gave impetus to a speedy development of the local culture. This is well illustrated by the metallurgical items of the Kura-Araxes culture, which is significantly more advanced in comparison with the preAeneolithic culture.
At present the situation has changed drastically. On the basis of a whole series of radiocarbon analyses, it has been proved [15; 82] that burial mounds of the ancient pit-grave culture are of a significantly later period in comparison with Maikop archaeological sites. This allows scholars to assume that the tradition of building this type of burial mounds emerged precisely in the Maikop culture. Its ties with Levant and Mesopotamian antiquities point to its earlier origin [15: 97].
At the same time, a whole range of chronological data obtained with radiocarbon analysis has established that the settlements and burial mounds of the South Caucasus containing Uruk artefact are coexistent with the Maikop culture [13: 149-153] and, accordingly, the ancient pit-grave culture and its burial mounds belong to a later period.
Therefore, today we cannot possibly ascribe the emergence of this kind of burial mounds in the Maikop culture as well as similar contemporaneous sites in the South Caucasus to the influence of the steppe zone cultures. Moreover, there were no adverse conditions that would have prevented emergence of this type of burial mounds in the Caucasus itself
UPDATE: Also relevant a book chapter on The Caucasus – donor and recipient of materials to and from the ancient near east, and a talk by EN Chernykh in a recent conference on the topic of Caucasus as the Bridge Between the Settled Farming and the Pastor.
The Caucasus – donor and recipient of materials to and from the ancient near east
Origins of the Maykop phenomenon
Origins of the Maykop phenomenon by Mariya Ivanova seems to argue against the “Uruk expansion from Mesopotamia” hypothesis and point towards Central Asia, with the author finding parallels of the Maykop culture in the Kura valley and Lake Urmia area. That would certainly fit the bill of a more “eastern” PIE homeland if we accept, as many do, an IE identity for at least elements within the Maikop culture.
Graves and settlements of the 5th millennium BC in North Caucasus attest to a material culture that was related to contemporaneous archaeological complexes in the northern and western Black Sea region. Yet it was replaced, suddenly as it seems, around the middle of the 4th millennium BC by a “high culture” whose origin is still quite unclear.
This archaeological culture named after the great Maikop kurgan showed innovations in all areas which have no local archetypes and which cannot be assigned to the tradition of the Balkan-Anatolian Copper Age.
The favoured theory of Russian researchers is a migration from the south originating in the Syro-Anatolian area, which is often mentioned in connection with the socalled “Uruk expansion”. However, serious doubts have arisen about a connection between Maikop and the Syro-Anatolian region. The foreign objects in the North Caucasus reveal no connection to the upper reaches of the Euphrates and Tigris or to the floodplains of Mesopotamia, but rather seem to have ties to the Iranian plateau and to South Central Asia.
Recent excavations in the Southwest Caspian Sea region are enabling a new perspective about the interactions between the “Orient” and Continental Europe. On the one hand, it is becoming gradually apparent that a gigantic area of interaction evolved already in the early 4th millennium BC which extended far beyond Mesopotamia; on the other hand, these findings relativise the traditional importance given to Mesopotamia, because innovations originating in Iran and Central Asia obviously spread throughout the Syro-Anatolian region independently thereof.
Origins of the Maykop phenomenon
The Maikop Singularity
According to The Maikop Singularity: The Unequal Accumulation of Wealth on the Bronze Age Eurasian Steppe? by Philip L. Kohl the Maikop parallels with northern Mesopotamia or, more broadly, with the ancient Near East, and the seemingly consistent and growing number of calibrated radiocarbon determinations (currently more than 40 such dates; E. N. Chernykh personal communication) not only date the Maikop phenomenon more securely but also suggest some connections -albeit hard to specify- with larger historical processes, such as the north Mesopotamian, and later Uruk expansion into eastern Anatolia.
The calibrated radiocarbon dates suggest that the Maikop culture seems to have had a formative influence on kurgan burial rituals and what now appears to be the later Pit-Grave (Yamnaya) culture on the Eurasian steppe (Chernykh and Orlovskaya 2004a: 97).
In other words, the fact that such a symbolic Mesopotamian practice is attested in the richest known “royal,” or chiefly, Maikop burial must have significance not only for the earlier dating of the Maikop culture, but also for determining aspects of its cultural affiliation and formation.
