by food-producers. Out in the steppe the sod was too tough for farmers in the
fourth millennium BCto plow, although it did offer ample vegetation for grazing.
Wool, in contrast to milk and meat, was durable and marketable, and when
woolly sheep began to replace hairy sheep (wild sheep have a hairy coat, and so
did the early domesticates) the steppe may have become more attractive. As noted
at the beginning of this chapter, all the branches of Indo-European inherited from
PIE a word for wool and we must assume that wool was of some importance in
the PIE culture. The earliest woolen textiles that archaeologists have found
anywhere date to the fourth millennium BC. There is indirect evidence that in
western Iran and a few other places certain varieties of sheep may have been bred
for both meat and wool already in the sixth millennium BC, but Bill Darden
concluded that “significant indications of wool technology do not occur anywhere
until the fourth millennium.” Eventually wool became an important item of
trade, and in Mesopotamia “workers’ wages were paid in wool, and exports of
woolen cloths paid for the imports of raw materials.”^73 How important wool sheep
were in the Yamna culture is debated. Some, but not all, osteological evidence
suggests that the Yamna pastoralists depended more on their cattle than on their
sheep.^74
However that may be, late in the fourth millennium BCit evidently became
profitable to take flocks of sheep as well as herds of cattle deep into the steppe.
Exactly how this pastoralism worked in the Bronze Age is not entirely clear. Until
1000 BCthe steppe was not fully nomadic, because the pastoralists coexisted with
agricultural villagers living along the river valleys (by ca. 700 BCall the villages
were gone and the steppe was fully nomadic). The pastoralists of the late fourth
and most of the third millennium BCare identified with the Yamna archaeological
culture, which is well known from its burials in kurgans (each of which usually
contained multiple burials) and most of the kurgans lie in the deep steppe. The
pastoralists must have kept their flocks and herds not too far from the kurgans
that they erected, but very few settlements have been found. This is in contrast
to the subsequent Srubna (Timber Grave) period, when a good part of the steppe
population lived in small settlements. A typical community of Yamna pastoralists
must have had a temporary settlement, or nothing more than a camp, and moved
from one spring, water hole or well to another when the immediately accessible
steppe began to be overgrazed. Although evidence for agriculture is slight, a few
crops were evidently planted and harvested.^75
Sherratt and Anthony argued convincingly that what allowed people to live on
the open steppe, and to provide fresh pastures for their flocks and cattle over an
immense area, was the wagon. In the first millennium BCthe “Skythians” had no
houses or huts but lived in their covered wagons,^76 and what evidence we have
(and also what evidence we do not have) indicates that most pastoralists did the
same already in the late fourth and the third millennium BC. The pastoralist’s wagon
would have been covered with a canopy or tilt: a fabric—probably of felt—stretched
over a wooden frame.^77 Every wagon was ponderous, with heavy planking and
with tri-partite disk wheels, often a meter or more in diameter.^78 For the ancient
pastoralists about whom we have information wagons were their “home”: in a
18 Origins and spread of Proto-Indo-European