The Cernavodă culture, ca. 4000– 3200, is a late

Copper Age The Chalcolithic ( ) (also called the Copper Age and Eneolithic) was an archaeological period characterized by the increasing use of smelted copper. It followed the Neolithic and preceded the Bronze Age. It occurred at different periods in dif ...

archaeological culture An archaeological culture is a recurring assemblage of types of artifacts, buildings and monuments from a specific period and region that may constitute the material culture remains of a particular past human society. The connection between thes ...

distributed along the lower Eastern

Bug River The Bug or Western Bug is a major river in Central Europe that flows through Belarus (border), Poland, and Ukraine, with a total length of .Danube The Danube ( ; see also #Names and etymology, other names) is the List of rivers of Europe#Longest rivers, second-longest river in Europe, after the Volga in Russia. It flows through Central and Southeastern Europe, from the Black Forest sou ...

and along the coast of the

Black Sea The Black Sea is a marginal sea, marginal Mediterranean sea (oceanography), mediterranean sea lying between Europe and Asia, east of the Balkans, south of the East European Plain, west of the Caucasus, and north of Anatolia. It is bound ...

and somewhat inland, generally in present-day

Bulgaria Bulgaria, officially the Republic of Bulgaria, is a country in Southeast Europe. It is situated on the eastern portion of the Balkans directly south of the Danube river and west of the Black Sea. Bulgaria is bordered by Greece and Turkey t ...

and

Romania Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central Europe, Central, Eastern Europe, Eastern and Southeast Europe. It borders Ukraine to the north and east, Hungary to the west, Serbia to the southwest, Bulgaria to the south, Moldova to ...

. It is named after the Romanian town of

Cernavodă Cernavodă () is a town in Constanța County, Northern Dobruja, Romania with a population of 15,088 as of 2021. The town's name is derived from the Bulgarian ''černa voda'' ( in Cyrillic), meaning 'black water'. This name is regarded by some s ...

(Bulgarian černa vodá (черна 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 The Elbe ( ; ; or ''Elv''; Upper Sorbian, Upper and , ) is one of the major rivers of Central Europe. It rises in the Giant Mountains of the northern Czech Republic before traversing much of Bohemia (western half of the Czech Republic), then Ge ...

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 The Eurasian Steppe, also called the Great Steppe or The Steppes, is the vast steppe ecoregion of Eurasia in the temperate grasslands, savannas and shrublands biome. It stretches through Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang, Kazakhstan, Siberia, Europea ...

; 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 The Anatolian languages are an extinct branch of Indo-European languages that were spoken in Anatolia. The best known Anatolian language is Hittite, which is considered the earliest-attested Indo-European language. Undiscovered until the late ...

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.

Gallery

File:Cernavoda culture metal, bone and ceramic artefacts.png, Metal, bone and ceramic artefacts File:Animal-shaped scepter - National History Museum of Romania 21650.jpg, Stone horse-head sceptre

Notes

References

* * J. P. Mallory, "Cernavoda Culture", ''

Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture The ''Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture'' (''EIEC'') is an encyclopedia of Indo-European studies and the Proto-Indo-Europeans. The encyclopedia was edited by J. P. Mallory and Douglas Q. Adams and published in 1997 by Fitzroy Dearborn. A ...

'', Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997.

External links

Cernavoda I Culture
Chalcolithic cultures of Europe Archaeological cultures of Europe Archaeological cultures in Bulgaria Archaeological cultures in Moldova Archaeological cultures in Romania Archaeological cultures in Ukraine 4th millennium BC {{Europe-archaeology-stub

Gallery

See also

Notes

References

External links