Poltavka culture

Poltavka culture
Geographical rangeRussia, Kazakhstan
PeriodBronze Age
Datesc. 2800 BCE – 2100 BCE
Preceded byYamnaya culture
Followed byPotapovka culture, Abashevo culture, Sintashta culture, Srubnaya culture.

Poltavka culture (Russian: Полтавкинская культура, romanized: Poltavkinskaya kul'tura) was an early to middle Bronze Age archaeological culture which flourished on the Volga-Ural steppe and the forest steppe in 2800–2100 BCE.[1]

The Poltavka culture emerged as an eastern outgrowth of the Yamnaya culture, neighboring the Catacomb culture, another Yamnaya successor, in the west. It has been considered ancestral to later cultures that are identified as Indo-Iranian.[2] The Poltavka culture influenced the later emergence of the Potapovka culture, Abashevo culture, Sintashta culture and Srubnaya culture.

Origins

The Poltavka culture emerged ca. 2800 BC,[1] as an eastern successor of the Yamnaya culture.[3][4][5] The western successor of the Yamnaya culture was the Catacomb culture.[6]

Along with the Sredny Stog culture, the Yamnaya culture and the Catacomb culture, the Poltavka culture is among the cultures of the Pontic steppe sharing archaeological characteristics with the Afanasievo culture of the eastern steppe.[7]

Distribution

The Poltavka culture flourished on the Volga-Ural steppe and the forest steppe.[8] It is contemporary with the Catacomb culture, which was located on the Pontic steppe to its southwest.[8][9][10] It seems to have co-existed at times with the Abashevo culture.[11]

The Poltavka culture appears to have expanded eastwards throughout its existence. It is probable that Poltavka herders explored areas of the Kazakh Steppe. The arrival of Poltavka people onto the Kazakh Steppe is associated with various technological innovations in the area. Poltavka pottery has been discovered in northern Kazakhstan.[5]

Successors

The Poltavka culture lasted until 2200–2100 BC.[12] It seems to be an early manifestation of the Srubnaya culture. It marks the transition of the Yamnaya culture to the Srubnaya culture.[8][13][14][15] Genetic studies suggest that the end of the Poltavka culture is associated with major population changes.[16]

The Abashevo culture appears to have emerged partially through influence from the Poltavka culture. Along with the Abashevo culture,[17] it also appears to have influenced the emergence of the Potapovka culture.[8][18]

The above mentioned eastward expansion of the Poltavka culture is associated with the emergence of the Sintashta culture and the later Andronovo culture,[4][19] the Abashevo culture, the Multi-cordoned ware culture[20][21] and the Catacomb culture.[22][23][24][25]

Morphological data suggests that the Sintashta culture might have emerged as a result of a mixture of steppe ancestry from the Poltavka culture and Catacomb culture, with ancestry from Neolithic forest hunter-gatherers.[a]

Characteristics

Poltavka settlements are very rare. They are confined to sand dunes in the lower Volga area.[8]

The flat-bottomed ceramics of the Poltavka culture differ from the pointed or round-based ceramics of the Yamnaya culture.[8] The decorative motifs of the ceramics of the later Sintashta culture and Andronovo culture are very similar to those of the Poltavka culture.[5]

The economy of the Poltavka culture was mobile pastoral, a continuation of the economy of the Yamnaya culture.[12]

Horses were domesticated on the Pontic-Caspian steppe.[27]

The Poltavka people carried out horse burials, a custom they inherited from the Yamnaya culture, the Khvalynsk culture and Samara culture respectively.[28]

The Poltavka culture shares many characteristics with the contemporaneous Sintashta culture. This includes similar pottery, metal types, weapons, horse sacrifices, chariot-driving gear and similar graves. It is common for new Poltavka settlements to be constructed on top of older ones, and the later Sintashta culture would in turn construct settlements on top of earlier Poltavka ones.[5]

Metal

The Poltavka culture is distinguished from the Yamnaya culture by its marked increase in metallurgy. Metals were probably acquired from centers in the southern Urals.[8]

The presence of gold and silver rings and bronze axes similar to those of the Maykop culture, testify to North Caucasian influences on the Poltavka culture.[8]

Certain metal objects of the Poltavka culture and the Catacomb culture appear to have been copied by the Abashevo culture.[29]

Burials

The Poltavka culture is primarily known from its burials. These were situated in cemeteries along river terraces.[8]

Poltavka graves differ slightly from those of the Yamnaya culture.[12] Burial pits sometimes had a timber cover. They were generally inserted into kurgans of the Yamnaya culture.[8][5] Poltavka kurgans were typically surrounded by a circular ditch, with a single grave with ledges.[5]

80 percent of Poltavka graves contain males.[4] Almost a third of Poltavka skulls show signs of wounds, often mortal.[30] Both male and female dead were buried on their left side or back on an organic mat, with the head oriented towards the east. On occasion the body was covered with ocher, however, less common than in the earlier Yamnaya culture.

