Early cities or large villages?: settlement dynamics in the Trypillia group, Ukraine

Summary

During the 4th millennium BC a number of considerably big settlements have developed in the territory of modern Ukraine, thus constituting the biggest sites in Europe at that time. Mostly investigated only as single entities these "mega-sites" have never been considered thoroughly as part of the whole landscape of Trypillia settlements. Some scholars have argued that these could have been examples of early formed urban centres (aka "proto-cities"), others, instead, proposed that these were big villages without a clear social hierarchy visible in site organization and structure.

This paper will present the spatial quantitative analysis of the whole database of known Trypillia sites and will propose a new perspective of seeing the mega-sites as locations for seasonal gatherings rather than permanently occupied urban-like central-places. Moreover, and more generally, the paper represents an attempt to exploit the great potential of large datasets to answer "bigger" research questions without getting lost in dry and meaningless numbers and statistics.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• What to Do with "Megasites" in Prehistory? Further Exploring the "Megasite" Conundrum

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15773