FIG. 3.
BOWL, DECORATED WITH RED LINES, DISCOVERED
IN THE GREAT “THOLOS” OF HAGHIA TRIADA.
(From Mosso’s “Dawn of Mediterranean Civilisation.”)
As we have seen this people usually, and perhaps invariably cremated their dead, for the skeletons referred to by M. Chvojka,[190] may not have belonged to this period; in any case they have not been described. We have, therefore, no direct evidence of their physical characters and racial affinities. Some years ago Sir Arthur Keith,[191] discussing the origin of the “Bronze age invaders of Britain,” a people which I shall describe in the next chapter by the name of the Beaker-folk, argued with much force that they must have set out from Galicia. As they reached Britain about or perhaps before 2000 B.C., they must have left Galicia still earlier, that is to say about the time that Tripolje settlements of type B. came to an end. For this reason I argued in 1916[192] that the Tripolje culture was due to the Beaker-folk, and I see no reason to-day to change my mind.
Now the Beaker-folk, often called Bronze Age or Round Barrow men, are rather tall, strongly built, and with rather broad heads. They have often been termed Alpine, but as Keith has shown, they differ in many important particulars from the typical Alpines in the mountain zone. The difference lies mainly in this: they are taller, more robust, their cranial index is lower, seldom rising above 84, while the conspicuous flattening of the occiput is absent.[193]
These characters suggest a cross between the Alpine and Nordic types, and this is a possible solution, as they lie midway between the Alpines of the mountain zone and another people, to be described next, who occupied the steppe lands to the east, and who closely resemble the Nordic type. On the other hand the Beaker-folk type seems to have remained fairly uniform, so that, if it is a cross, it is a stable cross, which suggests that it is one of long standing. It may be, then, that we should consider it rather as a cross between the broad-headed Ofnet type, and some long-headed palæolithic race, such as that of Combe Capelle.
On the steppe lands east of the Dnieper, and stretching thence to the confines of Asia, and apparently beyond into Turkestan, we find evidence of another people, who are of great importance to our problem.[194] Unfortunately we know less of them than we could wish, for many of their remains have come to light as the result of unscientific digging, and the few results of expert exploration have been meagrely published in very unaccessible proceedings. These people buried their dead in barrows, or kurgans, and for this reason they have been called Kurgan people.[195] This name, however, is open to objection, as several other folk at different times have buried in kurgans throughout this region. The chief peculiarity of the people I am dealing with is that they buried their dead in a contracted position, and that skeletons have been found thickly covered with red ochre. For this reason some writers have called them red skeleton men or nomad red men.[196] This again is not quite a satisfactory term, and I have suggested in its place steppe-folk or nomad steppe-folk.[197]
The graves of these men were poorly furnished. They contained usually a few stone or bone implements and a certain type of pot with a hemispherical base. The evidence available a few years ago led to the belief that they were in a neolithic condition and totally ignorant of the use of metal, but some recent discoveries at Maikop, in the Koban basin, disclosed a considerable number of objects of gold and silver. From this and similar finds Rostovtzeff[198] has argued that these steppe-folk were responsible for a considerable civilisation; but, taking into account the poverty displayed by most of their burials, I am disposed to think of them as still living in a neolithic state, but sometimes raiding the richer and more advanced civilisations to the south, which had long reached a chalcolithic stage. Rostovtzeff is probably right in attributing the Maikop discoveries to the early part of the third millennium, which brings them within the period we are discussing.
That these people were nomads seems clear from the little evidence we possess and from the poverty of their tombs and the absence of dwelling sites. We have, in one grave at least, evidence that they possessed the horse,[199] and since the grassy steppe lands are the home of wild cattle, we shall not be far wrong in believing that they were by this time passing from a hunting to a pastoral stage. They were, in fact, owners of large bands of cattle, which, like cow-boys, they drove from pasture to pasture.