Odp: Carts.

----- Original Message -----

From: Mark Odegard

To: cybalist@eGroups.com

Sent: Sunday, November 21, 1999 1:08 AM

Subject: [cybalist] Carts.

Piotr says,
 

I know that archaeologists specialising in European neolithic cultures tend to believe that carts were invented in Central Europe in the mid-4th millennium BC.

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While I'd like a clearer definition of 'Central Europe', I confess an attachment to the idea myself.

 

I actually meant the central part of the North European Plain, roughly from the Rhein/Maas delta to the Vistula system (northern Germany and most of Poland).

First, a cart in English and in western IE means a two-wheeled, single-axled vehicle. This is distinguished from a wagon, which has two axles, each with two wheels. The cart-word is the one that also gives us chariot and car. I'm unfamiliar with the eastern IE term for carts.

The Flintbek ruts were left by a cart. The impressions are so good that you can see how it was wheeled in (with a load of some stuff needed to build a megalithic longbarrow) and then withdrawn.

The thing about wheeled vehicles is not so much the idea as it is the practical necessities. You need a variety of woods to construct a good cart, plus the necessary tools (a copper axe and copper adze can do the job, but bronze tools are much much better). The wood was plentiful in the Northern European Forest. The question is where -- and when -- did they get their tools, especially the bronze ones.

Beyond this, I can only speculate. I'd like to know what kinds of wood make up an early bronze-age vehicle. I'd bet it was made of several kinds. Hardwood for at least the axle (preferably oak), and for the wheels too. For the rest of the vehicle, you'd use lighter, easier-to-work woods, and for the sides of the vehicle, just a lightweight wicker surround is all you'd really want.

Wheeled vehicles probably evolved from sledge-like wooden with sockets for wooden rolls carved on the underside. The most primitive axle-and-wheel carts and wagons were similarly mounted, and differed only in having a solid disk fastened to each end of a round axle.

 

Piotr