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:
“Education must, then, be not only a transmission of culture but also a provider of alternative views of the world and a strengthener of the will to explore them.”
—Jerome S. Bruner (20th century)
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“No race has the last word on culture and on civilization. You do not know what the black man is capable of; you do not know what he is thinking and therefore you do not know what the oppressed and suppressed Negro, by virtue of his condition and circumstance, may give to the world as a surprise.”
—Marcus Garvey (1887–1940)