The New Warfaredrawn by horses or other equids. Why this was so is a point
that must be clearly understood.
The earliest wheeled vehicles, as Piggott's lucid monograph
shows, 8 were built ca. 3000 B.C. (Gimbutas's claim that there
were wheeled vehicles as early as the middle of the fifth millen-
nium is not persuasive). 9 They were sturdy and heavy, the
wheels being either solid or tripartite disks cut from planks
(mature oak was the favorite material). Four-wheeled wagons
of this type would have weighed almost half a ton, and the two-
wheeled carts several hundred pounds. Because of its ability to
pull heavy loads from a yoke, the draft animal par excellence
was the ox, even though a team of oxen moved at a speed of
only 2 mph. The reason for the equids' inefficiency, as Com-
mandant Lefebvre des Noettes demonstrated long ago, 10 was
the ancient method of harnessing. The "modern" horse collar,
which permits a horse to throw its full weight against a load,
did not appear in western Eurasia until late in the Middle
Ages. In the ancient Near East and in the classical world the
horse pulled against a neck strap: the heavier the load, the
greater the impairment to the horse's breathing. Thus har-
nessed, the relatively small horse of the Bronze Age (not much
- Much of my information I have drawn from the first three chap-
ters of Piggott's Earliest Wheeled Transport. His account is not only exqui-
sitely detailed but also highly readable. - See, for example, Gimbutas, "Old Europe," 7: "After the middle
of the fifth millennium B.C. , contacts between Old Europe and the steppe
pastoralists increased. The wheel (and vehicle) also emerged at this time,
which contributed to mobility and trade. Miniature models of wheels in
clay are known from the Karanovo and Cucuteni cultures of the mid-fifth
millennium B.C." According to Piggott, Earliest Wheeled Transport, 39—40,
these disks occur in levels carbon dated to the late fourth and early third
millennia. Whatever their date, Piggott notes that " 'wheel models' of
pottery are notoriously the least reliable evidence" for wheeled vehicles,
"owing to their morphological similarity to spindle-whorls." - Commandant Lefebvre des Noettes, La force motrice aniniale a
travers lesages (Nancy: Berger-Levrault, 1924), especially 8-12, 85-86 and
94-97-
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