27 February 2021 | New Scientist | 45concentrically, with houses made of wattle and
daub lining ring roads circling a large central
space. The biggest sites had several thousand
houses and as many as 15,000 inhabitants –
compared with no more than a few hundred
people in a typical neolithic village. There is
heated debate over numbers, though that, in
part, is because it isn’t clear whether the sites
were fully inhabited year round. This raises
another question: what were these places for?
Some take a traditional view. Archaeologist
Mykhailo Videiko at Borys Grinchenko Kyiv
University, Ukraine, thinks the megasites were
simply a response to growing population
pressure. The Trypillians’ move may have been
facilitated by developments in technology, he
says, notably the advent of sledges drawn by
bulls or other animals. These made it possible
to transport food and other resources over
a dozen or more kilometres, from existing
villages or outlying fields to the new sites.
“There were no roads,” he says. “This was
a landscape of forests and river valleys.”
Johannes Müller at Kiel University, Germany,
views the megasites as essentially overgrown
villages – an experiment, yes, but only in scale.
The concentric design wasn’t new, he points
out: “You see it from around 4800 BC, in older
settlements with no more than 50 houses.”
But John Chapman and Bisserka Gaydarska
at Durham University, UK, couldn’t disagree
more. “It’s like saying that an aircraft carrier is
a very large yacht,” says Chapman.
For Chapman and Gaydarska, it really was
an experiment in social organisation – and
the appearance of the megasites reflects this
ideological shift. Each was laid out in quarters
that radiated from the centre roughly in the
shape of pie slices, and further subdivided
into neighbourhoods comprising a handful
of houses. The overall layout seems to haveThe first urbanites
Proto-cities in eastern Europe challenge our ideas about
the origins of civilisation, finds Laura Spinney
A
ROUND 6200 years ago, farmers
living on the eastern fringes of
Europe, in what is now Ukraine,
did something inexplicable. They left their
neolithic villages and moved into a sparsely
inhabited area of forest and steppe. There,
in an area roughly the size of Belgium
between the modern cities of Kiev and
Odessa, they congregated at new settlements
up to 20 times the size of their old ones.
This enigmatic culture, known as the
Cucuteni-Trypillia, predates the earliest
known cities in Mesopotamia, a civilisation
that spanned part of the Middle East, and
in China. It persisted for 800 years, but
then, as mysteriously as it had begun, this
experiment in civilisation failed. The
inhabitants left the lightest of footprints in
the landscape, and no human remains have
been found. “Not a pinkie, not a tooth,” says
palaeogeneticist Alexey Nikitin at Grand
Valley State University in Michigan.
This puzzling lack of evidence has fuelled
a lively debate about what Nikitin calls the
“Dark Ages” of European prehistory. “You talk
to five Trypillian archaeologists, you get five
different opinions,” he says.
But the data gap hasn’t stifled interest – quite
the opposite. Several projects in recent years
have tried to make sense of the Trypillian
proto-cities. Despite big disagreements, what
is emerging is a picture of an early and unique
attempt at urbanisation. It may be the key to
understanding how modern Europe emerged
from the Stone Age – and even throw new
light on the emergence of human
civilisation in general.
Uruk and Tell Brak, which arose in
Mesopotamia early in the 4th millennium BC,
are usually considered the world’s first cities.
Their excavated remains point to an increased
density of habitation and a novel, hierarchical
social structure – two features that are
considered integral to the definition of a city.
The idea is that as human populations grew,
strangers had to come together in a shared
space and get along. “I think that was the real
psychological threshold of urbanism,” says
Monica Smith at the University of California,
Los Angeles, an anthropologist and author of
Cities: The first 6,000 years. But the Trypillian
megasites don’t meet either of those criteria,
so how should we make sense of them?
Ukrainian archaeologists have known about
the megasites for more than a century, but
systematic excavations didn’t get under way
until after the second world war, and the sites
only came to international attention a decade
ago. Today, of the several thousand known
Trypillian settlements, around 15 count as
“mega” because they cover more than 1 square
kilometre. The biggest, Taljanki, is over three
times that size, making it slightly larger than
London’s financial heart, the City, and bigger
than Uruk throughout most of the
4th millennium BC.
Although sizable, the megasites weren’t
densely populated. They were laid out>“ The Trypillian
megasites were
very different
from the first
cities built
centuries later”