Ancient ‘megasites’ may reshape the history of the first cities
February 28, 2020 12:28 PM   Subscribe

Nebelivka, a Ukrainian village of about 700 people, sits amid rolling hills and grassy fields. Here at the edge of Eastern Europe, empty space stretches to the horizon. It wasn’t always so. Beneath the surface of Nebelivka’s surrounding landscape and at nearby archaeological sites, roughly 6,000-year-old remnants of what were possibly some of the world’s first cities are emerging from obscurity. These low-density, spread-out archaeological sites are known as megasites, a term that underscores both their immense size and mysterious origins. Now, some scientists are arguing the settlements represent a distinct form of ancient urban life that has gone largely unrecognized.
posted by Etrigan (24 comments total) 45 users marked this as a favorite
 
Although not as early, Djenne-Djenno should be mentioned too. It is an early (archaeological) city in West Africa that also seems to have followed a different, less socially stratified organization.

It's cool to think about how diverse the ancient world actually was, in terms of political organization, ways of life, etc.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 12:49 PM on February 28, 2020 [11 favorites]


Im curious how they know the homes were burned in a ceremonial manner, and not sure I follow their logic. No evidence of wildfire means they must have been burned intentionally, sure, but why assume it was ceremonial and not adversarial?
posted by Exceptional_Hubris at 1:47 PM on February 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


I’m always amazed at how from just a few scraps, whole histories can be divined.
posted by njohnson23 at 1:51 PM on February 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


There's a part buried sorta in the middle of the article where they talk about how much extra kindling it took to make their recreation-of-a-house burn in the same way as in the site, from which they extrapolated that whether ceremonial or not, it took WAY TOO MUCH WORK to burn these houses. Burning them was extra important in some way.
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 2:20 PM on February 28, 2020 [16 favorites]


Also they mentioned that the burnings were over an extended period across the life of the settlement, not clustered in time like you would expect for an attack.
posted by tavella at 2:35 PM on February 28, 2020


This sounds a lot like bronze age burning man.
posted by keep_evolving at 2:48 PM on February 28, 2020 [11 favorites]


Burning them was extra important in some way.

In traditional Navajo culture, if a person dies inside of a house, a hole is smashed through one wall to let out the “chindi” and that house is never used again. I wonder if it’s something similar.
posted by Silvery Fish at 2:59 PM on February 28, 2020 [12 favorites]


I was wondering that too, but this settlement was only apparently used for part of the year, as a gathering spot. I'd assume the people who made it to the gathering were generally not too debilitated, would they have so many people dying during a month or two occupancy? I suppose houses could be assigned to specific families, and maybe the burning was a ritual if there had been a death that year?
posted by tavella at 3:30 PM on February 28, 2020


Wikipedia: burned house horizon
posted by XMLicious at 3:30 PM on February 28, 2020 [18 favorites]


Over the last decade, however, researchers have increasingly questioned whether the only pathway to urban life ran through Mesopotamian cities.

Is this really true? The " over the last decade" part? It seems unbelievable to me, a completely uneducated fool, that a researcher in the field would have believed "the only pathway to urban life ran through Mesopotamian cities". At least a researcher in the last few decades. What mesopotamia has going for it is lots of durable goods left behind. That made it an easily observed example. To assume, therefore, that it's the only example would have goofy old me giving the side eye. How could one make such an assertion? Do I give researchers too much credit?
posted by 2N2222 at 3:54 PM on February 28, 2020 [2 favorites]


Has anybody else imagined that it might have been very fucking funny to *burn* a *house* *down* *on purpose*? The thing about how the burnings seemed to be every 70 or 80 years made me think of something like this happening:
1st person: Did you hear that story about how they burned a house to the ground one time?
2nd person: They did WHAT? Hahahahaha oh my god WHAT? You can do that?
3rd person: Actually I was there I was a kid and it was pretty scary. We definitely should not do that again.
Everyone else: Oh? Yeah ok it sounds scary.
*3rd person dies of old age*
Next gathering:
4th person: Did you hear that story about how they burned a house down one time?
5th person: Should we try it?
4th person: Absolutely
posted by bleep at 5:33 PM on February 28, 2020 [4 favorites]


What's the easiest way to clear out a space? Burn it down until you can build over it or plant a garden there, it's good land. How many houses are sitting around because you can't just burn them to the ground and bury them under anymore? FIRE!
posted by zengargoyle at 6:00 PM on February 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


Long ago I read an account of a society (African?) which burned its grass huts periodically because they tended to become infested.