Other scholars have focused on the northern steppe component of the Maikop culture. … V. A. Trifonov (2004: 58-60) in a reappraisal and comparison of the so-called royal tomb at Arslantepe with the Novosvobodnaya-phase Maikop burials, reverses the arrow of cultural transmission and borrowing and argues for an eastern Anatolian Chalcolithic origin of the Novosvobodnaya tombs, such as documented at Korucutepe. Thus, if Trifonov is correct, and if the calibrated radiocarbon dates securely place Maikop chronologically before the emergence of the Pit-Grave (Yamnaya) horizon, then somewhat counterintuitively, the origins of raising large barrows or kurgans above the broad, flat expanse of the steppes may not have been indigenous but may have been derived from eastern Anatolia or the northern periphery of the greater ancient Near East.
It is probably futile to seek a single source from which the Maikop culture emerged.
Stanislav Grigoriev’s “Ancient Indo-Europeans”
I had seen bits and pieces of SA Grigoriev’s ideas in various publications, but it’s nice to see this work in its entirety (although the reproduction of the maps doesn’t seem to be very good). From the conclusion:
The Indo-European problem is a complex one, combining linguistic and archaeological evidence. In linguistics Gamkrelidze and Ivanov have suggested a system and a fundamental solution. Convincing linguistic models uniquely localising the Indo-European homeland in the Balkans, or even in the North Pontic area or Central Europe, are lacking.
Often criticism of Gamkrelidze and Ivanov has been reduced to no more than a statement that archaeological evidence in favour of it is absent. As we see, this does not correspond to reality (and, by the way, did not correspond to reality before the publication of this book).
There are a number of facts to prove the connections of North Eurasian and European cultures with the Near East, whilst convincing examples to demonstrate the reverse connections do not now exist.
There is a purely historiographic tradition, not substantiated by facts. For the long years this tradition flourished it proved impossible to flesh it out with arguments, although skilled scholars attempted to do so. Therefore, hypotheses about the northern origin of the Indo-Europeans have practically nothing which can be used today in support, either linguistic or archaeological.
The archaeological model suggested here is not complete in many respects. Many parallels may raise doubts, as it has not always been possible to back them up with completely identical artefacts. But in the consideration of distant migrations and subsequent cultural transformations, such complete similarity may be wanting.
Interestingly, Grigoriev’s reconstruction does not seem to agree with G&I’s model in all its details, as the latter suggested the Halafian culture as the archaeological manifestation of the Proto-Indo-European community (picture from Wikipedia on the right).
For reasons of my own (i.e., finding the hiding place of the “West Asian” autosomal component which was introduced to Europe by Indo-Europeans) it might be worth seeking a more “eastern” PIE homeland.
In any case it would be wonderful to get some archaeogenetic data from the Near East. Irrespective of one’s opinion on the IE problem, most everyone would agree that this is a critical region for understanding the prehistory of Eurasia.
Stanislav Grigoriev’s “Ancient Indo-Europeans”
Origin of Early Transcaucasian Culture (aka Kura-Araxes culture)
Origins, Homelands and Migrations: Situating the Kura-Araxes Early Transcaucasian ‘Culture’ within the History of Bronze Age Eurasia by Philip L. Kohl summarizes current understanding of the emergence, nature and subsequent southwestern and southeastern spread of the early Transcaucasian (eTC) or Kura-Araxes ‘culture-historical community’ (Russian: obshchnost’) and then places this complex cultural phenomenon in the context of the larger early Bronze Age world of the Ancient Near east and the western eurasian steppes.
Akhundov (2007) recently uncovered pre-Kura-Araxes/Late Chalcolithic materials from the settlement of Boyuk Kesik and the kurgan necropolis of Soyuq Bulaq in northwestern Azerbaijan, and Makharadze (2007) has also excavated a pre-Kura-Araxes kurgan, Kavtiskhevi, in central Georgia.
Materials recovered from both these recent excavations can be related to remains from the metal-working Late Chalcolithic site of Leilatepe on the Karabakh steppe near Agdam (Narimanov et al. 2007) and from the earliest level at the multi-period site of Berikldeebi in Kvemo Kartli (Glonti and Dzavakhishvili 1987). They reveal the presence of early 4th millennium raised burial mounds or kurgans in the southern Caucasus.
