Early urbanism in prehistoric Europe?: the case of the Tripillye mega-sites

The Tripillye - Cucuteni culture of Ukraine, Moldova and North East Romania (5000 - 2700 BC) has been termed 'Europe's last civilization' - a late flowering of 'Old Europe' at a time when settled village life, advances in gold and copper metallurgy and vivid and varied material culture had come to an end a millennium or more earlier in most other regions of South East Europe. Although Gordon Childe introduced Tripillye to mainstream Western archaeology in the 1920s, the publication of most site monographs and articles in local languages has limited knowledge and the impact of Tripillyan discoveries to a small group of specialists. This has led to the neglect of the most striking aspect of Tripillyan practices - the development of a series of mega-sites, covering 200 - 450 ha, which are the largest sites in 4th millennium Europe and as large as the Early Bronze Age city of Uruk (Mesopotamia).
The sheer size of these 'mega-sites' not only prompts questions of the complexity of social structure(s) necessary to sustain such settlements, and the logistics and long-term planning needed to provision them but also makes them very hard to investigate. After 2 decades of excavation, Ukrainian colleagues are currently unable to sequence the houses on a single mega-site by scientific dating, preventing us from working out the population size at any given phase of the site occupation and hindering attempts to elucidate the sequence of mega-site growth, floruit and collapse. Currently, we can neither place mega-sites in a micro-regional or regional settlement context nor understand their human impact on the forest steppe landscape.
Our response to these research issues was the creation of an inter-disciplinary research project, jointly organised by Durham University (Chapman) and the Kyiv Institute of Archaeology (Videiko). Our preliminary summer 2009 field season enabled a field test of the methods proposed to understand the 250-ha. mega-site of Nebelivka, midway between Kyiv and Odessa. Geophysical prospection of 15ha of the site enabled the recognition of over 60 burnt structures in rows or streets, 18 of which were sampled by hand coring to depths of 0.80m to extract burnt house daub. The plant remains inserted into the daub can be directly dated by the AMS method, thereby providing a timeline for each individual houses. The aim is to recover 100 AMS dates from different parts of Nebelivka, enabling a sequencing of the whole settlement and the modelling of mega-site growth. Excavation of one complete burnt Tripillye house by the Ukrainian team in 2009 provided comparable 14C samples of other materials (bone, seeds, pottery). Initial fieldwalking in the environs of Nebelivka suggests that the land near the mega-site may have been devoted to cultivation; but much more fieldwalking in a 10-km radius is needed to provide insights into the nature of the local settlement structures and their social meanings. Peat deposits were identified to provide a regional vegetation history, with which to compare the local histories of mega-site environmental impact as recorded in nearby alluvial sequences. These fieldwork strategies will be enhanced by the analysis of satellite imagery to assess the amount of disturbance to mega-sites through earth-moving; the existence of crop-mark sites within the Nebelivka micro-region; and the variability in mega-site plans through time and across the whole Tripillye distribution.
The research strategy of focussing on three different spatial levels - site, micro-region and macro-region - provides a platform for the integration and interpretation of much fresh data which has a high potential for answering the three crucial issues raised by Tripillye mega-sites: what are the details of a well-sequenced mega-site?; how was the provisioning of such large sites managed across the landscape?; and can we detect a trajectory towards local, European urbanism?

The main area in which the project has the potential for major impact outside the archaeological sector is the cultural sector. Five initiatives are proposed: the project would be seeking to engage interested but non-specialist members of the general public, whether in the UK, Ukraine or in other countries.

(1) Press releases at regular intervals in the Times, the Guardian and Ukrainian national newspapers (2011 - 2015): aim - ensure coverage of the project in national media.

(2)Project web-site (2011 - 2015): aim - keep interested public and professionals up-to-date with the most recent project results.

(3) touring exhibition of display panels in eight museums in Ukraine (Kyiv, Ivano-Frankivsk, Galych, Zaporozhya, Odessa, Donetsk, Vinnytza and Kharkiv) in 2014, with a European itinerary of eight museums in 2015 (Chishinau; Piatra Neamt, Varna, Budapest, Krakow, Mannheim, Oxford and Durham): aim - dissemination of results to museum colleagues and general public in Ukraine and other European countries.

(4) general book written at the end of the project to coincide with the touring exhibition (2015): aim - dissemination of most important project results to general audience.

It is highly desirable to make an impact on Ukrainian and UK culture by providing a clearer idea of prehistoric social evolution in general and the contribution of the Eastern European Tripillye culture in particular. Participants in the museum activities will gain transferable skills for future media use, as well as presentational skills in the preparation of web-sites and exhibition panels.

There is wide range of expert advice available in-house for the travelling exhibition. Those teaching on the Durham Masters in Museum and Artefact Studies have provided advice on the planning of touring exhibitions. The professional exhibition designer, Ms. Christina Unwin, has a wide range of experience of communicating complex messages in approachable ways.