Ancient Ukrainia

I happened to read yesterday about what might be described as cities in what is now the Ukraine, otherwise the Trypillia megasites. It seems that they are the largest known settlements of their day, with the culture as a whole running from around 5,000BC to 2,800BC, with some of these megasites predating other known settlements of comparable size, the Pyramids in Egypt and Stonehenge here in the UK.

There are quite a lot of them, and one of the best known is at a place called Nebelivka, about half way between Kiev and the Black Sea to the south. At the time, in the transition zone between mixed forest and steppe, on the very fertile black soil called Chernozem, the stuff on which the Ukraine now grows a great deal of wheat. The figure above is a plan prepared with the help of magnetometers. 

A city which is characterised in a positive way by its substantial houses, its pottery and its small clay figurines. And in a negative way by the absence of the sort of buildings associated with kings and nobles, the absence of elaborate burials and the absence of much in the way of warriors, weapons or trauma. A city which appears to have been organised without a ruling class, with this last being deemed essential until quite recently. The culture as a whole lasted more than two thousand years, while the best estimate is that this particular city lasted about 200 years, around six thousand years ago. To me, an oddly short time given the number and quality of the houses.

Covering around 240 hectares, that is to say getting on for a square mile, and roughly organised as two concentric rings of houses, with the city broken down into quarters and the quarters down into neighbourhoods and with a large open space in the middle. Between the two rings are a number of rather larger assembly halls. With the whole contained in a shallow perimeter ditch.

One of the theories advanced in references 2 and 3 is that of the roughly 1,500 houses, maybe 400 were actually in use at any one time. Maybe a few thousand people. A fairly low density which left room for animals and gardens. Old, disused houses appear to have been ceremonially burnt.

The diet included a lot of domesticated meat, plus fruit and vegetables, both cultivated and gathered. Which works well enough in a more or less isolated village, but what about a city?

The economy was supported by long distance trade in copper, flints, shells, salt – and the all-important dyes they needed for decorating their pots.

I learn that there are various competing schools of archaeology which specialise in speculating about how ancient cities such as these came to be and how they worked. What they might have done in the way of ritual and religion. In reference 2 they invoke the idea of the Big Other as an organising principle, citing Lacan, the famous French psycho-analyst, amongst others, in support. While in reference 3 they do Ripley K factor analysis, here to do with the spatial distribution of the many Trypillia settlements unearthed to date, large and small. My understanding of both matters remains very limited. And no doubt, when talking amongst themselves, the archaeologists use lots more, more or less impenetrable jargon.

But an important culture of which I had not heard until yesterday.

PS  1: the Trypillia get a few pages in reference 5 for their houses and their pots, but I did not find any mention of megasites. Written before the dawn of archaeological-physics.

PS 2: I was surprised to find that there is ongoing debate about the formation of the agriculturally important belts of Chernozem soils. Nor did I notice any connection being made with the black soils of the fens surrounding the Wash in eastern England.

References

Reference 1: The Dawn of Everything: A new history of humanity – David Wengrow, David Graeber – 2021. See the section which starts on page 288 of the hardback edition. Chapter 8.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/03/more-old-mounds.html. A recent product of reading reference 1 (which continues).

Reference 3: Trypillia Megasites in Context: Independent Urban Development in Chalcolithic Eastern Europe - Bisserka Gaydarska, Marco Nebbia, John Chapman – 2019. Cambridge Archaeological Journal. More accessible. Chapman and his colleagues are based in Durham University.

Reference 4: The Origins of Trypillia Megasites – John Chapman, Bisserka Gaydarska, Marco Nebbia – 2019. Frontiers in Digital Humanities. Less accessible.

Reference 5: History of Mankind: Cultural and Scientific Development: Volume 1: Prehistory and the Beginnings of Civilization – Jacquetta Hawkes, Leonard Woolley – 1963.