The Vast Ancient Cities of Prehistoric Europe

6,000 years ago, in the heart of Eastern Europe, thrived a truly remarkable society, building what may have been the largest settlements the world had ever seen, exceeding in size and population even the earliest cities of Sumer in Mesopotamia. The Cucuteni-Trypillia culture was a Chalcolithic society that flourished between about 5000 and 3000 BC, expanding across the fertile grasslands and broad valleys of what's now Romania, Moldova and Ukraine. They're known for their curvaceous ceramic figurines and the beautiful decorated pottery they made which reveals an artistic sophistication millennia ahead of its time. But perhaps their most astounding innovation is the vast settlements they constructed between about 4200 and 3600 BC, with hundreds or even thousands of large houses covering up to 450 hectares with estimated populations as high as perhaps 46,000 residents. So why did they build these enormous settlements? Was it for protection from their dangerous hunter-gatherer and herder neighbours of the steppes to the east? Or for protection from hostile enemies within their own society? Were they inhabited year round or were they perhaps seasonal meeting places for the surrounding settlements? Either way, how might they have been planned and organised? And why did these sites come to an end around 3600 BC, often with the thousands of houses being burned to the ground? This is the story of these marvels of ancient Europe, perhaps the largest settlements the world had ever seen, the incredible mega-sites of the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture. Now I don't know if you know this, I'm not sure if I've mentioned this for a while, but since 2015 I've published 20 novels and novellas in three different historical fantasy and science fiction series. This meant creating three different fictional worlds for my story to take place in. To do this I've had to make note of things like the settings and locations, the characters, their histories and relationships, the timelines, the story lore and so on, in a great many notebooks, spreadsheets and piles of index cards. Each of these series takes place over centuries and it can be years between the publication of stories, so it's a challenge for me to organise and keep track of all this. But from now on, to do all these things, I'm going to be using World Anvil, this video's sponsor. World Anvil is a set of world building tools that helps you create, organise and store your world setting. You can create wiki-like interlinked articles, interactive maps, historical timelines and there's even full novel writing software, all the tools you need to write your novel. 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We don't know exactly how many people lived in each of these houses, so estimates for the total population vary, but there could have been 30 or even 45,000 people living in this settlement. If the upper estimates are correct, then there was nothing comparable anywhere in the world and nothing had been seen like this before anywhere. Even if the lower estimates are more accurate, only the Sumerian cities like Uruk in Mesopotamia would eventually rival and exceed this, centuries later, by about 3100 BC. There were other huge Tropilian settlements in this region like Talyanki and Nevelivka, to which modern researchers have given the term megacites, while others call them cities or proto-cities. But these megacites, settlements covering over 100 hectares or about 250 acres, were laid out in a pre-planned fashion with these concentric rings of houses around a large empty central space. They seem to be organised into subdivisions and there are radial and peripheral streets or trackways leading in and out of the settlements, and also perhaps dividing them into organisational segments. Because these places supposedly had no obvious administrative centres or palaces or large central storehouses, they are usually not defined like the cities that would soon emerge in Mesopotamia, which had more obvious signs of social inequality and organisation around temples. These Tropilian sites are more like vast villages, although this might not be accurate either, and I'll come back to this later. And the layouts of these sites show that they weren't just small settlements that grew over time, they were planned like this, with concentric rings of houses arranged in sections. So why were they built in the first place? The Cucuteni-Tropilio culture thrived between about 5000 and 3000 BC across modern-day Moldova, Romania and Ukraine. They emerged from earlier Neolithic cultures of southeast and central Europe, developing initially in the eastern foothills of the Carpathians. The western part of the culture is named after the site of Cucuteni in Romania, where the distinct culture could be seen to emerge in the layers of the ancient site which was excavated in the late 19th century. The eastern part of the culture is named Tropilia after the village on the Dnieper in Ukraine, where another ancient site was excavated at the end of the 19th century. These ancient people were experts at ceramics, creating a huge variety of shapes and decorations in