4000 BC, regularly ate horsemeat (three-fourths of the bones from hearths and
kitchen dumps were horse bones). Concluding from the osteological evidence that
the horses were domesticated rather than wild, and assuming that domesticated
horses must have been controlled by herders on horseback, Telegin looked for
signs of riding. Among the several graves that he excavated Telegin found a “head
and hoofs” burial of a stallion, a ritual common on the steppe during the Iron Age
and a sure sign of a riding society. In other sectors of his Dereivka excavations
Telegin found six perforated antler tines, which he interpreted as cheekpieces for
bridles.^5 For more than a generation the Dereivka “evidence” muddied the history
of horsemanship, but in 1997 David Anthony and Dorcas Brown carbon dated
the skull from the head and hoofs burial of the stallion and learned that the burial
was an Iron Age intrusion into an otherwise Neolithic site: the stallion died no
earlier than 700 BCand possibly as late as 200 BC.^6 As for the six “cheekpieces,”
the perforated antler tines at Neolithic Dereivka—as at Neolithic villages far
removed from horse country—can be more easily identified as piercing or boring
tools.^7
That the Dereivka and other Neolithic antler tines were cheekpieces was argued
most vigorously by Marija Gimbutas, who headed the Indo-European program
at UCLA, founded the Journal of Indo-European Studies, and from the 1960s until
her death in 1994 was one of the English-speaking world’s most celebrated
scholars. Gimbutas argued that horses were commonly bitted, bridled and ridden
on the steppe already in the fifth millennium BC. Over three decades of publication
Gimbutas’ principal thesis—her “Kurgan theory”—was that from the fifth to the
third millennium BCEurope was Indo-Europeanized as waves of riders from the
steppe invaded and conquered Europe, bringing with them their Indo-European
languages and their warlike way of life, and erecting conspicuous kurgans (in
Russian, a burial mound or barrow is a kurgan) in which to bury their chiefs.^8
Although not many kurgans dating so early as the fourth millennium BChave
been found, Gimbutas was perhaps correct in saying that PIE speakers buried their
leaders under kurgans. As Benjamin Fortson has summarized the topic,
Ancient IE texts describing burials, especially of kings or warriors, are known
from several branches, and although they do not agree with one another in
every detail, they allow us to piece together a reasonably good picture of PIE
burial practices. A dead person was buried in his own individual tomb that
was like a mortuary house and heaped over with earth (a tumulus or burial
mound). The corpse was sometimes cremated; this was the norm in the Indo-
Iranian world and a special honor for heroes in ancient Scandinavia. Buried
with the deceased were various grave goods, including ornaments, food,
clothing, weapons, tools, and often wheeled vehicles, sacrificed animals, and
even people. All these things would be needed in the afterlife.^9Although the practice of heaping up a tumulus over the grave of a deceased
notable—and stocking the grave with a lavish corredo—may have been common
among PIE speakers, it was not restricted to them. Kurgans—thousands of them—
The Kurgan theory and taming of horses 29