Carving the studs was arduous, however, and although the earliest cheekpieces
in the Carpathian basin were Scheibenknebelthey soon gave way there to the
Stangenknebel: the tip of a deer’s antler, which was by nature very sharp and in
fact too sharp (the tip was often cut off, to avoid injuring the horse). When tugged
against the horse’s cheek, the lever action on the antler caused the horse to turn
its neck and so to turn in the direction of the tug. These Stangenknebelwere
relatively easy to produce, although labor and skill were required for the incised
decorations that most of them bore. In temperate Europe the Scheibenknebelhad
gone entirely out of favor by 1500 BC, and for the next 300 years the standard
cheekpiece for horse harness was the Stangenknebel. Although Hüttel identified
135 of these (nos. 35 through 169 in his catalogue) this kind of cheekpiece was
rarely used in the steppes: Hüttel found only a single Stangenknebelin the steppes
(Anatolia, in contrast, yielded thirteen).^56 In Europe a sprinkling of Stangenknebel
has been found in western Hungary and eastern Austria, and then a relatively thick
concentration in northern Italy.^57
The Italian cheekpieces seem to be somewhat later than those from the Carpa -
thian basin, however, and most of the Stangenknebelfrom the Bz A2 period come
from western Romania and eastern Hungary.^58 Hüttel reasonably concluded that
the type originated there, and his conclusion has been strengthened by Nikolaus
Boroffka’s catalogue of all the organic cheekpieces found in Romania. Boroffka
counted thirty-one cheekpieces there, eight of them Scheibenknebeland the other
twenty-three Stangenknebel. Eight of the latter, nicely decorated, came from a
domestic workshop that archaeologists late in the nineteenth century excavated
Militarism in temperate Europe 143Figure 5.1Find-spots of disk cheekpieces (Boroffka’s Type A and Type B
Scheibenknebel). From Boroffka 1998, Abb. 17. Courtesy Nikolaus Boroffka
and the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Eurasien-Abteilung