The Cucuteni-Trypillia culture built huge ‘mega settlements’ (Image: Susanne Beyer/Institute for Pre- and Protohistory CAU Kiel)
Archaeologists are working out why the ancient people of Europe began to settle in the continent’s first “mega settlements” around 7,000 years ago – which they then repeatedly burned down on purpose.
The Cucuteni-Trypillia communities thrived between 5050 and 2950 BCE across an area dubbed the ‘Burned House Horizon’ in what is today , Romania and Moldova. They built huge circular proto-cities that were home to as many as 17,000 people.
Archaeologists have long speculated about why this culture deliberately razed its homes and buildings with fire every 60 years or so. And now, archaeologists at Kiel University in Germany are using sociology theory in an attempt to understand why these ancient people decided to live together in some of the earliest known examples of urbanism in Europe.
The settlements had habitable concentric walls (Image: Kenny Arne Lang Antonsen & Jimmy John Antonsen / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
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Some archaeologists have suggested these “mega settlements” were deliberately destroyed for symbolic reasons. Others have suggested the heat generated would have baked clay walls into a more robust material – while the smoke would have fumigated the living spaces.
More recent studies have proposed that old structures were burned down to make space for new ones. However, tests found that while wooden roods were destroyed, the home’s clay-plastered walls did remain surprisingly intact.
Researchers were astonished by the amount of fuel that must have been used to reach the maximum temperatures recorded in the sediment. Tests found they would have needed over 130 trees’ worth of firewood for each one-story building – or around 3.8 square miles of forest for a small settlement of just 100 houses.
The mega settlements were home to as many as 40,000 people (Image: Susanne Beyer / Kiel University)
The Cucuteni-Trypillia culture is also famous for its pottery (Image: Einsamer Schütze/wikimediacommons)
Now, using these huge ‘burned house horizon’ settlements as case studies, archaeologists and a philosopher have focused on why urbanism began to flourish in Eastern Europe thousands of years ago. They applied the United Nations Human Development Index – a way of measuring the key areas of human development in modern society – to try to understand why humans in the ‘Burned House Horizon’ area began settling in these mega settlements.
To do this, they used something called ‘the capability approach’, a philosophical concept that goes back to the work of the Indian philosopher and economist Amartya Sen in the 1970s and 1980s, This led them to conclude that people were attracted to these mega settlements attracted settlers because – like today’s cities – they offered people increased opportunities.
Dr Vesa Arponen, one of the case study’s three authors, said: “The approach assumes that human well-being is not only measured by material possessions but also by other means that enable and facilitate action, as well as by the capabilities for groups and individuals to lead an active life.”
Dr Arponen continued: “The application of our analysis tool confirms previous studies. They maintain that these settlements were characterized by great social equality in their blossoming phase and that people had extensive opportunities to be active themselves – however, our results point to different explanations for this than before.”
“Our analytical approach opens up the possibility of interpreting the developments in the Cucuteni-Trypillia societies the other way around. It could have been the expanded opportunities for people and their chance of realization that attracted more people, which then led to population growth and innovation,” summarizes Dr. Arponen.