Poltavka burials are characterized by an increased presence of ornaments and weapons. This is interpreted as evidence of increased social stratification. Other grave goods include pottery and stone scepters.[8] A Poltavka burial in the Volga region is notable for containing a large copper club.[31]

The funeral customs of the Poltavka culture influenced the customs of the Abashevo culture further north.[29]

Genetics

Mathieson et al. (2015) analyzed six skeletons of the Poltavka culture. Five of them showed Y-haplogroup R1b1a2 and its subclades. One outlier belonged to Y-hg R1a1a1b2a.[16] which notably was not included in the standard rich R1b burials.[12] All were probably closely related to people of the Yamnaya culture and the Afanasievo culture.[16][12]

Narasimshan et al. (2019) obtained seven times y-hg R1b 101 a2a (Z2103) and one R1a 1a1 (Z93-Z94), all from Samara. The authors noted a significant infusion of Central European ancestry into the steppe during the transition from the Poltavka culture to the Potapovka culture.[26]

Other genomic studies suggest that the Poltavka culture was closely genetically related to both the peoples of the eastern Yamnaya culture and the later Sarmatians.[32][33]

Linguistics

The Poltavka culture has been considered ancestral to what would later develop into Indo-Iranian cultures.[8][4]

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ "Morphological data suggests that both Fedorovka and Alakul' skeletons may be related to Sintashta groups, which in turn may reflect admixture of Neolithic forest HGs and steppe pastoralists, descendants of the Catacomb and Poltavka cultures."[26]