Similarly, on the basis of her survey work in eastern Anatolia north of the Oriental Taurus mountains, C. Marro (2007) likens chafffaced wares collected at Hanago in the Sürmeli Plain and Astepe and Colpan in the eastern Lake Van district in northeastern Turkey with those found at the sites mentioned above and relates these to similar wares (Amuq E/F) found south of the Taurus Mountains in northern Mesopotamia.
The new high dating of the Maikop culture essentially signifies that there is no chronological hiatus separating the collapse of the Chalcolithic Balkan centre of metallurgical production and the appearance of Maikop and the sudden explosion of Caucasian metallurgical production and use of arsenical copper/bronzes.
More than forty calibrated radiocarbon dates on Maikop and related materials now support this high chronology; and the revised dating for the Maikop culture means that the earliest kurgans occur in the northwestern and southern Caucasus and precede by several centuries those of the Pit-Grave (Yamnaya) cultures of the western Eurasian steppes (cf. Chernykh and Orlovskaya 2004a and b).
The calibrated radiocarbon dates suggest that the Maikop ‘culture’ seems to have had a formative influence on steppe kurgan burial rituals and what now appears to be the later development of the Pit-Grave (Yamnaya) culture on the Eurasian steppes (Chernykh and Orlovskaya 2004a: 97).
In other words, sometime around the middle of the 4th millennium BCE or slightly subsequent to the initial appearance of the Maikop culture of the NW Caucasus, settlements containing proto-Kura-Araxes or early Kura-Araxes materials first appear across a broad area that stretches from the Caspian littoral of the northeastern Caucasus in the north to the Erzurum region of the Anatolian Plateau in the west.
For simplicity’s sake these roughly simultaneous developments across this broad area will be considered as representing the beginnings of the Early Bronze Age or the initial stages of development of the KuraAraxes/Early Transcaucasian culture.
The ‘homeland’ (itself a very problematic concept) of the Kura-Araxes culture-historical community is difficult to pinpoint precisely, a fact that may suggest that there is no single well-demarcated area of origin, but multiple interacting areas including northeastern Anatolia as far as the Erzurum area, the catchment area drained by the Upper Middle Kura and Araxes Rivers in Transcaucasia and the Caspian corridor and adjacent mountainous regions of northeastern Azerbaijan and southeastern Daghestan.
While broadly (and somewhat imprecisely) defined, these regions constitute on present evidence the original core area out of which the Kura-Araxes ‘culture-historical community’ emerged.
Kura-Araxes materials found in other areas are primarily intrusive in the local sequences. Indeed, many, but not all, sites in the Malatya area along the Upper Euphrates drainage of eastern Anatolia (e.g., Norsun-tepe, Arslantepe) and western Iran (e.g., Yanik Tepe, Godin Tepe) exhibit – albeit with some overlap – a relatively sharp break in material remains, including new forms of architecture and domestic dwellings, and such changes support the interpretation of a subsequent spread or dispersal from this broadly defined core area in the north to the southwest and southeast.
The archaeological record seems to document a movement of peoples north to south across a very extensive part of the Ancient Near East from the end of the 4th to the first half of the 3rd millennium BCE. Although migrations are notoriously difficult to document on archaeological evidence, these materials constitute one of the best examples of prehistoric movements of peoples available for the Early Bronze Age.
Origin of Early Transcaucasian Culture (aka Kura-Araxes culture)
Analysis of Maikop crania (Kazarnitsky 2010)
In sum, the results of the multivariate analysis suggest that Maikop people are distinct from all the contemporary and later Eastern European groups of the steppe and forest-steppe zones.
This provides an additional argument in favor of the hypothesis that Maikop burials in Kalmykia attest not merely to the cultural impact of the Maikop community on the steppe tribes (Munchaev, 1994: 168); rather, they were left by a separate group which was unrelated to the local Pit Grave population by origin.
The Southern Caucasoid trait combination revealed by the Maikop series is somewhat similar to that shown by the contemporaneous groups of the Northern Caucasus and southern Turkmenia. Clearly, this does not imply a direct connection with any of these regions.
The Near Eastern parallels are no less suggestive (Bunak, 1947: 77). Thus, a small series from Al-Ubaid in southern Mesopotamia, dating from the 4th millennium BC, is characterized by dolichocrany (cranial index, 72.6), a high face, medium wide, high and sharply protruding nose, and wide palate (Keith, 1931: 239–241). Regrettably, the number of measurements is too small to warrant a reliable comparison with the Maikop series.
However, the isolated position of the Maikop group in Eastern Europe, its vague resemblance to the Southern Caucasoids of the Caucasus and Southwestern Central Asia, and the Near Eastern cultural affinities of Maikop and Novosvobodnaya (Munchaev, 1994: 170) indirectly point to Near Eastern provenance.
Analysis of Maikop crania (Kazarnitsky 2010)
Craniological and dental signatures of Out-of-Armenia
Bioarchaeological Analysis Mutual Relations of Populations Armenian Highlands and Eurasia Using Craniological and Dental Nonmetric Traits published in Asian Culture and History Vol. 4, No. 2; July 2012, by Anahit Yu. Khudaverdyan is a multidimensional craniometric analysis of more than 254 ethnic groups of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages from the territory of Eurasia.
On the basis of the received information, cluster analysis was done and has shown the genetic condensations of ethnoses and vectors of relatives or, conversely, distinctions between them. Craniometric and odontologic investigation of the Bronze Age is interesting and in connection with discussion about the origin of Indo-Europeans and about the place of their ancestral home.
Different aspects of the problem of the ancestral home of Indo-Europeans are far from completely resolved and generate lively debate in the pages of scientific publications. New anthropological data allowed identification of alien Mediterranean characteristics influencing various ethnic Eurasian groups and revealed evidence of a migratory stream from the Armenian highlands and the Caucasus. This research provided new evidence of patterns of ethnic contact and intermixture in Western Eurasia.
From the paper on the craniological results one can see a clear link between the Armenian highlands samples and the Western Europe samples (the Arcvakar sample – 17 close phenetic links are revealed). The samples from the Georgia (Samtavro /Late Bronze Age – II period) and Iran (Tepe Gissar III), Uzbekistan (Sapallitepe) are identified as the samples with closest affinities samples from Ukraine (Shirochanski) and Poland, Germany (Corded Ware culture) in particular.
This suggests that some of the European genes do actually stem from this area. So, mediterranean connections from Armenian highlands, Georgia and Central Asia are distinctly fixed in Western Europe and in the Middle-Late Bronze Age.
If true, it is suggested that the dispersal of the Indo-European languages have been accompanied by migration and some gene flow from the Armenian highlands homeland to the various historical seats of the Indo-European languages. The different rates of genetic drift and external gene flow may have contributed to the morphological differentiation and diversification amongst the different Eurasian populations.
Cluster analysis has revealed a craniological series having analogies (on a complex of craniometric, odontologic characters) with representatives of the population of the Armenian highlands, the Caucasus, the Near East and Central Asia. The initial starting area (or one of the intermediate areas), as indicated by the anthropological data, would seem to be the Armenian highlands, and the Caucasus as a whole.
Craniological and dental signatures of Out-of-Armenia
Proto-Indo-European and North Caucasian
In the text Areal Typology of Proto-Indo-European: The Case for Caucasian Connections Ranko Matasović re-examines the evidence for early contacts between Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and the languages of the Caucasus. Although he were not able to find certain proofs of lexical borrowing between PIE and North Caucasian, there are a few undeniable areal-typological parallels in phonology and grammar.
Some features generally attributed to PIE are not found in the majority of languages of North and Northeastern Eurasia, while they are common, or universally present, in the languages of the Caucasus (especially North Caucasus). Those features include the high consonant-to-vowel ratio, tonal accent, number suppletion in personal pronouns, the presence of gender and the morphological optative and, possibly, the presence of glottalized consonants and ergativity.
Proto-Indo-European and North Caucasian
The Caucasus revisited (Yunusbayev et al. 2011)
Genes and Languages in the Caucasus
Y chromosomes of Dagestan highlanders
Genetic structure of West Eurasians
The Bronze Age Indo-European invasion of Europe
The Indo-European invasion of the Baltic
Differential relationship of ANI to Caucasus populations
Investigating East Asian admixture in Balkans/Anatolia/Caucasus
Huge study on Y-chromosome variation in Iran
rolloff analysis of Lezgins as Sardinian+Burusho
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