And if you only used a site a couple of months a year, GOK what might be living in a house when you came back after 10 months.
posted by jamjam at 6:08 PM on February 28, 2020 [4 favorites]


I think they were trying to appease the gods in the face of some extended natural disaster.
posted by mmiddle at 6:27 PM on February 28, 2020


Archeologists have known that urban settlements in the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture in what's now Ukraine and Romania were larger than contemporary urban sites in the Middle East, but unlike the cultures of Middle-Eastern neolithic, the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture wasn't widely known by the general public (at least in the English-speaking world).

According to the article, recent research has suggested that the population density at these sites wasn't as high as previously thought.
posted by nangar at 6:39 PM on February 28, 2020 [4 favorites]


This is cool! Could it have been a sort of marketplace for nomadic people? The ditch would be enough to keep in the livestock. I was just telling my students yesterday that they shouldn't take their textbook as the gospel, because there is more we don't know about ancient history that what we do know. I'm going to show them this next week!
posted by mumimor at 12:07 AM on February 29, 2020 [1 favorite]


When I read they burned houses down on purpose, my first thought was bedbugs.
posted by Miss Cellania at 3:02 AM on February 29, 2020 [3 favorites]


> Could it have been a sort of marketplace for nomadic people?

Interesting. We know people in the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture traded with the Yamnaya culture just to the east and intermarried with them. The Yamnaya people were nomadic cattle-herders, and they seem to have essentially lived in their wagons. When a person died, they broke up their wagon and buried the wheels of the wagon along with the body. Their are some especially elaborate burials where the whole wagon was interred with the deceased person's body. This might relate to the ritual house burnings of the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture.

From the article, it seems like the picture of the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture has been changing since I last read about them. I'd like to read some more informed archeological sources and see what they've been saying.
posted by nangar at 3:50 AM on February 29, 2020 [5 favorites]


I have no difficulty whatsoever in believing that the houses were destroyed because of some ritual purity thing. Consider the long set of instructions in the Bible (Leviticus 14) on what to do if a house has something generally mis-translated as "leprosy". Basically, there's a three stage process of emptying the house, waiting to see if the infection(?) has spread, removing the affected material, waiting to see if the infection(?) has spread, and ultimately destroying the house. That careful, ritualised destruction looks very much like the sort of thing practiced in Nebelivka. I'm sure there are parallels in other cultures, too.
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:42 AM on February 29, 2020 [6 favorites]


I'm another one on team "they burned the houses for hygienic reasons". It doesn't have to have been bedbugs, it could also have been a dysentery type problem where people in the surrounding houses were getting re-infected by a shared sewage midden, and it could have been black mold. Leviticus 14 in the old testament describes how to purify a house when it gets moldy and if that fails, the timbers have to be destroyed. One of the transitional stages between hunger gatherer and urban is the one of temporary settlements, and the reason that the long houses get abandoned after being lived in for a period of decades is not just that the local gathering resources are badly tapped out, but also because they weren't considered clean - this was a practice on the West Coast of Canada so, recent enough to be documented.

What I am wondering is if these egalitarian cities were in any way related to the spread of Indo European. Being settled like that would enable the mothers to raise lots more kids compared to their nomadic neighbours, so there would be a resulting population jump. The big advantage to settled agriculture is that it brings greater food supplies and a bigger population. My speculation works from the idea that there would be a new, massive surplus population with the capacity to take horses and spread out looking for new places to live. 6000 years ago is 1,500 years after the Indo-European language had developed, so these cities could have been the feeders that ensured the language that brought us our early vocabulary for horse back riding continued to expand.

