The Elshanka culture (Russian: Елшанская культура) was a Subneolithic or very early Neolithic culture that flourished in the middle Volga region in the 7th millennium BC. The sites are mostly individual graves scattered along the Samara and Sok rivers. They revealed Europe's oldest pottery.
The culture extended along the Volga from Ulyanovsk Oblast in the north through the Samara Bend towards Khvalynsk Hills and the Buzuluk District in the south. No signs of permanent dwellings have been found. Elshanka people appear to have been hunters and fishermen who had seasonal settlements at the confluences of rivers. Most grave goods come from such settlements.
Elshanka is believed to be the source from which the art of pottery spread south and westward towards the Balkans (with one particularly important site being the Surskoy Island in the Dnieper Rapids where pottery was made from 6200 BC to 5800 BC). Elshanka pots, dated from 6700 BC onwards, usually have simple ornaments, though some have none. They were made "of a clay-rich mud collected from the bottoms of stagnant ponds, formed by the coiling method and were baked in open fires at 450-600 degrees Celsius".
A man buried at Lebyazhinka IV (a site usually assigned to the Elshanka culture) had the Haplogroup R1b. I. Vasiliev and A. Vybornov, citing the similarity of pottery, assert that Elshanka people were the descendants of the Zarzian culture who had been ousted from Central Asia by progressive desertification. Other researchers see Elshanka ceramic industry as a local attempt at reproducing Zarzian pots.
A rapid cooling around 6200 BC and influences from the Lower Volga region led the Elshanka culture to be succeeded by the Middle Volga culture (with more complex ceramic ornaments) which lasted until the 5th millennium BC. It was succeeded in the region by the better known Samara culture.
Linguist Asko Parpola (2022) associates the Elshanka culture with the Pre-Proto-Indo-European language, stating that Elshanka expanded northwards into the forest zone as the Kama culture, reflecting a migration of Pre-PIE speakers into the Pre-Proto-Uralic-speaking area and thus possibly explaining the Indo-Uralic linguistic parallels.
References
- ^ Baumer, Christoph (18 April 2018). History of Central Asia, the: 4-volume set. Bloomsbury. ISBN 9781838608682.
- ^ Anthony, David W. (26 July 2010). The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-1400831104.
- Lazaridis, Iosif; Haak, Wolfgang; Patterson, Nick; Anthony, David; Reich, David (2015), "Massive migration from the steppe is a source for Indo-European languages in Europe. Supplementary Information 11. Relevance of ancient DNA to the problem of Indo-European language dispersals", Nature, 522 (7555): 207–211, arXiv:1502.02783, Bibcode:2015Natur.522..207H, doi:10.1038/nature14317, PMC 5048219, PMID 25731166
- "Archived copy". xn----8sbnlabhce1bwkeefm9e.xn--p1ai. Archived from the original on 2 April 2015. Retrieved 1 August 2022.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link) - "Археология Поволжья||Каменный век". www.povolzie.archeologia.ru. Archived from the original on 23 November 2019. Retrieved 1 August 2022.
- Парпола, Аско (2022-04-29). "Location of the Uralic proto-language in the Kama River Valley and the Uralic speakers' Expansion east and west with the 'Sejma-Turbino transcultural phenomenon' 2200-1900 BC". Археология Евразийских степей (2): 258–277. doi:10.24852/2587-6112.2022.2.258.277. hdl:10138/354948. ISSN 2618-9488.
Alternative link to free pdf:https://www.researchgate.net/publication/360290015_Location_of_the_Uralic_proto-language_in_the_Kama_River_Valley_and_the_Uralic_speakers'_Expansion_east_and_west_with_the_'Sejma-Turbino_transcultural_phenomenon'_2200-1900_BC