Catacomb culture

Named after a grave shape rather than a people, the Catacomb culture was a Bronze Age culture of the Pontic steppe north of the Black Sea, dated to about 2500–1950 BCE. It grew out of the Yamnaya culture in the southern steppe, spread east and north, and was eventually followed by the Srubnaya culture. Its people were probably Indo-European speakers, though which branch is debated.

The culture emerged around 2500 BCE as a western offshoot of the Yamnaya culture, on land Yamnaya had occupied before, with western influences apparently decisive in its formation. It also shows links with the Sredny Stog, Poltavka and Afanasievo cultures. Archaeologists divide it into regional variants by pottery and burial customs, and some treat it as a "cultural-historical area" of several related cultures. To the east lay the Poltavka culture, another Yamnaya descendant that it influenced. In the North Caucasus, the Lola culture, formed by migrants from the east Caucasus around 2200 BCE, replaced local Catacomb variants.

The name comes from the burial form: a shaft grave, as in Yamnaya, with a side niche dug at its base to hold the body. The dead usually lay flexed on their right side, with ornaments such as silver rings and weapons including axes, arrows, daggers and maces. About 16 per cent of graves contain animal offerings, often the head and hooves of goats, sheep, horses or cattle. Some burials were marked with carved stone stelae, and some held wheeled vehicles. In a few high-status graves the skull was covered with clay modelled into a face, for men, women and children alike.

The Catacomb people were mainly stockbreeders, keeping cattle, sheep, goats, horses and some pigs, but wooden ploughs and traces of einkorn and emmer wheat show they also farmed. Their tools suggest specialist weavers, bronze-smiths and weapon makers, and they made early composite bows and quivers holding ten to twenty arrows. Most known settlements are seasonal camps near water, though a larger site at Matveyevka on the Southern Bug had stone foundations, and a late stone fortress stood on Bayda island in the Dnieper. Their pottery is more elaborate than Yamnaya's; small footed bowls from women's graves are thought to have served rituals using narcotics such as hemp. Some groups practised skull shaping, and about 9 per cent of skulls show drilled holes. One estimate puts the population at 50,000 to 60,000.

Similar grave chambers, metal types and figurines have been noted in Italy and the eastern Mediterranean, and the culture's hammer-head pins turn up in central Europe and Italy. Parallels with Mycenaean Greece, in spearheads, horse cheek-pieces and death masks, are especially close, and some scholars suggest the clay face masks foreshadow the Mycenaean gold ones. Whether this reflects migration or the spread of ideas is uncertain.

David Anthony takes it to have been Indo-European-speaking. Scholars have proposed it as ancestral to Indo-Iranian or Thracian, or as a shared background for Greek, Armenian and Indo-Iranian, and in 2022 Guus Kroonen and colleagues suggested a link with early Tocharian. Ancient-DNA studies have found maternal lineages typical of European hunter-gatherers at higher rates than in Yamnaya, which one study took to mean the two populations were less mixed than once thought. All of these remain hypotheses.

The Srubnaya culture succeeded it, the Abashevo culture may partly derive from it, and its eastern successor, the Multi-cordoned ware culture, may have helped shape Sintashta and so the later Andronovo culture.

Our 2000 BCE map labels an approximate Catacomb culture zone on the steppe of today's Ukraine and southern Russia.