I also wonder if the fact that they had horses could have been the reason they didn't need major defensive walls. If you've got scouts on horseback it is relatively easy to mobilize and defend against raiders who do not. Combine that with a much higher population so that when it comes to a battle you seriously outnumber them, and a wealth base spread out so that they would have to hit multiple objectives to be sure of nabbing enough valuables to make it worth the raid, and any decent military commander with ambitions is going to throw her lot in with the locals, get some horses and go out and raid, or colonize the people further out who don't have them. If you are already a local commander you're going to be tempted to encourage the young men to take horse and strike out, because it keeps things peaceful at home when you do.

On preview: Joe in Australia cited Leviticus too.
posted by Jane the Brown at 5:57 AM on February 29, 2020 [10 favorites]


Rebuilding over a burned house is not always practical. The city I live in had one of those traditional great fires in the 1800's that took out pretty much the entire Southern peninsula where the population was then centred. Before the fire the place had mainly house lots with the house on the back and a garden or yard in the front. When they rebuilt they all rebuilt homes or businesses in the yard area that was free of debris. Now now all the houses are lined up against the sidewalk or have token front gardens not much larger than the house steps which makes it pretty grim. They could have dumped the debris in the ocean so they had more opportunity to clear it out altogether than in many areas, but the backyards here are all full of the debris and are still terrible places to try and put in a garden still. Those that are verdant are ones that brought in topsoil. Of course the land on the peninsula was bad for farming to begin with - that's why the put the city here, and the the farm plots in the valley near the creeks.

My point is that they don't regularly burn down a house to reclaim the land for a vegetable plot or to grow some grass, or even to stable some animals. Houses are deliberately burned by their owners only for construction that can't go anywhere else or because they feel strongly that the house has to go.
posted by Jane the Brown at 6:07 AM on February 29, 2020 [2 favorites]


> What I am wondering is if these egalitarian cities were in any way related to the spread of Indo European...My speculation works from the idea that there would be a new, massive surplus population with the capacity to take horses and spread out looking for new places to live.

Now that we have ancient genetic data that can be used to trace migrations, most archeologists are convinced the neighboring Yamnaya people spoke an early Indo-European language, probably ancestral to all Indo-European languages except the Anatolean group, which includes Hittite, and split off earlier.

As far as I know, people in the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture didn't raise horses, but the Yamnaya people definitely did, something they'd adopted from people in central Asia further east. The Yamnaya culture adopted domestic horses from central Asia, cattle and other livestock the ancestors of the neolithic Cucuteni-Trypillia people had brought with them from Middle East, and wheeled vehicles from Middle Eastern traders who came into the region to get copper from local mines. The combination of these technologies allowed the Yamnaya culture to become highly mobile. They spread over a large area, merged with other cultures in different regions and differentiated into distinct local cultures.

The idea that the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture may have also spoken an early Indo-European language is consistent with one of the theories about the origins of the Indo-European language family and the split between the ancient Anatolian Indo-European languages and the rest of the Indo-European language family. Common terms for horses, and parts of wheeled vehicles inherited from Proto-Indo-European are wide-spread across the Indo-European language family, but mostly absent or dubious in the Anatolian branch, so this split in the language family could have happened before people in the Yamnaya culture adopted wheeled vehicles and started raising horses. We 're getting into territory that's pretty fuzzy here. If we go back beyond the era where we have written records, and what we can work out from genetic and archeological evidence of migrations, it gets pretty hazy and speculative.
posted by nangar at 8:58 AM on February 29, 2020 [6 favorites]


Learned yesterday at the Soil Regeneration Event that wood slash can be burned in a particular way to create the kind of char mushrooms love to live on. So maybe . . .?
posted by Mesaverdian at 10:59 AM on March 1, 2020 [2 favorites]


Mesaverdian, the striking features of these remains included the intense heat that left its mark by baking the clay that had filled the walls; also the fact that personal possessions and even food had been left behind. The arsonists (?) apparently abandoned the house and its contents, stuffed it with kindling, and set fire to it. This doesn't look like people making biochar; it looks (as Jane the Brown put it) as if they felt strongly that the house has to go.
posted by Joe in Australia at 2:03 PM on March 1, 2020 [1 favorite]


« Older Ice Ice Baby   |   The Loneliness of the Long Distance Writer Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments