Fertile Fields of Discovery

Under the quiet fields of a collective farm here lies a gigantic prehistoric settlement that challenges textbook assumptions about where civilization arose.

The 6,000-year-old settlement’s existence, discovered a century ago but still virtually unknown in the West, was built by Ukraine’s first farmers, the Trypillians, and excavated just this summer.

“There was nothing else like this in the world at that time,” said archeologist Olexi Kolesnikov--who, like the others excavating at the site, is from the Ukrainian Institute of Archeology--indicating a vast cultivated field of the Talljanky state farm 100 miles south of the Ukrainian capital, Kiev. The field covers only a small portion of the prehistoric site.

What is remarkable about the settlement is not the survival of the simple homes--now no more than burned and crumbled remains--but the sheer number present at a time when much of humanity was still living in tiny villages. A multitude of houses were clustered together here on the plateau belted by rivers and ravines.

The Talljanky site covers 1,112 acres. Buried under nearby fields are 10 other settlements, each of which exceeds 100 acres.

Dwarfing the modern farm village of Talljanky, whose population is 1,400, the ancient Trypillian settlement had about 3,000 buildings arranged in concentric circles and contained as many as 15,000 people.

Dating to around 4,000 BC, the settlement was built at the same time as such “proto-cities” as Ur in Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq. These precociously large concentrations of people and buildings eventually became the city-states of Sumer, where history as we know it began. That transition from peasant villages to sophisticated urban societies has long been considered unique.

But the Ukrainian sites were apparently three to five times larger than the Mesopotamian proto-cities, Kolesnikov says. “They were by far the largest concentrated settlements in the world,” said archeologist David Anthony of Hartwick College in New York.

The settlements were built by Ukraine’s first farmers, known as Trypillians, after the town where their prehistoric culture was discovered. Their roots are in the Neolithic era, when humans mastered agriculture and animal domestication, settled villages, and made pottery and textiles.

Their culture emerged from the first settlements of farmers, who began tilling Turkey’s Anatolian plain about 8,000 BC before migrating to new lands. Migrants reached western Ukraine by about 5,000 BC, mixed with the local inhabitants and spread onward as far as the Dnieper River over 1,500 years. Although they have traditionally been considered more advanced than the hunter-gatherer tribes that lived around them, European farming cultures such as the Trypillians were long viewed as backward compared to their Mesopotamian contemporaries.

Then, in the 1970s, aerial military photographs of the farmlands straddling a narrow 20-mile strip around

Talljanky revealed a compact cluster of giant Trypillian settlements.

Whether it can be considered an early city--in the same sense as the Mesopotamian proto-cities--is now a question for academic debate.

In Mesopotamia, evidence of urbanization is seen in large public works such as temples, irrigation networks and city walls. There was social stratification: People who decided to build such monuments lived better than people who did the work. They had richer homes and, when they died, better burials.

“When you get that many people living together in one concentrated settlement, the normal activities of daily life create problems that ultimately require centralized administration and decision-making,” Anthony explains.

Mykola Shmagli of the institute, who has been studying a 700-acre settlement in the neighboring village of Majdanetske, believes that the Trypillians were independently advancing toward urbanization at the same pace as the Mesopotamians.

From 4,000 BC to 3,000 BC, “these processes were synchronized in Europe and the Middle East,” Shmagli wrote recently, advancing the view that the Trypillians’ settlements were as much proto-cities as those of their Mesopotamian contemporaries.

However, evidence from the Trypillian sites is still scanty, making it hard to construct an instantly compelling case for Ukrainian urbanization.

For one thing, they have barely been studied. Only 30 of Talljanky’s 3,000 buildings have been excavated, and only 50 of Majdanetske’s have been excavated.

Burial sites--usually a useful clue as to people’s styles of life--are not available, as the Trypillian custom was apparently to cremate their dead.

How the Trypillians organized themselves socially also remains a mystery. Based on Majdanetske’s street plan, Shmagli suggested that the settlement was divided into segments representing extended families, whose elders got together to make decisions.

If so, Anthony says, “this kind of consensus-based decision-making is completely unexpected in a settlement of this size. . . . The [sites] seem to represent a form of community management that we do not understand, for which we have no living models.”

Based on the painted symbols found on pottery at the sites, the late UCLA anthropologist Marija Gimbutas envisioned an essentially egalitarian society in which lineage and inheritance passed through women and worship focused on a female deity.

“The power of motherhood is felt strongly here, but mostly people were equal,” says the institute’s Valentyna Shumova, one of those working on the excavation. That would mean that the Trypillians’ settlements were fundamentally different from sites like Ur, which were built on social inequality.

Also unlike the Mesopotamian proto-cities, which were occupied continuously for dozens of generations, each giant Trypillian settlement was short-lived--built, occupied and then burned when a new one was built close by.

“They weren’t all occupied at the same time,” says institute archeologist Volodymyr Kruts, who has calculated that a giant settlement would exhaust the surrounding fields and forests every 50 years.

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The reason for the Trypillians’ disappearance as a culture has never been established. By 3,000 BC, when the Sumerians were inventing writing in their flourishing city-states, the Trypillians’ settlements were mysteriously abandoned.

Gimbutas suggested that warlike, patriarchal, horse-riding nomads from the neighboring steppe defeated the peaceful, matriarchal farmers in a primordial clash of the sexes.

Olexi Kolesnikov thinks climatic cooling may have made the Trypillians’ farming economy collapse.

Anthony speculates that the settlements’ consensus-based decision-making eventually made them unmanageable, especially when quick decisions were needed.

More excavation is needed for answers, archeologists say, but not much time is left. Modern plowing by farm workers threatens to gut the giant settlements before they can be fully studied.

“In 10 or 15 years, if they keep plowing like this, the evidence of the settlements will be destroyed,” Kruts says.