Sintashta culture

Sintashta culture
Period Bronze Age
Dates 2100–1800 BCE
Type site Sintashta
Major sites Arkaim
Petrovka
Characteristics Extensive copper and bronze metallurgy
Fortified settlements
Elaborate weapon burials
Earliest known chariots
Preceded by Poltavka culture, Abashevo culture
The formative Sintashta-Petrovka culture is shown in red on this map. The maximum extent of the Andronovo culture is in orange. The location of the earliest spoke-wheeled chariot finds is indicated in magenta. Adjacent and overlapping cultures (Afanasevo culture, Srubna culture, BMAC) are shown in olive green.

The Sintashta culture, also known as the Sintashta-Petrovka culture[1] or Sintashta-Arkaim culture,[2] is a Bronze Age archaeological culture of the northern Eurasian steppe on the borders of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, dated to the period 2100–1800 BCE.[3] The culture is named after the Sintashta archaeological site, in Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia.

The Sintashta culture is regarded as the origin of the Indo-Iranian languages. The earliest known chariots have been found in Sintashta burials, and the culture is considered a strong candidate for the origin of the technology, which spread throughout the Old World and played an important role in ancient warfare.[4] Sintashta settlements are also remarkable for the intensity of copper mining and bronze metallurgy carried out there, which is unusual for a steppe culture.[5]

Origin and spread

Predecessors: Poltavka culture, Abashevo culture, Corded Ware culture

According to Allentoft (2015), the Sintashta culture probably derived at least partially from the Corded Ware Culture

The Sintashta culture emerged from the interaction of two antecedent cultures, the Poltavka culture and the Abashevo culture. Because of the difficulty of identifying the remains of Sintashta sites beneath those of later settlements, the culture was only recently distinguished from the Andronovo culture.[2] It is now recognised as a separate entity forming part of the 'Andronovo horizon'.[1]

Its immediate predecessor in the Ural-Tobol steppe was the Poltavka culture, an offshoot of the cattle-herding Yamnaya horizon that moved east into the region between 2800 and 2600 BCE. Several Sintashta towns were built over older Poltavka settlements or close to Poltavka cemeteries, and Poltavka motifs are common on Sintashta pottery.

Sintashta material culture also shows the influence of the late Abashevo culture, derived from the Fatyanovo-Balanovo culture, a collection of Corded Ware settlements in the forest steppe zone north of the Sintashta region that were also predominantly pastoralist.[6]

Allentoft et al. (2015) found close autosomal genetic relationship between peoples of Corded Ware culture and Sintashta culture, which "suggests similar genetic sources of the two," and may imply that "the Sintashta derives directly from an eastward migration of Corded Ware peoples."[7] Sintashta individuals and Corded Ware individuals both had a relatively higher ancestry proportion derived from the early farmers of Central Europe, and both differed markedly in such ancestry from the population of the Yamnaya Culture and most individuals of the Poltavka Culture that preceded Sintashta in the same geographic region.[7][note 1]

Inter-group competition and warfare

The first Sintashta settlements appeared around 2100 BCE, during a period of climatic change that saw the already arid Kazakh steppe region become even more cold and dry. The marshy lowlands around the Ural and upper Tobol rivers, previously favoured as winter refuges, became increasingly important for survival. Under these pressures both Poltavka and Abashevo herders settled permanently in river valley strongholds, eschewing more defensible hill-top locations.[8]

The Abashevo culture was already marked by endemic intertribal warfare;[9] intensified by ecological stress and competition for resources in the Sintashta period, this drove the construction of fortifications on an unprecedented scale and innovations in military technique such as the invention of the war chariot. Increased competition between tribal groups may also explain the extravagant sacrifices seen in Sintashta burials, as rivals sought to outdo one another in acts of conspicuous consumption analogous to the North American potlatch tradition.[8] Sintashta artefact types such as spearheads, trilobed arrowheads, chisels, and large shaft-hole axes were taken east.[10] Many Sintashta graves are furnished with weapons, although the composite bow associated later with chariotry does not appear. Sintashta sites have produced finds of horn and bone, interpreted as furniture (grips, arrow rests, bow ends, string loops) of bows; there is no indication that the bending parts of these bows included anything other than wood.[11] Arrowheads are also found, made of stone or bone rather than metal. These arrows are short, 50–70 cm long, and the bows themselves may have been correspondingly short.[12]

Andronovo culture

Because of the difficulty of identifying the remains of Sintashta sites beneath those of later settlements, the culture was only recently distinguished from the Andronovo culture.[2] It is now recognised as a separate entity forming part of the 'Andronovo horizon'.[1]

Proto-Indo-Iranian ethnic and linguistic identity

The approximate present-day distribution of the Indo-European branches of Eurasia:
  Indo-Iranian

The people of the Sintashta culture are thought to have spoken Proto-Indo-Iranian, the ancestor of the Indo-Iranian language family. This identification is based primarily on similarities between sections of the Rig Veda, an Indian religious text which includes ancient Indo-Iranian hymns recorded in Vedic Sanskrit, with the funerary rituals of the Sintashta culture as revealed by archaeology.[13] There is however linguistic evidence of a list of common vocabulary between Finno-Ugric and Indo-Iranian languages. While its origin as a creole of different tribes in the Ural region may make it inaccurate to ascribe the Sintashta culture exclusively to Indo-Iranian ethnicity, interpreting this culture as a blend of two cultures with two distinct languages is a reasonable hypothesis based on the evidence.[14] From the Sintashta culture the Indo-Iranian languages migrated with the Indo-Iranians to Anatolia, India and Iran.[15][16] From the 9th century BCE onward, Iranian languages also migrated westward with the Scythians back to the Pontic steppe where the proto-Indo-Europeans came from.[16]

