Settlements of the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture

The study of the settlements of the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture provides important insights into the early history of Europe. The Cucuteni-Trypillia culture, which existed in the present-day southeastern European nations of Moldova, Romania, and Ukraine during the Neolithic Age and Copper Age, from approximately 5500 to 2750 BC, left behind thousands of settlement ruins containing a wealth of archaeological artifacts attesting to their cultural and technological characteristics.
The latest research (2014) suggests that some of the largest mega sites contain as many as 3000 structures and the possibility of 20,000 to 46,000 inhabitants. Maidanetske may have contained almost 3,000 houses and a population between 12,000 and 46,000, with 29,000 as the average population figure. Dobrovody and Talianki are estimated with populations of up to 16,200 and 21,000.
In terms of overall size, some of Cucuteni-Trypillia sites, such as Talianki (with a population of 15,000 and covering an area of some 340 hectares – 840 acres) in the Uman Raion of Ukraine, are as large as (or perhaps larger than) the more famous city-states of Sumer in the Fertile Crescent. These Eastern European settlements predate the Sumerian cities by over half a millennium. Academicians have not designated the gigantic settlements of Cucuteni-Trypillia culture as "cities" due to the lack of conclusive evidence for internal social differentiation or specialization. However, there is some debate among scholars whether these settlements ought to be labeled as proto-cities.
The Cucuteni-Trypillia settlements were usually located on a place where the geomorphology provided natural barriers to protect the site, most notably using high river terraces or canyon edges. The natural barriers were supplemented with fences, earthworks and ditches, or even more elaborate wooden and clay ramparts. The role of the fortifications found at these settlements was probably to protect the tribe's domestic animal herd from wild predators. Other hypotheses are that the fortifications were for protection against enemy attacks, or as a means to gather the community. The role of these fortifications, however, is still debated among scholars.
The most common arrangement of construction for Cucuteni-Trypillia settlements was to place most of the buildings in a circular pattern surrounding a central structure; some examples of this arrangement were found at Târpeşti, Ioblona, Berezivka, Onoprievka, and Răşcani. The earliest villages consisted of ten to fifteen wattle-and-daub households. In their heyday, settlements expanded to include several hundred large huts, sometimes with two stories. These houses were typically warmed by an oven and had round windows. Some huts included kilns, which were used to fire the distinctive pottery for which the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture is known.
These settlements underwent periodical acts of destruction and re-creation, as they were burned and rebuilt every 60–80 years. Some scholars have theorized that these settlements' inhabitants believed every house symbolized an organic, almost living, entity. Each house, including its ceramic vases, ovens, figurines and innumerable objects made of perishable materials, shared the same circle of life, and all of the buildings in the settlement were physically linked together as a larger symbolic entity. As with living beings, the settlements may have been seen as having a life cycle of death and rebirth.
As the settlements grew, the houses were arranged in two elliptical rows, separated by a space of 70–100 metres (220–320 feet). Each household was almost completely self-supportive within these communities as if instead of being located within a settlement, each family was living away from town and neighbors in the country. A lack of public infrastructure within these settlements compelled the inhabitants to include all aspects of their lives within their domicile; ovens, kilns, working, and sleeping areas were all within the same space as the family's sacred altars. The buildings included both the sacred and profane, which some authorities see as evidence to support the idea that the inhabitants viewed their homes as living beings.
The existence of the giant settlements was discovered in the 1960s, when the military topographer K.V. Shishkin noticed the presence of peculiar spots from certain aerial photographs.
Scholars posit two theories regarding the impetus behind the formation of the large Cucuteni-Trypillia settlements:
Ukrainian archeologist Ivan T. Černjakov credits the large size of some of the Cucuteni-Trypillia settlements to their agricultural system, which was affected by the climatic changes over the years. This can be seen by examining the historic and modern changes in sea level of the nearby Black Sea.
Some of these large settlements include:
A 2009 British-Ukrainian archaeological expedition, organized by John Chapman and Mykhailo Videiko, focussed on the 300 ha mega-site of Nebelivka, Kirovograd domain, enabling the production of a 15 ha geophysics plot with over 50 burnt structures and a small number of unburnt structures, as well as pits and other anomalies. The remains of one house were excavated. This settlement, dated to the B II period of Trypillia Culture, was the largest around 4000 BCE.
With the mega settlements of the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture starting in 4300 BCE, very large settlements would continue for almost 2000 years. As of 2014, more than 2440 Cucuteni-Trypillia settlements have been discovered so far in Moldova, Ukraine and Romania. 194 (8%) of these settlements had an area of more than 10 hectares between 5000–2700 BCE and more than 29 settlements had an area in the range 100–450 hectares and 2,800 houses.
The settlements were primarily administrative, military, and religious centres and not for crafts. The typical Trypillia hierarchy was one dominant "capital" with a population up to 15,000 people and more than 100 hectares; this capital was surrounded by satellite towns typically in the size range of 10–40 hectares and villages in the range of 2–7 hectares. The capital-controlled territories are as far away as 20 km (12,5 mi) from the center.
The latest research indicates that the settlements had a three-level settlement hierarchy, with the possibility of state-level societies. An excavated mega-structures suggests the presence of public buildings for meetings or ceremonies.
The following is a list of the largest settlements with the approximate peak population times. Remember, population estimates of ancient settlements should always be taken with caution, with different interpretations depending on the scholar.
Ultimately, the large scale of the Cucuteni-Trypillia settlements may have contributed to the downfall of their society, but there are two opposing ideas on why.
One theory that attributes their collapse to ecological factors. Due to a dramatic worldwide climate change around 3200 BCE, the area of the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture would have been plunged into a devastating Dust Bowl drought. With their reliance on agriculture to produce food, feeding the many inhabitants of these large-scale settlements would have been unsustainable, leading to the dramatic end of the Cucuteni-Trypillia farming society and replaced by the more drought-appropriate pastoral nomadic society of the Proto-Indo-Europeans that followed.
As the economic system has been shown to be very productive, the state of the art is that social factors were decisive for the decline. Recent results from researchers of the Kiel University (Collaborative Research Centre 1266), based on the geophysical survey and excavation of a number of the "megasites", suggest that these declined in part due to a process of social fissioning as emerging hierarchical decision-making models were rejected by communities politically organized into autonomous segmented lineages.