however, were probably not made in the grassland steppe. It is possible that they
were built in southeastern Crimea, where in antiquity the northern foothills of the
Crimean mountain range were covered with hardwood trees: oak, beech, hornbeam
and ash. We have, however, no evidence of wagons or settlements (and, as noted
above, very little evidence even of food production) in Crimea in the fourth
millennium BC.
The earliest in corporeevidence of wheeled vehicles anywhere comes from the
Maikop culture. When Anthony wrote The Horse the Wheel and Language
the earliest such evidence seemed to date ca. 3100 BCand came from two kur -
gan burials, one near the lower Dnieper and the other near the Kuban.^66 Still earlier
evidence, available for some time, has only recently received attention.^67 In 1985
archaeologists at Starokorsunskaya, near the city of Krasnodar on the Kuban
river, found the remains of a funeral wagon in a burial dating ca. 3300 BC. Atop
the wooden cover of a pit-grave were poorly preserved remains of at least two
(solid) wooden wheels. Enough of one wheel was preserved to determine that its
diameter was ca. 60 cm, with an axle perforation of 18 cm.^68
For a long time wheeled vehicles remained a very important feature of life and
death in the Kuban region. Archaeologists digging in the Novotitarovskaya area
of the Kuban steppe have found 115 graves with wagons or wagon parts.^69
Wagons were also included in burials in other parts of the Kuban steppe, and
Aleksandr Gej has observed that of all the wagons found in Early and Middle
Bronze Age burials on the Eurasian steppe almost half have been found in the
quite small Kuban territory.^70 Until a better candidate comes along, I will consider
it likely that PIE was spoken along the Kuban—as well as along the Don and the
middle Volga—during the pre-Maikop culture, and that during the subsequent
Maikop period PIE matured.
The spread of Indo-European languages in the third
millennium BC
Importantly, if somewhat circuitously, an argument about the spread of Indo-
European languages through the steppe proceeds smoothly enough from the
premise that the Maikop culture, with its cartwrights and wainwrights, was an
important part of a wider PIE language community. It is now widely recognized,
thanks in large part to arguments put forward by Andrew Sherratt and David
Anthony, that wheeled vehicles enabled the exploitation of the grassland steppe
during the late fourth and the third millennium BC.^71 During this period the
Yamna (pit-grave) archaeological culture spread over the grassland steppe from
at least the Dnieper river in the west to the Ural in the east, and Indo-Europeanists
are quite sure that Indo-European languages were spoken in most if not all of the
Yamna culture.^72 Before the Yamna period food-producers had lived along the
rivers of the steppe, where fish were plentiful, winter foraging was available for
animals, and agriculture was not terribly difficult. Away from the rivers, the steppe
had been roamed by hunters and foragers (many hunter-gatherers of the Dnieper-
Donets culture seem to have lived on the open steppe) but had not been occupied
Origins and spread of Proto-Indo-European 17