their pottery, and developing sophisticated kilns to precisely control the heat and internal atmosphere. The Cucuteni groups gradually developed colourful painted designs in black, white, brown and red pigment, and their mastery of fire extended to copper metallurgy. Their pottery was so special as it was made for display in their houses, and various types were made for storage, cooking and especially for consumption in public feasts, rituals and family celebrations. Their houses, following the older regional tradition, were made of timber frames with the walls plastered with a clay mixture. Archaeologists have found remains of these plastered walls with various colours of paint on them, showing they could be decorated, perhaps with similar motifs as those seen on their pottery. Even the floors of the houses were covered in clay, which was apparently fired before the walls were erected. For the societies of Old Europe, and none more so than the Cucuteni-Trypillia, the house was the foundational, economic, social and ritual unit in their culture. Their houses could be 5 to 8 metres wide and 20 to 30 metres long, with two storeys. Inside were hearths or fireplaces for heating, platforms or upper floors for sleeping, and designated areas for working, shown by loom weights in weaving areas and the quernstones for grinding the grain to make flour, and large clay-formed depressions, likely for collecting grain and flour, and they could also have clay ovens for baking their bread. Some also had raised platforms along the walls, made from woven frames covered in clay, that were like shelves or sideboards, where they arrayed their pottery for storage and display. They made other items of furniture, like low tables, in the same way. While wood rarely survives, there is evidence from ceramic models of items like chairs and couches for reclining. The first Cucuteni settlements were clustered near the mountain passes of the Carpathians, suggesting they were sited to control these routes. Splinter groups from this culture then expanded north-eastwards, across the edge of the Forest Steppe Ecological Zone, across the Dniester Valley, to the South Bug River Valley in Ukraine. Some settlements covered less than a hectare, and had just a few houses, each with an extended family living in it. As Cucuteni Tropilia groups expanded eastwards across the steppe and the Forest Steppe boundary, moving from river valley to river valley, some settlements grew larger. One of the earliest established settlements in the Southern Bug Valley had 100 buildings, and covered 15 to 20 hectares, with a population between 4 and 700 people. Other sites could be even larger, covering 40 hectares or more. And many of these, from the smallest to the largest, had an ovoid layout, with houses forming concentric rings, with a central open space. We can see then that the megasites appeared to be broadly the same type of settlement, conceptually, only much larger. So there was in fact a huge spectrum of settlement sizes. There were hunter-gatherers in these regions, who were displaced or absorbed by the migrating farmers. Remaining hunter-gatherer groups of the river valleys to the east would be changed by their contacts with farming societies along the frontier. Their changing burial customs suggest a new class of powerful leaders emerged, and as well as hunting and fishing, they began herding animals, mainly sheep and goats. These steppe herders would eventually start to domesticate the wild horses of the steppe too, after about 4000 BC. The relationship between the Tropilia farmers and their steppe herder neighbours to the east has been proposed as a reason the Tropilian people started building ever larger settlements. It was thought the Proto-Indo-European speaking Shredni Stog culture attacked the settled farmers in raids for cattle, women and perhaps slaves and other forms of portable wealth. The Tropilian people had to cluster together in ever greater numbers to stave off attack from these marauding, wild, foreign people. In support of this idea is the location of the megacites. They cluster in the eastern portion of the territory near the frontier. The layout of the megacites too suggest they were designed to limit access. At least one site had the outer houses joined together to create a perimeter wall. And we know there was ongoing contact and interactions between the Tropilia and the Shredni Stog. They traded items and influenced one another's ceramic styles. The Shredni Stog groups of the Pontic steppe were clearly great traders themselves and mediated trade between the societies of the Caucasus and the Cucuteni Tropilia. It could be the relationships with the Shredni Stog herders and the Tropilian farmers was usually peaceful but could descend into violence, perhaps on both sides. But it might not have been only violence from without that led to growing settlement sizes. The various Cucuteni Tropilia groups may well have waged war on one another. The fertile black earth of this region was desirable. These valleys and plains were in the forest steppe ecological zone and so were rich in timber and the rivers provided water and facilitated transport and long-range trade. The