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Ram heads are an important decorative element and are also used on pendants, which come in a variety of shapes, including miniature axes. One type comprises a pair of conjoined Brili-type axes, and another is a central south Caucasian axe.Yet other pendants are simply ram heads with spiralling horns of different lengths. Brili spearheads are of two types – those that are cast with a hollow socket and those with a thick sheet that wrapped around the top of the wooden shaft. Both are fairly common and found throughout the central and southernmost south Caucasus, but they do not help in the dating of Tomb 12. Eight daggers are part of the metalwork assemblage.They are either leafshaped or elongated and relatively small in size. Like the spearheads, there is no measure of agreement on chronology: both early and late second millennium dates have been suggested.
WAGONS ANDCARTS
Origins and Distribution
The invention of wheeled vehicles was a breakthrough of singular importance in the history of technology. Its creation, so simple yet so radical, gradually transformed community life. The wheeled vehicle revolutionised economic pursuits and social activities, transport, and contact. Whether the earliest vehicles – carts (with two wheels) and wagons (with four wheels) – were of any practical use in day-to-day activities such as carrying heavy loads, however, is a matter of contention. Some have argued that the sheer bulk of these early vehicles and their wide and clumsy turning circle would not have made them a suitable mode of transport.137 On the other hand, the presence of a large amount of plantain pollen on the wheels from Tqemlara Barrow 4, in Georgia, for instance, would suggest that the vehicles might have been used in daily life.138 This evidence and preliminary studies carried out by Margarethe and Hans-Peter Uerpmann, who have reported stress marks on cattle bones caused by hard work, support Andrew Sherratt’s original idea that early, wheeled vehicles were part of a set of innovations including the plough and animal traction.139 These changes belong to what Sherratt termed the ‘Secondary Products Revolution’, which Svend Hansen has shown also involved a dynamic network of exchange and communication systems, from central Europe to the Caucasus.140
137Burmeister 2010.
138Shatberashvili et al. 2010: 197.
139Sherratt 1981; Uerpmann and Uerpmann (2010) studied several sites but the cattle bones from Metz Sepasa in Armenia are particularly telling.
140Sherratt 1981; Hansen 2010; Halstead 2011. According to Uerpmann and Uerpmann (2010: 237–8), however, we should dismiss the notions of periods assigned to the exploitation of ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ products.
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Exactly where and when the wheeled vehicle was developed is a moot point. Sherratt maintained that ox-drawn wagons were most likely conceived in regions with large populations and a high concentration of domesticated herds.To his way of thinking, the south Mesopotamian urban centres had the requisite criteria, and the ‘Uruk Expansion’ provided the process of dissemination northward to Europe.141 Not so, says Joseph Maran, who argues with equally compelling evidence that wheeled transport was a north Pontic invention that moved south via the Maikop territories to Mesopotamia.142 We know that wagons and carts appeared considerably later than the use of domestic beasts for drawing sledges. Indeed, it is likely that wheeled vehicles evolved from the slide-car through the A-shaped cart to the rectangular-bodied wagon.
Current evidence suggests that wagons and carts appeared at approximately the same time, in the second half of the fourth millennium BC, in several regions – Mesopotamia, Europe, and the Caucasus.143 The nature of that evidence, however, is very different in each region. From Mesopotamia we have some twenty-four pictographs for the sledge, but only four pictographs, inscribed on the earliest written clay tablets from the Eanna precinct (Level IVa) at Uruk, document the wheel’s appearance. In the Caucasus, waterlogged and generally anaerobic conditions in many barrow burials have preserved actual vehicles. Europe, on the other hand, is known for its wheel depictions on pottery and clay models of wagons. Animal figurines and clay models of wheeled vehicles are ubiquitous throughout the Old World. One thing is certain; namely, wheel technology soon acquired a symbolic and prestige status. It was developed and transferred by elites, who included wagons and carts amongst the furnishings of their tombs. Eventually the light spoke-wheeled chariot, discussed in Chapter 8, whose manoeuvrability transformed warfare, superseded the heavy and lumbering wagons and carts.
Early wheeled vehicles are inextricably part of Caucasian history.The rich concentration of preserved vehicles on both sides of the Caucasus Range, unrivalled in any other place on earth, enables us to track their development with some degree of confidence.144 Some studies have accorded chronological primacy to the barrows (pit graves) of the Russian steppes, belonging to the Pit-Grave (Yamnaya) communities, over the agrarian communities of the
141Sherratt 2004.
142Maran 2004.
143Piggott 1983;Anthony 2007. For an important collection of articles, see Burmeister 2004, and for a summary of research on wheeled vehicles, there is Bondár 2012. Mesopotamia still has its followers as the place of origin of wagons (Bakker et al. 1999; some in Burmeister 2004; Hansen 2010: 306), but the new radiocarbon readings from the northern Caucasus suggest that it is still too difficult to call. Europe, too, has some compelling claims.
