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This article is about Bronze Age burial mounds. See Kurgan, Kurgan Oblast for a Russian city of that name.

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Kurgan (кургáн) is the russian word (from turkic) for a type of burial mound or barrow, heaped over a burial chamber, often of wood.

In 1956 Marija Gimbutas introduced her Kurgan hypothesis combining kurgan archaeology with linguistics to locate the origins of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) speaking peoples. She tentatively named the culture "Kurgan" after their distinctive burial mounds and traced its diffusion into Europe. This hypothesis has had a significant impact on Indo-European research. Those scholars who follow Gimbutas identify a Kurgan culture as reflecting an early Indo-European ethnicity which existed in the steppes and southeastern Europe from the fifth to third millennia BC.

Several towns in Russia are called Kurgan, as well as one oblast (Курганская область), named after its capital.

Archaeology

Kurgan type barrows were characteristic of Bronze Age nomadic peoples of the steppes, from the Altai to the Caucasus and Romania. Sometimes, burial mounds are quite complex structures with internal chambers. Within the burial chamber at the heart of the kurgan, members of the elite were buried with grave goods and sacrificial offerings, sometimes including horses and chariots.

Excavated Kurgans

• the Ipatovo kurgan revealed a long sequence of burials from the Maikop culture ca. 4000 BC down to the burial of a Sarmatian princess of the 3rd century BC.

Kurgan hypothesis

The "Kurgan hypothesis" of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) origins assumes gradual expansion of the "Kurgan culture" until it encompasses the entire pontic steppe, Kurgan IV being identified with the Yamna culture of around 3000 BC. Subsequent expansion beyond the steppes leads to hybrid cultures, such as the globular amphora culture to the west, the immigration of proto-Greeks to the Balkans and the nomadic Indo-Iranian cultures to the east around 2500 BC. The domestication of the horse, and later the use of early chariots is assumed to have increased the mobility of the Kurgan culture, facilitating the expansion over the entire Yamna region. In the Kurgan hypothesis, the entire pontic steppes are considered the PIE Urheimat, and a variety of late PIE dialects is assumed to have been spoken across the region. The area near the Volga labelled ?Urheimat in the map above marks the location of the earliest known traces of horse-riding, and would correspond to an early PIE or pre-PIE nucleus of the 5th millennium BC.

Stages of Expansion

Gimbutas identifies four successive stages of the Kurgan culture and three successive "waves" of expansion.

• Kurgan I, Dnieper/Volga region, earlier half of the 4th millennium BC. Apparently evolving from cultures of the Volga basin, subgroups include the Sarama and Seroglasovka cultures.
• Kurgan II–III, latter half of the 4th millennium BC. Includes the Srednij-Stog cultures and the Maikop culture of the northern Caucasus. Stone circles, early two-wheeled chariots, anthropomorphic stone stelae of deities.
• Kurgan IV or Yamna culture, first half of the 3rd millennium BC, encompassing the entire steppe region from the Volga to Romania.

• Wave 1, predating Kurgan I, expansion from the lower Volga to the Dnieper, leading to coexistence of Kurgan I and the Cucuteni culture. Repercussions of the migrations extend as far as the Balkans and along the Danube to the Vinca and Lengyel cultures in Hungary.
• Wave 2, mid 4th millennium BC, orginating in the Maikop culture and resulting in advances of "kurganized" hybrid cultures into northern Europe around 3000 BC. In the view of Gimbutas, this would correspond to the first intrusion of Indo-European languages into western and northern Europe.
• Wave 3, 3000–2800 BC, expansion of the Yamna culture beyond the steppes, with the appearance of the characteristic pit graves as far as the areas of modern Romania, Bulgaria and eastern Hungary.

Secondary Urheimat

The "kurganized" globular amphora culture in Europe is proposed as a "secondary Urheimat", separating into the bell beaker and corded ware cultures around 2300 BC and ultimately resulting in the European branches of Italic, Celtic andGermanic languages, as well as the proto-Mycenaean invasion of Greece, and other, partly extinct, language groups of the Balkans and central Europe.

Interpretation

Gimbutas viewed the expansions of the Kurgan culture as a series of essentially hostile, military invasions that swept away the peaceful, matriarchal cultures of "Old Europe", replacing it with a patriarchal warrior society, a process visible in the appearance of fortified settlements and hillforts and the graves of warrior-chieftains:

The Process of Indo-Europeanization was a cultural, not a physical transformation. It must be understood as a military victory in terms of imposing a new administrative system, language and religion upon the indigenous groups.

In her later life, Gimbutas increasingly emphasized the forced transition from the mediterranean cult of the Mother Goddess to a patriarchal society and the worship of the warlike Thunderer (Zeus, Dyaus), to a point of essentially formulating feminist archaeology. Many scholars who accept the general scenario of Indo-European migrations proposed, maintain that the transition may well have been much more peaceful and gradual than suggested by Gimbutas. The migrations were certainly not a sudden, concerted military operation but the expansion of disconnected tribes and cultures, spanning many generations. But to what degree the indigenous cultures were peacefully assmilated or violently displaced remains a matter of controversy among supporters of the Kurgan hypothesis.

James Mallory advocates the Kurgan hypothesis as the de-facto standard theory of Indo-European origins, but he recognizes valid criticism and criticizing Gimbutas' simplistic scenario of military invasion: almost all the arguments for invasion and cultural transformation are far better explained without reference to Kurgan expansion.

The Kurgan scenario is widely accepted as the most likely answer to the question of Indo-European origins, but its status remains speculative. The main alternative suggestion is the theory of Colin Renfrew, postulating an Anatolian Urheimat, and the spread of the Indo-European languages as a result of the spread of agriculture. This view implies a significantly higher age of the Proto-Indo-European language (ca. 10.000 years as opposed to ca. 6.000 years), and finds rather less support among linguists than the Kurgan theory.

Literature

• "In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology and Myth" by J. P. Mallory, ISBN 0500276161
• "The Kurgan Culture and the Indo-Europeanization of Europe: Selected Articles Form 1952 to 1993" von Marija Gimbutas u.a., ISBN 0941694569
• "Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture" ed. James Mallory, D. Q. Adams, ISBN 1884964982

External links

• Kurgan Culture
• [http://www.rdg.ac.uk/archaeology/Research/Klin_Yar/Ipatovo.htm

the Ipatovo kurgan]

• excavated kurgans (from archaeology.org).

• Indo-European
• Archaeology
• Ancient Peoples