Yamnaya

Archaeologists have long thought that the Yamnaya people spoke an early Indo-European language and that their offshoots migrated to India and elsewhere (see "Tracking the Tarim Mummies," March/April 2001).

Cudgel Culture 2002

The Yamnaya culture, named for its characteristic burials in rectangular pits (yama is Russian for pit) beneath kurgans or mounds, is found throughout the steppe north of the Caspian and Black seas and west of the Ural River.

Cudgel Culture 2002

Discovery of a unique copper cudgel at Kutuluk, a group of burial mounds near the central Russian city of Samara, proves a long-suspected link between the Yamnaya people of the steppe and the tribes that migrated to India in the second millennium B.C.

Cudgel Culture 2002

"We have only three examples of human sacrifice from the area for the Yamnaya culture (3000-2300 B.C.); they were probably ancient Indo-Europeans."

Summer Sacrifice 2001

Members of one Indo-European group (the Yamnaya culture) that migrated to the western Altai Mountains, where they are identifiable as the Afanasievo culture, may have later moved into the Tarim Basin of what is now western China.

Books: Tracking the Tarim Mummies 2001

After 3500 BC, a large part of this steppe had cemeteries of more mobile stockbreeders, perhaps horse-mounted, who knew the wheeled vehicle, metallurgy, and agriculture (this was the Yamnaya or "pit-grave" horizon).

The Civic Platform - A Political Journal of Ideas and Analysis 2008