The Earliest Wheeled Vehicles and the Caucasian Evidence

Abstract

In these Proceedings over 15 years ago Gordon Childe made a classic survey of the evidence for the earliest wagons and carts in the Near East and Europe, following it three years later with a similar treatment using some additional material which had become available by that time (Childe, 1951, 1954a, b). Since then much new primary archaeological evidence has been discovered or recognized for what it is, and there have been two recent important works of synthesis, that of Boná (1960) on vehicle models in the Middle Danube, and that of van der Waals (1964) of finds of actual disc wheels in the Netherlands. From 1956 a large number of actual vehicle finds have been made in excavations on the shores of Lake Sevan in Armenian SSR; an additional second find comes from Trialeti in Georgian SSR, and new vehicle-burials found near Elista in the Kalmyk steppe, so that we now have a total of nearly 30 wagons, carts and chariots surviving wholly or in part from southern Russia, mainly of the 2nd millennium B.C. In the last 10 years or so, too, new work on the Neolithic and earliest metal-using cultures of East Europe, and on the Kura-Araxes Culture of Transcaucasia and its counterpart in eastern Anatolia has thrown new light on early wheeled transport in such contexts. Despite the penetrating and far-reaching conclusions pursued by van der Waals only four years ago there still seems room for a survey reviewing these in connection with other aspects of this cardinal problem in Old World prehistory.