One of the research goals of the AHRC-funded “Early urbanism in Europe?: the case of the Trypillia mega-sites, Ukraine” Project was the better understanding of how Trypillia houses burned down in order to aid our understanding of the taphonomy of house remains excavated at the Trypillia BII mega-site of Nebelivka. For that reason, the Project decided to build two 2/3 size Trypillia experimental houses – one single-storey and one two-storey – in order to compare the burnt remains of the two types of houses. In the first part of this article, we explain the construction methods of the two 4 x 3m houses and the resources utilized to build them. In the second part, we provide an account of the burning of the two-storey house and explain the principal results of the experiment. In conclusion, we seek to define the specific contribution of the Nebelivka experiment not only to the history of Trypillia house-burning but the wider debate of deliberate house-burning.
Growing digital documentation of cultural heritage resources yielded from an increasing number of international projects, calls for the development of formal computational approaches to assess the risks that this invaluable material heritage is exposed to. This paper proposes a nuanced case-control approach to the risk assessment developed by the Central Asian Archaeological Landscape (CAAL) project for an area in southern Tajikistan. A number of statistical methods are applied for the spatial modelling of the risk to the cultural heritage across the study area and for the assessment of the local scenarios of potential archaeological features already affected by natural and human threats. The value of this formal approach is in its flexible applicability to diverse regional and national settings, as well as in its capability of being updated and repeated within the same territory. This provides local stakeholders, heritage professionals, and local authorities, with a useful tool to develop a risk management plan that includes quantitative as well as qualitative spatial assessments.
The Trypillia megasites of Ukraine are the largest known settlements in 4th millennium BC Europe and possibly the world. With the largest reaching 320ha in size, megasites pose a serious question about the origins of such massive agglomerations. Most current solutions assume maximum occupation, with all houses occupied at the same time, and target defence against other agglomerations as the cause of their formation. However, recent alternative views of megasites posit smaller long-term occupations or seasonal assembly places, creating a settlement rather than military perspective on origins. Shukurov et al. (2015)'s model of Trypillia arable land-use demonstrates that subsistence stresses begin when site size exceeded 35ha. Over half of the sites dated to the Trypillia BI stage - the stage before the first megasites - were larger than 35ha, suggesting that some form of buffering involving exchange of goods for food was in operation. There were two settlement responses to buffering:- clustering of sites with enhanced inter-site exchange networks and the creation of megasites. The trend to increased site clustering can be seen from Phase BI to CI, coeval with the emergence of megasites. We can therefore re-focus the issue of origins on why create megasites in site clusters. In this article, we discuss the two strategies in terms of informal network analysis and suggest reasons why, in some cases, megasites developed in certain site clusters. Finally, we consider the question of whether Trypillia megasites can be considered as 'cities'.
Fine-resolution sampling of pollen, non-pollen palynomorphs and microcharcoal as well as sedimentological data in a 6-m sediment core were used to reconstruct both natural conditions and human impacts in the late fifth and early fourth millennia cal bc in the environs of the Nebelivka megasite in Kirovograd Oblast, Central Ukraine. This 238-ha site, dating to the Middle (or BII) Phase of the Trypillia culture, represents one of the first low-density urban establishments in Europe. Despite what was believed to be a sizable population, local human impacts reconstructed from the multi-proxy palaeo-ecological record were moderate in character. There was no positive evidence to indicate a depositional hiatus in the P1 core and no sign of a major ecological impact at any stage in the high-resolution record. The palaeo-ecological record indicates modest settlement agglomeration with less permanent populations rather than permanent populations of tens of thousands of people.
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