Cernavodă culture

Cernavodă culture
Geographical range	Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia
Period	Chalcolithic
Dates	c. 4000 BC – 3200 BC
Preceded by	Sredny Stog culture, Suvorovo culture, Karanovo culture, Gumelnița culture, Varna culture
Followed by	Coțofeni culture, Baden culture, Usatove culture, Yamnaya culture, Ezero culture

The Cernavodă culture, ca. 4000–3200, is a late Copper Age archaeological culture distributed along the lower Eastern Bug River and Danube and along the coast of the Black Sea and somewhat inland, generally in present-day Bulgaria and Romania. It is named after the Romanian town of Cernavodă (Bulgarian černa vodá (чёрна водá in cyrillic) means 'black water').

It is a successor to and occupies much the same area as the earlier Karanovo culture and Gumelnița culture, for which a destruction horizon seems to be evident. It is part of the "Balkan-Danubian complex" that stretches up the entire length of the river and into northern Germany via the Elbe and the Baden culture; its northeastern portion is thought to be ancestral to the Usatove culture.

It is characterized by defensive hilltop settlements. The pottery shares traits with that found further east, in the Sredny Stog culture on the south-west Eurasian steppe;^{[citation needed]} burials similarly bear a resemblance to those further east.

It has been theorized that Cernavoda culture, together with the Sredny Stog (russian Средний Стог - middle (hay)stack) culture, was the source of Anatolian languages and introduced them to Anatolia through the Balkans after Anatolian split from the Proto-Indo-European language, which some linguists and archaeologists place in the area of the Sredny Stog culture.^[1]^[2]^[3]

Gallery

Metal, bone and ceramic artefacts

Notes

^ Kroonen, Guus; Jakob, Anthony; Palmér, Axel I.; Sluis, Paulus van; Wigman, Andrew (12 October 2022). "Indo-European cereal terminology suggests a Northwest Pontic homeland for the core Indo-European languages". PLOS ONE. 17 (10): e0275744. Bibcode:2022PLoSO..1775744K. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0275744. ISSN 1932-6203. PMC 9555676. PMID 36223379.
^ Краткая история освоения индоевропейцами Европы (in Russian)
^ Anthony, David. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language. OCLC 1102387902.

References

Anthony, David W. (2007). The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0691058870.
J. P. Mallory, "Cernavoda Culture", Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997.