on enforcing directional control from a vehicle (i.e. from a distance behind the
horses’ mouths)—something that is much less difficult from the back of a
mount.”^70
The introduction of the bit enabled steppe dwellers to use as draft animals the
horses that until then had been valued mostly as food animals and secondarily as
pack animals. Horses hitched to wagons or to disk-wheeled carts would have hardly
been able to run, and if they did work up to a run with a heavy cart behind them
they would have had difficulty bringing it to a stop. Once the bit was available,
therefore, some effort and experimentation must have gone into constructing a
light, spoke-wheeled cart. The spoked wheel weighed only a fraction of the disk
wheel, whether the disk was tripartite or (rarely) solid. If the cart’s platform was
of leather rather than of planking the cart would have weighed so little that a team
of horses, each pulling against a neck-strap, could have pulled it with ease and
could as easily have stopped it when reined in.
In the Sintashta-Petrovka region of the steppe, the first spoke-wheeled carts
appear—how could it be otherwise?—in funerary contexts. The cart and the horses
that pulled it may have carried the body to the burial site, and certainly accom -
panied the deceased owner into the Underworld. Karlene Jones-Bley has argued
that the Sintashta “chariots” were not designed for more practical purposes (many,
44 The Kurgan theory and taming of horses
Figure 2.1Disk cheekpieces (Scheibenknebel) from Trakhtemyriv, on middle Dnieper.
From Hüttel 1981, nos. 14 and 15. Courtesy Prähistorische Bronzefunde and
C. H. Beck Verlag