References

  1. 1 2 Kuznetsov & Molchalov 2016, p. 74.
  2. ↑ Nichols, Johanna (January 14, 2021). "The Origin and Dispersal of Uralic: Distributional Typological View". Annual Review of Linguistics. 7 (1): 351–369. doi:10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011619-030405. ISSN 2333-9683. ...the ancestor of Proto-Indo-Iranian had almost certainly been the language of the nomadic pastoral Poltavka culture of the Caspian steppe
  3. ↑ Mallory & Adams 1997, p. 92.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Anthony 2007, p. 306.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Anthony 2007, pp. 386–390.
  6. ↑ Mallory & Adams 1997, pp. 651–653.
  7. ↑ Mallory & Adams 1997, pp. 4–5.
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Mallory & Adams 1997, pp. 439–440.
  9. ↑ Kuzmina 2007, p. 305.
  10. ↑ Kuzmina 2007, p. 350.
  11. ↑ Kuzmina 2007, p. 222.
  12. 1 2 3 4 5 Mathieson, Iain; Reich, David (March 14, 2015). "Eight thousand years of natural selection in Europe". bioRxiv 10.1101/016477.
  13. ↑ Mallory & Adams 1997, pp. 541–542.
  14. ↑ Kuzmina 2007, p. 169.
  15. ↑ Kuzmina 2007, p. 234.
  16. 1 2 3 Mathieson, Iain (December 24, 2015). "Genome-wide patterns of selection in 230 ancient Eurasians". Nature. 528 (7583): 499–503. Bibcode:2015Natur.528..499M. doi:10.1038/nature16152. PMC 4918750. PMID 26595274.
  17. ↑ Mallory & Adams 1997, pp. 446–447.
  18. ↑ Kuzmina 2007, p. 354.
  19. ↑ Anthony 2007, p. 374.
  20. ↑ Kuzmina 2007, p. 6.
  21. ↑ Kuzmina 2007, p. 69.
  22. ↑ Kuzmina 2007, p. 206.
  23. ↑ Kuzmina 2007, p. 323.
  24. ↑ Kuzmina 2007, p. 332.
  25. ↑ Kuzmina 2007, p. 387.
  26. 1 2 Narasimhan 2019.
  27. ↑ Librado, Pablo (2021). "The origins and spread of domestic horses from the Western Eurasian steppes". Nature. 598 (7882): 634–640. Bibcode:2021Natur.598..634L. doi:10.1038/s41586-021-04018-9. PMC 8550961. PMID 34671162.
  28. ↑ Kuzmina 2007, p. 330.
  29. 1 2 Anthony 2007, p. 383.
  30. ↑ Kuzmina 2007, p. 384.
  31. ↑ Mallory & Adams 1997, p. 112.
  32. ↑ Krzewińska, Maja (October 3, 2018). "Ancient genomes suggest the eastern Pontic-Caspian steppe as the source of western Iron Age nomads". Nature Communications. 4 (10) eaat4457. Bibcode:2018SciA....4.4457K. doi:10.1126/sciadv.aat4457. PMC 6223350. PMID 30417088. [P]opulation interactions and the origin of Scythians of the Pontic-Caspian steppe remain poorly understood. Similarly, little is known about the origins and genetic affinities of the Sarmatians. Genomic studies suggest that the latter group may have been genetically similar to the eastern Yamnaya and Poltavka Bronze Age groups.
  33. ↑ Unterländer, Martina (March 3, 2017). "Ancestry and demography and descendants of Iron Age nomads of the Eurasian Steppe". Nature Communications. 8 14615. Bibcode:2017NatCo...814615U. doi:10.1038/ncomms14615. PMC 5337992. PMID 28256537. The two Early Sarmatian samples from the West... fall close to an Iron Age sample from the Samara district... and are generally close to the Early Bronze Age Yamnaya samples from Samara... and Kalmykia... and the Middle Bronze Age Poltavka samples from Samara...
  • Pearson, Roger (1985). Anthropological glossary. R. E. Krieger Pub. Co. p. 79. ISBN 9780898745108. Retrieved July 21, 2015.
  • Templeton, A. (2016). "Evolution and Notions of Human Race". In Losos, J.; Lenski, R. (eds.). How Evolution Shapes Our Lives: Essays on Biology and Society. Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press. pp. 346–361. doi:10.2307/j.ctv7h0s6j.26. ... the answer to the question whether races exist in humans is clear and unambiguous: no.
  • Wagner, Jennifer K.; Yu, Joon-Ho; Ifekwunigwe, Jayne O.; Harrell, Tanya M.; Bamshad, Michael J.; Royal, Charmaine D. (February 2017). "Anthropologists' views on race, ancestry, and genetics". American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 162 (2): 318–327. Bibcode:2017AJPA..162..318W. doi:10.1002/ajpa.23120. PMC 5299519. PMID 27874171.
  • American Association of Physical Anthropologists (March 27, 2019). "AAPA Statement on Race and Racism". American Association of Physical Anthropologists. Retrieved June 19, 2020.
  • Pickering, Robert (2009). The Use of Forensic Anthropology. CRC Press. p. 82. ISBN 978-1-4200-6877-1.
  • Herbst, Philip (June 15, 1997). The color of words: an encyclopaedic dictionary of ethnic bias in the United States. Intercultural Press. ISBN 978-1-877864-97-1. Though discredited as an anthropological term and not recommended in most editorial guidelines, it is still heard and used, for example, as a category on forms asking for ethnic identification. It is also still used for police blotters (the abbreviated Cauc may be heard among police) and appears elsewhere as a euphemism. Its synonym, Caucasoid, also once used in anthropology but now dated and considered pejorative, is disappearing.
  • Mukhopadhyay, Carol C. (June 30, 2008). "Getting Rid of the Word 'Caucasian'". In Mica Pollock (ed.). Everyday Antiracism: Getting Real About Race in School. New Press. pp. 14–. ISBN 978-1-59558-567-7. Yet there is one striking exception in our modern racial vocabulary: the term 'Caucasian'. Despite being a remnant of a discredited theory of racial classification, the term has persisted into the twenty-first century, within as well as outside of the educational community. It is high time we got rid of the word Caucasian. Some might protest that it is 'only a label'. But language is one of the most systematic, subtle, and significant vehicles for transmitting racial ideology. Terms that describe imagined groups, such as Caucasian, encapsulate those beliefs. Every time we use them and uncritically expose students to them, we are reinforcing rather than dismantling the old racialized worldview. Using the word Caucasian invokes scientific racism, the false idea that races are naturally occurring, biologically ranked subdivisions of the human species and that Caucasians are the superior race. Beyond this, the label Caucasian can even convey messages about which groups have culture and are entitled to recognition as Americans.

Sources

Wikimedia Commons logo
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Poltavka culture.
This page is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.