wealth of the land also supported a high population density and so led to competition for resources. And in any conflict of course the larger settlements would be safer than the smaller ones and so perhaps a kind of arms race could have developed. However some researchers argue the mega sites don't really look like they prioritized defense from raiding or concerted attack at all. There were other smaller Cucuteni Tropilia sites surrounded by banks and ditches but they say the massive sites didn't tend to have these. Conversely perhaps their sheer size was their defense meaning perimeter ditches and palisades were superfluous. Also some were sited in places where the natural geography provided defense like Talyanki which was built on a bluff between the Talyanka river and a smaller stream. And at least some of the mega sites like Nevalivka did have boundary ditches anyway. Either way though there was a regional site size hierarchy with both small and large sites across the region. So maybe these huge sites were the regional power centres, politically and economically dominating the smaller towns and villages around them. Perhaps each group in cooperation with neighboring groups and also in competition with them. But some researchers have looked at this regional settlement organization and questioned the old assumptions about the mega sites. They ask what if these sites weren't permanent settlements at all? Cucuteni Tropilia settlements have been known about and excavated for well over a century and there are over two and a half thousand sites known. But the mega sites were only really discovered in the 1960s through aerial photography. These sites were later explored from the 70s onwards with surveys and archaeological investigations but the sheer scale of the sites means they're challenging to assess. Carrying out geophysical surveys over a hundred hectares is a huge and expensive task but they reveal the remains of houses along with other features like pits and ditches and so the layouts can be mapped. Excavations are also difficult and only relatively small portions can be excavated at a time. Nevertheless excavations have provided samples for radiocarbon dating and it does appear that most houses in a site were occupied over the same span of time. The layout of the mapped sites also suggest that houses were built together and maintained together and were all destroyed at the same time. The black oblongs that show up in the magnetometer surveys are in fact showing the remains of burnt houses. Houses that were burned to destruction when the sites were abandoned. The remains of Neolithic and Chalcolithic houses of South East Europe are often found in excavations to have been burned. So much so that this practice lasting for thousands of years across the region has been called the burned house horizon by archaeologists. People initially assumed they had been burned in hostile attacks on the settlements and perhaps some of them were or that they regularly caught fire in accidents and perhaps that happened too. But reconstructions of these houses have been tested for their flammability and because the timbers are coated in clay they don't burn easily. It actually requires the addition of a huge amount of fuel to burn each one so it's thought these burnings were intentional carried out by the inhabitants. When the burnings were done during the life of a settlement and new houses were built on top or nearby perhaps they did it to keep on top of animal infestations or disease or maybe it was done as part of the mortuary rites when the inhabitants died or just because the houses were too old to be repaired. But the investigated megasites seem to have been intentionally burned together before being abandoned and the inhabitants moved into the surrounding areas and beyond. But were they really inhabitants at all? Some researchers suggest the largest megasites were never lived in year-round, at least not by everyone, because they say the carrying capacity of the local area would not have supported those population sizes. They say the fields could not have grown enough crops or grazed enough animals. Instead they say these sites were seasonal gathering places for the surrounding settlements. In this view the radial roads were more like processional routes and the city quarters, the wedge-shaped divisions, were built and occupied by temporary residents from surrounding villages, so each wedge would be for a tribe or village. The large central spaces in the centre were for the seasonal collective rituals, whatever they were. In fact the central space then becomes not just the focal point for the megasites but the reason they exist, and the houses surrounding it are almost incidental. People would live here for just a portion of the year and return to their real homes for the rest of it. Now I'm not an archaeologist and I'm sure I don't understand all the technical arguments and other nuances, but to me it seems an extravagant use of resources to build vast settlements only to live in them sometimes. That would mean thousands of people would have to build two houses for their family and invest time in transporting the resources between them