17 Facts About Corded Ware

Corded Ware culture encompassed a vast area, from the contact zone between the Yamnaya culture and the Corded Ware culture in south Central Europe, to the Rhine on the west and the Volga in the east, occupying parts of Northern Europe, Central Europe and Eastern Europe.

The Corded Ware culture is thought to have originated from the westward migration of Yamnaya-related people from the steppe-forest zone into the territory of late Neolithic European cultures such as the Globular Amphora and Funnelbeaker cultures, and is considered to be a likely vector for the spread of many of the Indo-European languages in Europe and Asia.

Term Corded Ware culture was first introduced by the German archaeologist Friedrich Klopfleisch in 1883.

Corded Ware named it after cord-like impressions or ornamentation characteristic of its pottery.

Corded Ware encompassed most of continental northern Europe from the Rhine on the west to the Volga in the east, including most of modern-day Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belarus, Czech Republic, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, Switzerland, northwestern Romania, northern Ukraine, and the European part of Russia, as well as coastal Norway and the southern portions of Sweden and Finland.

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Archaeologists note that Corded Ware was not a "unified culture, " as Corded Ware groups inhabiting a vast geographical area from the Rhine to Volga seem to have regionally specific subsistence strategies and economies.

Origins and dispersal of Corded Ware culture is one of the pivotal unresolved issues of the Indo-European Urheimat problem, and there is a stark division between archaeologists regarding the origins of Corded Ware.

The Corded Ware culture has long been regarded as Indo-European, with archaeologists seeing an influence from nomadic pastoral societies of the steppes.

Corded Ware culture was once presumed to be the Urheimat of the Proto-Indo-Europeans based on their possession of the horse and wheeled vehicles, apparent warlike propensities, wide area of distribution and rapid intrusive expansion at the assumed time of the dispersal of Indo-European languages.

However, Barry Cunliffe has criticized the theory that the Corded Ware populations were descended from a mass migration of Yamnaya males, noting that the available Corded Ware samples do not carry paternal haplogroups observed in Yamnaya male specimens.

In favour of the view that the culture developed independently was the fact that Corded Ware coincides considerably with the earlier north-central European Funnelbeaker culture .

Middle Dnieper culture and the Eastern Baltic Corded Ware culture gave rise to the Fatyanovo–Balanovo culture on the upper Volga, which in turn contributed to the Abashevo culture, a predecessor of the proto-Indo-Iranian Sintashta culture.

Corded Ware found Single Graves to be quite different from the already known dolmens, long barrows and passage graves.

Turek notes that there are several examples of Corded Ware graves containing older biological males with typically female grave goods and body orientation.

Corded Ware focuses on both the effects on Indo-European languages that resulted from this contact and investigation of the pre-existing languages.

Corded Ware's claimed that when Yamnaya Indo-European speakers came into contact with the indigenous peoples during the 3rd millennium BC, they came to dominate the local populations yet parts of the indigenous lexicon persisted in the formation of Proto-Germanic, thus giving Proto-Germanic the status of being an "Indo-Europeanized" language.

People of the Nordic Bronze Age and Corded Ware show the highest lactose tolerance among Bronze Age Europeans.