Transcription
[Music] 6,000 years ago, in the heart of Eastern Europe, thrived a truly remarkable society, building what may have been the largest settlements the world had ever seen, exceeding in size and population even the earliest cities of Suma in Mesopotamia. The Cucateni Trapilia culture was a calculithic society that flourished between about 5,000 and 3000 BC, expanding across the fertile grasslands and broad valleys of what's now Romania, Muldova, and Ukraine. They're known for their curvaceous ceramic figurines, and the beautiful decorated pottery they made, which reveals an artistic sophistication millennia ahead of its time.
But perhaps their most astounding innovation is the vast settlements they constructed between about 4200 and 3600 BC with hundreds or even thousands of large houses covering up to 450 hectares with estimated populations as high as perhaps 46,000 residents. So why did they build these enormous settlements? Was it for protection from their dangerous hunter gatherer and herder neighbors of the steps to the east? or for protection from hostile enemies within their own society. Were they inhabited year round or were they perhaps seasonal meeting places for the surrounding settlements? Either way, how might they have been planned and organized? And why did these sites come to an end around 3600 BC, often with the thousands of houses being burned to the ground? This is the story of these marvels of ancient Europe, perhaps the largest settlements the world had ever seen. the incredible mega sites of the Kugateni Trapilia culture.
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>> This is the Trapilia culture site known as Maidenetski, which has been dated to between about 3900 to 3650 BC. It covered an area of around 250 hectares, over 600 acres, and was composed of perhaps 3,000 houses. We don't know exactly how many people lived in each of these houses, so estimates for the total population vary, but there could have been 30 or even 45,000 people living in this settlement. If the upper estimates are correct, then there was nothing comparable anywhere in the world, and nothing had been seen like this before anywhere. Even if the lower estimates are more accurate, only the Samrian cities like Uruk in Mesopotamia would eventually rival and exceed this centuries later by about 3,100 BC.
There were other huge Tripolian settlements in this region like Taliani and Nebolithka to which modern researchers have given the term mega sites while others call them cities or proto cities. But these mega sites, settlements covering over 100 hectares or about 250 acres, were laid out in a pre-planned fashion with these concentric rings of houses around a large empty central space. They seem to be organized into subdivisions, and there are radial and peripheral streets or trackways leading in and out of the settlements and also perhaps dividing them into organizational segments. Because these places supposedly had no obvious administrative centers or palaces or large central storehouses, they are usually not defined like the cities that would soon emerge in Mesopotamia, which had more obvious signs of social inequality and organization around temples. These trapilian sites are more like vast villages, although this might not be accurate either, and I'll come back to this later. And the layouts of these sites show that they weren't just small settlements that grew over time. They were planned like this with concentric rings of houses arranged in sections.
So why were they built in the first place? The Kucateni Trapilia culture thrived between about 5,000 and 30,000 BC across modern-day Moldova, Romania, and Ukraine. They emerged from earlier Neolithic cultures of southeast and central Europe developing initially in the eastern foothills of the Carpathians. The western part of the culture is named after the site of Kucatani in Romania where the distinct culture could be seen to emerge in the layers of the ancient site which was excavated in the late 19th century. The eastern part of the culture is named Trapilia after the village on the Neper in Ukraine where another ancient site was excavated at the end of the 19th century.
These ancient people were experts at ceramics, creating a huge variety of shapes and decorations in their pottery and developing sophisticated kils to precisely control the heat and internal atmosphere. The Kucatani groups gradually developed colorful painted designs in black, white, brown, and red pigment, and their mastery of fire extended to copper metallurgy. Their pottery was so special as it was made for display in their houses and various types were made for storage, cooking and especially for consumption in public feasts, rituals and family celebrations. Their houses, following the older regional tradition, were made of timber frames with the walls plastered with a clay mixture. Archaeologists have found remains of these plastered walls with various colors of paint on them, showing they could be decorated, perhaps with similar motifs as those seen on their pottery. Even the floors of the houses were covered in clay, which was apparently fired before the walls were erected.
For the societies of old Europe, and none more so than the Kucatani Trapilia, the house was the foundational economic, social, and ritual unit in their culture. Their houses could be 5 to 8 m wide and 20 to 30 m long with two stories. Inside were hearths or fireplaces for heating, platforms or upper floors for sleeping and designated areas for working shown by loom weights in weaving areas and the cornstones for grinding the grain to make flour and large clayformed depressions likely for collecting grain and flour. And they could also have clay ovens for baking their bread. Some also had raised platforms along the walls made from woven frames covered in clay that were like shelves or sideboards where they arrayed their pottery for storage and display. They made other items of furniture like low tables in the same way. While wood rarely survives, there is evidence from ceramic models of items like chairs and couches for reclining.