144Piggott 1969, 1983 and 1992, and before him Childe 1951, 1954a and 1954b. See also Littauer and Crouwel 1979; Bertram 2003: 157–66; Burmeister 2004; see also Trifonov 2004.
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south Caucasus. New radiocarbon analyses, however, have begun to alter this perspective and suggest that the two periods are more or less contemporary.145 This would mean that vehicles appeared on both sides of the Caucasus at about the same time.The sum probabilities of the one-sigma (68.2 per cent) confidence level of several hundred radiocarbon readings indicate that the beginning of the Pit-Grave horizon should be placed at the end of the fourth millennium or early third millennium BC, with the earliest dates (ca. 3700 BC) deriving from the eastern and western peripheries, in the Ural andVolga basins.146 Furthermore, it now seems that the Catacomb (Catacombnaya) communities, once thought also to follow the Pit-Grave, in fact co-existed with it over several hundred years (ca. 2900–2200 BC).‘The results of radiocarbon chronology’, notes Chernykh, ‘explode our previous calendar position of the main Eastern European steppe communities’.147
To these new analyses we can add the growing number of radiocarbon dates from the southern Caucasus that make it possible to place the beginning of the Kura-Araxes at around 3500/3400 BC and, as we have seen, the MartkopiearlyTrialeti phase at 2500 BC. Despite the fuzziness that surrounds the genesis of the earliest wheeled vehicles, we do know that wheel technology, like most new ideas, spread rapidly. Within a relatively short time, communities across the Near East and Europe embraced this new invention, even though the oxdrawn sledge would still have been a common sight.
The Caucasian Evidence
It is convenient to deal with the evidence for Bronze Age Caucasian wheeled vehicles together, because the vehicles are structurally similar, and leave comments on the Late Bronze-Early Iron Age vehicles with spoke wheels for a later chapter.Three categories of evidence present themselves for wagons and carts: (a) actual vehicles, or some of their parts, preserved in waterlogged conditions; (b) clay models; (c) impressions in the soil where vehicles once stood, left after the wooden structures had perished. The earliest vehicles from the Caucasus were built completely of wood, apart from occasional metal fitments such as reign guides.Their wheels were solid discs assembled from three planks of wood held together with dowels set into mortise-holes that were gouged out with a metal chisel (Figure 7.24(3–4)). No block wheels carved from one plank of wood, similar to those found in Neolithic north-western Europe, have been recovered from the Caucasus.
To ensure structural strength, planks of wood were split lengthwise, and never cut across the grain of a tree trunk. Carpenters also chose relatively
145Chernykh 2011.
146Chernykh 2011: figs 13 and 14.
147Chernykh 2011: 159.
Figure 7.24. Wagons and carts: (1) Trialeti Barrow 5, wooden wagon; (2) Irganchai Barrow 1, top view of the wooden wagon; (3–4) Trialeti Barrows 5 and 29 tripartite disc wheels from showing mortise-holes; (5) Lchashen Barrow 2, wooden cart; (6) Berikldeebi Barrow 4, bronze reign ring mounted on a tube with wood remnants; (7) Lchashen Barrow 11, wooden wagon (after Piggott 1969; no. 2 photograph courtesy K. Kakhiani; nos. 6, 8 photographs A. Sagona).
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young (thin) trees to construct a tripartite wheel. Not only would young trees have been more common, they would have required less effort to fell than established trees, especially hardwoods. At the centre of the wheel, in the middle of the central plank, is the raised hub around the axle hole. A lynch pin at the opposite ends of the axle prevented the wheel from slipping off. A pair of draught animals, usually oxen, harnessed by means of a yoke to a draught-pole, pulled the vehicles along; horse traction was used rarely for wagons and appears only in the mid-second millennium BC. Some vehicles had straight sides, usually constructed of wattle, or an arched cover (a tilt). Although the early ox-wagons were weighty and slow moving, their construction required exceptional carpentry skills and a considerable investment of time and energy.
The earliest evidence we have for wheeled vehicles in the southern Caucasus are isolated clay discs with a central swelling found in Kura-Araxes contexts. These, as well as horned animal figurines, some possibly representing oxen, are fairly ubiquitous across the Kura-Araxes province. It is likely that at least some of the discs represent the wheels of model vehicles and are not spindle whorls, which are generally domed and manufactured from bone. This suggests Kura-Araxes communities were aware of, or even used, wheeled vehicles as early as the second half of the fourth millennium BC. But that has yet to be proven, as has the idea that such vehicles facilitated the migration of communities across the highlands.148 Early wheeled vehicles were heavy (up to 700 kg) and ponderous, and would not have been suited to long-distance travel over rocky and jagged mountainous terrain, often steeply sloped, that even modern four wheel drive vehicles struggle to cope with. A more appropriate mode of transport would have been pack animals and human portage.This is not to say, however, that wheeled vehicles were not used around settlements.
A clay model of an ox-cart was found at Arich in Armenia, but the clearest visual evidence of what the earliest vehicles looked like comes from a model from Pit I at Badaani.149 The latter example was found in three pieces – two wheels and a body (Figure 7.24(8)). The swelling at the centre (the hub) of both discs leaves no doubt that the finds were wheels.The body of the cart has seven holes around the edge of the frame to accommodate upright poles that held side panels, probably constructed of wickerwork. A groove at the front for the draught-pole and a hole on either side for the axle leaves no question about the authenticity of vehicle, which is comparable to one found at Norşuntepe.150 We have no radiocarbon dates for the Badaani settlement, but its ceramic vessels have early Trialeti traits (ca. 2500 BC).The bronze socketed axes with elongated blades support this dating, which resemble those from
148Greenberg 2014b.
149Khachatrian 1975: fig. 37 (Arich); Mirtskhulava 2011 (Badaani).
150Greenberg 2014b: fig. 3.
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the Sachkhere tumuli. Scattered across the south Caucasus are single clay discs similar to the Badaani wheels that are datable to the Kura-Araxes complex.
Actual wheeled vehicles or their impressions have been found in about twenty tombs in the southern Caucasus belonging to the Early Bronze Age III period, mostly clustered in the central region of the southern Caucasus.151 Wagons or their parts have been found in fifteen tumuli: Bedeni (Barrows 5, 8, and 10), Berikldeebi (Barrow 1), Irganchai (Barrows 1, 2, and 9), Sadachlo (Barrow 4),Trialeti [Sabit Akhcha] (Barrow 5), Chikhistskali,Tsnori (Barrows 1 and 2), Zeiani, Utamish (Barrow 1), andTqemlara (Barrow 4). Judging by the available published evidence, those from Bedeni, Ananauri 3, Tsnori, Trialeti, and Irganchai are particularly noteworthy.
The Trialeti [Sabit Akhcha] Barrow 5 wagon was built completely from spruce (Figure 7.24(1)). Its body measures about 2.4 m in length and is just wider than 2 m from the outer edges of the protruding axles, but its full length cannot be determined, because the A-shaped draught-pole and yoke had been removed to accommodate it in a pit grave of restricted size. Seven juxtaposed planks of wood formed the floor of the wagon. Its tripartite wheels were 1.25 m in diameter and fixed to a rigid axle, set in hubs larger than 40 cm wide. Around its frame, simple volutes and carved animal heads added a touch of decorativeness. Circular mortise-holes along its length would have supported a superstructure – whether an arch tilt or straight wickerwork sides is impossible to say. Nearby, at Trialeti Barrow 29, Kuftin found four wheels (Figure 7.24(4)) and their axles in situ in a pit grave. The wheels were built of oak planks and the boxwood dowels ran completely through the mortise-holes in the middle plank.
The pair of Ananauri 3 wagons was almost identical, differing from each other only in some details (Figure 7.7).Their bodies were oak-built and both were ornamented along their backs.The 3.5 m draught poles were placed on both wagons, while the axles were positioned beneath them. Pegs up to 4 cm in length fixed in place the sides of the wagon body, which appear to have been lined with leather. Each wheel (1.4 m in diameter) consisted of three planks of
151Excavation results are, for the most part, in the form of short notices or preliminary reports, which have little in the way of detail on wheeled vehicles. Some of the details from Sagona 2013 are repeated here: Pitschelauri and Varazashvili 1988 (Zeiani, Barrow 1); Varazashvili and Kachkachuri 1987 (Chikhistskali); Gogelia and Chelidze 1985 (Sadachlo, Barrow 4); Dedabrishvili 1979 (Tsnori, Barrows 1 and 2); Gobedzhishvili 1980 (Bedeni, Barrows 5, 8, and 10); Gagoshidze et al. 1986 (Berikldeebi, Barrow 1); Kotovich et al. 1980 (Utamish, Barrow 1); Dzhaparidze et al. 1984 (Akhchia, Barrow 3); Kakhiani et al. 1991, Kakhiani et al. 1995, Kakhiani and Ghlighvashvili 2008 (Irganchai, Barrows 1, 2, and 9); Areshian 1986 (Maisian, Barrow 7); Gogelia and Chelidze 1997 (Sarachlo, Barrow 1); Pizchelauri and Orthmann 1992 (Tetri Kvebi 1); Mansfeld 1996 (Tqisbolo Gora); Zhorzhikashvili and Gogadze 1974 (Trialeti Barrow XXIX); Dzhaparidze 1960 (Trialeti [Sabit Akhcha] Barrow 5); Shatberashvili et al. 2010 (Tqemlara Barrow 4); Makharadze and Murvanidze 2014a (Ananauri 3).