Culture
The culture takes its name from a royal burial found there. The Maikop Barrow, was extremely rich in gold and silver artifacts; Exceptional for the time.
The Maykop culture is believed to be one of the first to take of the wheel.
Its inhumation practices were typically Indo-European, typically in a pit, sometimes stone-lined, topped with a kurgan or (tumulus). Stone cairns replace kurgans in later interments. Because of its burial practices, and in terms of the Kurgan hypothesis of Marija Gimbutas, it is listed as an intrusion from the Pontic steppe into the Caucasus. According to Mallory this is hard to evaluate and he emphasizes that: where the evidence for barrows is found, it is precisely in regions which later demonstrate the presence of non-Indo-European populations. In other occasions the culture has been cited, at the very least, as a kurganized culture with a strong ethnic and linguistic links to the descendants of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. It has been linked to the Lower Mikhaylovka group and Kemi Oba culture, and more distantly, to the Globular Amphora and Corded Ware cultures, if only in an economic sense. Mallory states:
Such a theory, it must be emphasized, is highly speculative and controversial although there is a recognition that this culture may be a product of at least two traditions: the local steppe tradition embraced in the Novosvobodna culture and foreign elements from south of the Caucasus which can be charted through imports in both regions.—EIEC,"Maykop Culture".
Read more about this topic: Maykop Culture
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“Nobody seriously questions the principle that it is the function of mass culture to maintain public morale, and certainly nobody in the mass audience objects to having his morale maintained.”
—Robert Warshow (1917–1955)
“Our culture has become something that is completely and utterly in love with its parent. It’s become a notion of boredom that is bought and sold, where nothing will happen except that people will become more and more terrified of tomorrow, because the new continues to look old, and the old will always look cute.”
—Malcolm McLaren (b. 1946)
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)