The first Kucatani settlements were clustered near the mountain passes of the Carpathians, suggesting they were cited to control these roots. Splinter groups from this culture then expanded northeastwards across the edge of the forest step ecological zone across the Nista Valley to the Southbrook River Valley in Ukraine. Some settlements covered less than a hectare and had just a few houses, each with an extended family living in it. As Kigatoni trapilia groups expanded eastward to cross the step and the forest step boundary, moving from river valley to river valley, some settlements grew larger. One of the earliest established settlements in the southern bug valley had 100 buildings and covered 15 to 20 hectares with a population between 4 and 700 people. Other sites could be even larger, covering 40 hectares or more. And many of these from the smallest to the largest had an ovoid layout with houses forming concentric rings with a central open space. We can see then that the mega sites appeared to be broadly the same type of settlement conceptually only much larger. So there was in fact a huge spectrum of settlement sizes.
There were hunter gatherers in these regions who were displaced or absorbed by the migrating farmers. Remaining huntergatherer groups of the river valleys to the east would be changed by their contacts with farming societies along the frontier. Their changing burial customs suggest a new class of powerful leaders emerged and as well as hunting and fishing. They began hering animals, mainly sheep and goats. These step herders would eventually start to domesticate the wild horses of the step too after about 4,000 BC. The relationship between the Trapilia farmers and their step herder neighbors to the east has been proposed as a reason the Trailian people started building ever larger settlements. It was thought the protoindo-uropean speaking Shredn culture attacked the settled farmers in raids for cattle, women and perhaps slaves and other forms of portable wealth. The Trapilian people had to cluster together in ever greater numbers to stave off attack from these marauding wild foreign people. In support of this idea is the location of the megasites. They cluster in the eastern portion of the territory near the frontier. The layout to the mega sites too suggest they were designed to limit access. At least one site had the outer houses joined together to create a perimeter wall. And we know there was ongoing contact and interactions between the Trailia and the Shrednese dog. They traded items and even influenced one another's ceramic styles. The Shrednese dog groups of the Pontic step were clearly great traders themselves and mediated trade between the societies of the Caucuses and the Cucati Trapilia. It could be the relationships with the Shreddingto herders and the Trapilion farmers was usually peaceful but could descend into violence perhaps on both sides.
But it might not have been only violence from without that led to growing settlement sizes. The various Kucatani Trapilia groups may well have waged war on one another. The fertile black earth of this region was desirable. These valleys and plains were in the forest step ecological zone and so were rich in timber and the rivers provided water and facilitated transport and longrange trade. The wealth of the land also supported a high population density and so led to competition for resources. And in any conflict of course the larger settlements would be safer than the smaller ones and so perhaps a kind of arms race could have developed. However, some researchers argue the mega sites don't really look like they prioritize defense from raiding or concerted attack at all. There were other smaller Cucatini trapilia sites surrounded by banks and ditches, but they say the massive sites didn't tend to have these. Conversely, perhaps their sheer size was their defense, meaning perimeter ditches and palisades were superfluous. Also, some were cited in places where the natural geography provided defense, like Talanke, which was built on a bluff between the Talanka River and a smaller stream. And at least some of the mega sites like Nebka did have boundary ditches anyway. Either way though, there was a regional site size hierarchy with both small and large sites across the region. So maybe these huge sites were the regional power centers politically and economically dominating the smaller towns and villages around them. Perhaps each group in cooperation with neighboring groups and also in competition with them. But some researchers have looked at this regional settlement organization and questioned the old assumptions about the mega sites. They ask, "What if these sites weren't permanent settlements at all?
[Music] Kikateni Trapilia settlements have been known about and excavated for well over a century and there are over 2 and a half thousand sites known but the mega sites were only really discovered in the 1960s through aerial photography. These sites were later explored from the 70s onwards with surveys and archaeological investigations, but the sheer scale of the sites means they're challenging to assess. Carrying out geohysical surveys over a 100 hectares is a huge and expensive task, but they reveal the remains of houses along with other features like pits and ditches and so the layouts can be mapped. Excavations are also difficult and only relatively small portions can be excavated at a time. Nevertheless, excavations have provided samples for radiocarbon dating and it does appear that most houses in a site were occupied over the same span of time. The layout of the mapped sites also suggest that houses were built together and maintained together and were all destroyed at the same time. The black oblongs that show up in the magnetometer surveys are in fact showing the remains of burnt houses. Houses that were burned to destruction when the sites were abandoned. The remains of Neolithic and Calcalithic houses of Southeast Europe are often found in excavations to have been burned. So much so that this practice lasting for thousands of years across the region has been called the burned house horizon by archaeologists. People initially assumed they had been burned in hostile attacks on the settlements and perhaps some of them were or that they regularly caught fire in accidents and perhaps that happened too. But reconstructions of these houses have been tested for their flammability. And because the timbers are coated in clay, they don't burn easily. It actually requires the addition of a huge amount of fuel to burn each one. So, it's thought these burnings were intentional carried out by the inhabitants. When the burnings were done during the life of a settlement and new houses were built on top or nearby, perhaps they did it to keep on top of animal infestations or disease. Or maybe it was done as part of the mortuary rights when the inhabitants died or just because the houses were too old to be repaired. But the investigated mega sites seem to have been intentionally burned together before being abandoned, and the inhabitants moved into the surrounding areas and beyond. But were they really inhabitants at all?
