#eneolithic

My boyfriend and I but in the Eneolithic ^^ got inspired (but is not accurate, tried to mix best with the ref images I found ^^ )while reading about Cucuteni-Trypillia culture (now Romania as for the Cucuteni and Ukraine Trypillia)

I have been working with the epic heavy metal artist Christian Sloan Hall again, this time to produce some artwork of Western Steppe Herders for my upcoming video on the Yamnaya people. It is hard to reconstruct eneolithic people of the steppe due to lack of evidence for much of their material culture, but we did our best and drew on many sources to try and get it right. Now I shall explain why he depicted them this way.

Because we couldn’t find any Yamnaya clothing, we referred to images of clothing from other eneolithic steppe cultures, namely the Mariupol culture and the Azov-Dnieper culture from the Mamaj Gora cemetery and also referred to female clothing of the later Bronze age Andronovo culture. The burial caps are common to all, and since Yamnaya fall in between those two, it is probably safe to say such hats were worn by their men and women too. We can see from Yamnaya stelae that the men wore pointed beards and sometimes went about naked or semi-naked and also that they wore sandals but Christian depicted this man wearing shoes like those of the Azov-Dnieper culture. Trousers do not appear in the archaeological record until around 2000 BC, but leg wraps are found around Neolithic Europe and Christian has given him these as they would be useful in the colder months when riding a horse.

They are both wearing braids because linguistic evidence reveals there was a PIE word for hair braids. The man has silver hair coils on his braids as these are attested in many Yamnaya burials as are dog /wolf teeth necklaces.

There is evidence for tattooing in the Yamnaya offshoot Catacomb Culture. We can see the tattoos on finger bones where the lack of flesh between skin and bone resulted in stained bones. We should presume that these tattoos covered other parts of their body too but we cannot tell for sure where, however we have Iron Age Scythian tattoos as a reference tool.

Iron Age Scythians also used deer antlers as cheek pieces for their horses, and the pre-Yamnaya Sredny Stog culture also had what appear to be antler cheek pieces so Christian has depicted the Yamnaya horses with similar tack wear. 

Female God symbol, 3000 -1000 BCE.

From pre-Roman Lunigiana, Italy.

O Terceiro Milénio na Estepe Europeia - Livro 

Kaiser, E. (2019): Das dritte Jahrtausend im osteuropäischen Steppenraum. Kulturhistorische Studien zu prähistorischer Subsistenzwirtschaft und Interaktion mit benachbarten Räumen. Berlin Studies of the Ancient World. Vol. 37Edit. Topoi. ISBN: 978-3-9819685-1-4

Sinopse:  Os túmulos são característicos da cultura yamnaya e da cultura funerária das catacumbas do terceiro milênio A.C. na estepe da Europa Oriental e na zona de estepe florestal. Com o início da cultura yamnaya, os enterros são regularmente realizados em túmulos, os montes são frequentemente usados ​​várias vezes e se transformam em monumentos ao longo do tempo. 

+INFO em: O Terceiro Milénio na Estepe Europeia - Livro

Grave Reveals Violent Death of Ancient Family.

Eulau, Germany, a grave with the remains of a mother and father huddled together with two sons has been dated to 4,600 years ago and marks the oldest genetic evidence for a nuclear family, researchers say.

The individuals were carefully arranged in their graves to denote they were part of a biological family, the researchers say. Wounds on the remains suggest the parents and kids were defending themselves against a violent raid, involving stone axes and arrows, at the time of their deaths.

The researchers gleaned even more information about the family by analyzing strontium isotopes from teeth. (Isotopes are atoms of a particular element that have the same number of protons but a different number of neutrons in the nucleus.) Since strontium from food is incorporated into a person's teeth over time, the relative amounts of different strontium isotopes can link the ancient remains with different regions.The results showed that the females spent their childhoods in different regions from the males and children in the grave, suggesting the females "married out," moving to the location of the males for marriage, the researchers say."Such traditions would have been important to avoid inbreeding and to forge kinship networks with other communities," said Alistair Pike, head of Archaeology at the University of Bristol and co-director of the project.