every year. Also these empty or half-empty megasites would be vulnerable to attack or raiding without a full population to protect them. And arguments based on the local carrying capacity, while highly technical and scientific, necessarily make a lot of assumptions. Soil fertility can be maintained by manuring, a technique we know was done by other Neolithic Europeans ancestral to them. And we know that the Cucutaneo-Trypillia culture sustained trade networks across their region and beyond, importing resources like copper and shells from the Aegean for example, and trading ceramics, flint, minerals and salt. I don't see why in the traditional view large power centres couldn't have also imported food and timber from client settlements in the surrounding region to support their populations. Maybe it was a breakdown in these local and long range trade networks that ultimately led to the megasites being abandoned. Perhaps it's a legacy of the Soviet-era origins of the research on these sites but there seems to be a tendency to view them through an egalitarian lens. Some sources assert that all the houses were the same and there was no sign of social hierarchies within the settlements. Political organisation at the megasites is suggested to have been by some kind of hypothetical council, with representatives from each of the wedges coming to collective agreement on local issues. And perhaps that is how they were run, but it seems a bit far-fetched to me. Other sources describe signs of complexity and economic specialisation between sites and within sites, especially in the later eras. Some large towns seem to have specialised in mass production of ceramic pottery, while others were specialist flint mining villages that extracted, created and exported flint tools. Within the megasites, in each of the wedge-like subdivisions, some buildings seem to have been more special than others. While sometimes they've been called meeting houses or creches or temples, usually because of higher concentrations of ceramic figurines, sometimes special ones, and because of clay platforms inside, interpreted as altars, and painted interior walls. This famous collection of reclining full-figured women was found in a house that's sometimes called a temple, because of the figurines. But the structure also contained a higher concentration of cornstones for the mass production of flour. In other prehistoric settlements in other cultures, buildings like this have been interpreted as centralised economic structures, the back-breaking labour of grinding, perhaps even carried out by slaves, overseen by high-status women. And painted walls have been found in normal domestic houses too, so that doesn't make these large structures temples necessarily. From what I've read, I can't see any reason why these large buildings, and the large settlements, couldn't be signs of hierarchical social organisation and centralised economic and political control. And following decades of excellent research by hundreds of brilliant people, there's still much ongoing analysis and debate about these sites. You can read about these places in David Antony's best-selling book, The Horse, The Wheel and Language. I also found this book very informative, but it's likely a bit dry and technical for most people. You can also find the work of John Chapman of Durham University about these sites online, if you'd like to read about some of the modern arguments in more detail. As with all my videos, there are sources listed in the description. Decades of research on pottery subtypes, trade networks and settlement patterns have plotted out the internal changes within the Trepillio culture over 2,000 years, as the various regional subgroups influence one another, expand, migrate and conquer one another over the centuries. It might have the name the Cucutoni-Trepillio culture, and often be represented by a big blob of colour on a map, but actually these were a series of overlapping, dynamic societies who changed throughout the 2,000 years they existed, while influencing one another and their neighbours. After about 3300 BC, perhaps influenced by climatic changes, sites of all sizes and entire regions start being abandoned, and no one knows what happened to those people. But we do know the Indo-European speaking steppe cultures of Eastern Europe would soon begin to expand across these regions into Central Europe and beyond, and the last remains of the Cucutoni-Trepillio culture would be gone by 2700 BC. However they are to be interpreted, the megasites they created, mainly between about 4200 BC and 3600 BC, were an innovation unlike anything the world had seen before. They were unprecedented and had to be dreamed up, organised and managed. And they thrived for hundreds of years. Ultimately, this ambitious experiment came to an end, but to me it's still quite incredible that these magnificent sites ever existed at all. Thank you very much indeed to my patrons and channel members for supporting my work. If you like what I do here, please join us using the links below. Now please watch this video on the largest buildings the world had ever seen in 5500 BC, the incredible longhouses of the Thank you for watching.