Metal production

The Sintashta economy came to revolve around copper metallurgy. Copper ores from nearby mines (such as Vorovskaya Yama) were taken to Sintashta settlements to be processed into copper and arsenical bronze. This occurred on an industrial scale: all the excavated buildings at the Sintashta sites of Sintashta, Arkaim and Ust'e contained the remains of smelting ovens and slag.[8] Much of this metal was destined for export to the cities of the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC) in Central Asia. The metal trade between Sintashta and the BMAC for the first time connected the steppe region to the ancient urban civilisations of the Near East: the empires and city-states of Iran and Mesopotamia provided an almost bottomless market for metals. These trade routes later became the vehicle through which horses, chariots and ultimately Indo-Iranian-speaking people entered the Near East from the steppe.[17][18]

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Allentoft et al. (2015) analysed ancient DNA recovered from remains at four Sintashta sites. The five samples analysed included the mitochondrial DNA haplogroups U2e, J1, J2 and N1a. The two male individuals both belonged to Y-chromosome haplogroup R1a1.[7]

References

  1. 1 2 3 Koryakova 1998b.
  2. 1 2 3 Koryakova 1998a.
  3. ↑ Anthony 2009.
  4. ↑ Kuznetsov 2006.
  5. ↑ Hanks & Linduff 2009.
  6. ↑ Anthony 2007, pp. 386–388.
  7. 1 2 3 Allentoft 2015.
  8. 1 2 3 Anthony 2007, pp. 390–391.
  9. ↑ Anthony 2007, pp. 383–384.
  10. ↑ E. N. Chernykh, Ancient Metallurgy in the USSR, The Early Metal Age. , 225, fig. 78. As referenced in Steppe Weapons in Ancient China and the Role of Hand-to-hand Combat. Jessica Rawson. School of Archaeology. University of Oxford. https://www.academia.edu/20315661/Steppe_Weapons_in_Ancient_China_and_the_Role_of_Hand-to-hand_Combat Accessed 7 Feb 2016.
  11. ↑ THE SINTASHTA BOW OF THE BRONZE AGE OF THE SOUTH TRANS-URALS, RUSSIA Andrey Bersenev, Andrey Epimakhov and Dmitry Zdanovich. Pages 175–186 in: Bronze Age Warfare: Manufacture and Use of Weaponry. Edited by Marianne Mödlinger Marion Uckelmann Steven Matthews. BAR International Series 22552011. Published by Archaeopress, publishers of British Archaeological Reports, Gordon House 276 Banbury Road Oxford OX2 7ED England, 2011. BAR S2255 Bronze Age Warfare: Manufacture and Use of Weaponry. ISBN 978 1 4073 0822 7 (accessed 20 03 2016)
  12. ↑ THE SINTASHTA BOW OF THE BRONZE AGE OF THE SOUTH TRANS-URALS, RUSSIA Andrey Bersenev, Andrey Epimakhov and Dmitry Zdanovich. Pages 175–186 in: Bronze Age Warfare: Manufacture and Use of Weaponry. Edited by Marianne Mödlinger Marion Uckelmann Steven Matthews. BAR International Series 22552011. Published by Archaeopress, publishers of British Archaeological Reports, Gordon House 276 Banbury Road Oxford OX2 7ED England, 2011. BAR S2255 Bronze Age Warfare: Manufacture and Use of Weaponry. ISBN 978 1 4073 0822 7 (accessed 20 03 2016)
  13. ↑ Anthony 2007, pp. 408–411.
  14. ↑ Kuz'mina 2007, p. 222.
  15. ↑ Anthony 2007.
  16. 1 2 Beckwith 2009.
  17. ↑ Anthony 2007, p. 391.
  18. ↑ Anthony 2007, pp. 435–418.

Sources

  • Allentoft; et al. (2015), "Population genomics of Bronze Age Eurasia", Nature, doi:10.1038/nature14507 
  • Anthony, D. W. (2007). The Horse, the Wheel, and Language. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-05887-0. 
  • Anthony, D. W. (2009). "The Sintashta Genesis: The Roles of Climate Change, Warfare, and Long-Distance Trade". In Hanks, B.; Linduff, K. Social Complexity in Prehistoric Eurasia: Monuments, Metals, and Mobility. Cambridge University Press. pp. 47–73. ISBN 978-0-511-60537-6. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511605376.005. 
  • Beckwith, Christopher I. (2009), Empires of the Silk Road, Princeton University Press 
  • Hanks, B.; Linduff, K. (2009). "Late Prehistoric Mining, Metallurgy, and Social Organization in North Central Eurasia". In Hanks, B.; Linduff, K. Social Complexity in Prehistoric Eurasia: Monuments, Metals, and Mobility. Cambridge University Press. pp. 47–73. ISBN 978-0-511-60537-6. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511605376.005. 
  • Koryakova, L. (1998a). "Sintashta-Arkaim Culture". The Center for the Study of the Eurasian Nomads (CSEN). Retrieved 16 September 2010. 
  • Koryakova, L. (1998b). "An Overview of the Andronovo Culture: Late Bronze Age Indo-Iranians in Central Asia". The Center for the Study of the Eurasian Nomads (CSEN). Retrieved 16 September 2010. 
  • Kuznetsov, P. F. (2006). "The emergence of Bronze Age chariots in eastern Europe". Antiquity. 80 (309): 638–645. 
  • Kuz'mina, E. E. (2007). Mallory, J. P., ed. The Origin of the Indo-Iranians. Leiden: Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-16054-5. 
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