of what Marija Gimbutas called “Old Europe.” Toward the east, this archaeological
assemblage was contemporary with, and connected to, the Cucuteni-Trypillian
culture, named after two of the earliest type-sites, one in northeastern Romania
and the other in Ukraine. Villages of the “Old Europe” type were to be found as
far west as central Austria. The prosperity of “Old Europe” depended mostly on
its good soils and abundant rainfall and therefore its suitability for agriculture,
but in Transylvania also on the extraction of copper and the panning of gold from
the Carpathian mountains.
Between ca. 4000 and 3700 BC“Old Europe” declined significantly, for reasons
that are unclear, and it remained at a low level for a very long time. Fewer
settlements in this area are known from the later fourth millennium BC, and those
that have been identified are very small. It may be, as Andrew Sherratt suggested,
that the readily accessible sources of Carpathian copper were by that time
depleted.^27 In the third millennium BClivestock evidently became more important
in the economy of Transylvania and eastern Hungary, with agriculture playing a
subordinate role. Many low passes lead through the Carpathians and it is possible
that some of the inhabitants of Transylvania and Hungary in the third millennium
BCwere nomadic pastoralists from the Eurasian steppe. Much remains unclear,
however, about the prehistory of Romania and Bulgaria in the third and early second
millennium BC, in part because little archaeological research was done in these
states until the 1990s.
Given the presence of copper in the Carpathians, it is surprising that Tran -
syl vania and other parts of Romania seem to have continued at the Neolithic
level until after 2000 BC.^28 Most of what is known of Transylvania during
the third millennium BCis labeled as the Coţofeni archaeological culture,^29
and most of what survives is clay: either incised pottery or crude figurines.
The inhabitants lived in small huts or in pit-dwellings. In the latter, which had
also been com -mon in the Early Neolithic period, posts at the corners of the
pit supported a roof, but all of the small living space was subterranean. Cattle,
pigs, goats and sheep were common food animals (horses were evidently rare).^30
There was nothing prosperous about these communities. Eventually the Coţofeni
“settlements” of Transylvania seem to have been abandoned, and what followed
has been assigned to the Glina, the Schneckenberg, and a welter of other
archaeological cultures, most of them poorly known and none of them securely
dated. From the end of the third and beginning of the second millennium BCfew
settlements have been found, and those few tend to be near copper deposits.
Presumably the people who lived in the settlements spent much of their lives
mining copper, but they profited little from their industry. Most information
comes from graves, some of them tumuli, and the grave goods deposited in the
tumuli are not impressive. The dead went to the Underworld with some pottery,
usually undecorated, but with no metal other than a very rare piece of personal
adornment.^31
On the Hungarian plain, as in Transylvania, stood many kurgans. Their dates
are problematic, but some of the kurgans seem to have been erected in the
centuries just before and after 2000 BC. Although the dead buried in these kurgans
138 Militarism in temperate Europe