[Music] Some researchers suggest the largest mega sites were never lived in year round, at least not by everyone, because they say the carrying capacity of the local area would not have supported those population sizes. They say the fields could not have grown enough crops or grazed enough animals. Instead, they reason these sites were seasonal gathering places for the surrounding settlements. In this view, the radial roads were more like processional routes, and the city quarters, the wedge-shaped divisions, were built and occupied by temporary residents from surrounding villages. So, each wedge would be for a tribe or village. The large central spaces in the center were for the seasonal collective rituals, whatever they were. In fact, the central space then becomes not just a focal point for the mega sites, but the reason they exist, and the houses surrounding it are almost incidental. People would live here for just a portion of the year and return to their real homes for the rest of it.
Now, I'm not an archaeologist, and I'm sure I don't understand all the technical arguments and other nuances, but to me, it seems an extravagant use of resources to build vast settlements only to live in them sometimes. That would mean thousands of people would have to build two houses for their family and invest time in transporting their resources between them every year. Also, these empty or half empty megaites would be vulnerable to attack or raiding without a full population to protect them. And arguments based on the local carrying capacity, while highly technical and scientific, necessarily make a lot of assumptions. Soil fertility can be maintained by manuring, a technique we know was done by other Neolithic Europeans ancestral to them. And we know that the Kucatani Trailia culture sustained trade networks across their region and beyond. importing resources like copper and shells from the Ajian, for example, and trading ceramics, flint, minerals, and salt. I don't see why, in the traditional view, large power centers couldn't have also imported food and timber from client settlements in the surrounding region to support their populations. Maybe it was a breakdown in these local and long range trade networks that ultimately led to the mega sites being abandoned.
Perhaps it's a legacy of the Soviet era origins of the research on these sites, but there seems to be a tendency to view them through an egalitarian lens. Some sources assert that all the houses were the same and there was no sign of social hierarchies within the settlements. Political organization at the mega sites is suggested to have been by some kind of hypothetical council with representatives from each of the wedges coming to collective agreement on local issues. And perhaps that is how they were run, but it seems a bit far-fetched to me. Other sources describe signs of complexity and economic specialization between sites and within sites, especially in the later eras. Some large towns seem to have specialized in mass production of ceramic pottery, while others were specialist flint mining villages that extracted, created, and exported flint tools. Within the mega sites, in each of the wedgelike subdivisions, some buildings seem to have been more special than others. While sometimes they've been called meeting houses or crashes or temples, usually because of higher concentrations of ceramic figurines, sometimes special ones, and because of clay platforms inside, interpreted as altars and painted interior walls. This famous collection of reclining full figured women was found in a house that sometimes called a temple because of the figurines. But the structure also contained a higher concentration of cornstones for the mass production of flour. In other prehistoric settlements, in other cultures, buildings like this have been interpreted as centralized economic structures, the backbreaking labor of grinding, perhaps even carried out by slaves overseen by high status women. And painted walls have been found in normal domestic houses, too. So, that doesn't make these large structures temples necessarily. From what I've read, I can't see any reason why these large buildings and the large settlements couldn't be signs of hierarchical social organization. and centralized economic and political control. And following decades of excellent research by hundreds of brilliant people, there's still much ongoing analysis and debate about these sites. You can read about these places in David Antony's bestselling book, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language. I also found this book very informative, but it's likely a bit dry and technical for most people. You can also find the work of John Chapman of Durham University about these sites online if you'd like to read about some of the modern arguments in more detail. As with all my videos, there are sources listed in the description.
Decades of research on pottery subtypes, trade networks, and settlement patterns have plotted out the internal changes within the Trapilia culture over 2,000 years. As the various regional subgroups influence one another, expand, migrate, and conquer one another over the centuries. It might have the name the Kucatani Trapilia culture and often be represented by a big blob of color on a map, but actually these were a series of overlapping dynamic societies who changed throughout the 2,000 years they existed while influencing one another and their neighbors. After about 3,300 BC, perhaps influenced by climatic changes, sites of all sizes and entire regions start being abandoned. And no one knows what happened to those people. But we do know the Indo-Uropean speaking step cultures of Eastern Europe would soon begin to expand across these regions into central Europe and beyond. And the last remains of the Cucatoni Trapilia culture would be gone by 2700 BC. However they are to be interpreted, the mega sites they created, mainly between about 4200 BC and 3600 BC, were an innovation unlike anything the world had seen before. They were unprecedented and had to be dreamed up, organized, and managed, and they thrived for hundreds of years. Ultimately, this ambitious experiment came to an end. But to me, it's still quite incredible that these magnificent sites ever existed at all.
Thank you very much indeed to my patrons and channel members for supporting my work. If you like what I do here, please join us using the links below. Now, please watch this video on the largest buildings the world had ever seen in 5,500 BC, the incredible long houses of the linear pottery culture. Thank you for watching.
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