Who built Europe’s first cities? Clues about the urban revolution emerge Then, after two millennia, they vanished

Around 6,000 years ago, a group known as the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture developed egalitarian settlements north of the Black Sea and created the region’s earliest urban centres

The vase is tan with abstract designs in black: curved triangles that swoop into circles, a motif with an elegant, organic flow. It looks contemporary, or perhaps like the work of a mid-century artist on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

This ceramic piece is in a museum, but not in any modern wing. Found as fragments in 2006 at an archaeological site in Poduri, Romania, the vase is the work of an unknown artist from some 6,000 years ago. The restored artefact is on display in a museum in northwestern Romania.

The potter who created it was a member of the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture, a pre-Bronze Age society that thrived in what is now Romania, Moldova and Ukraine, where several ‘megasites’ held thousands of homes.

To some archaeologists, these giant settlements are among the world’s first cities, whereas others debate whether they qualify as urban centres. In either case, they represent the largest assemblages of people in early Europe and are one of the first experiments in the urban revolution.

Researchers discovered the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture in the late nineteenth century. Yet, because of the location of the sites, the culture is not as well studied as others that are roughly contemporaneous, such as those from Sumer, pre-dynastic Egypt and pre-Minoan Crete. There is now burgeoning interest in the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture, which has brought researchers to the field over the past 15 years.

With the help of improved imaging and dating tools, archaeologists are increasingly able to imagine daily life in these massive communities at the centre of one of the longest-lasting cultures known in human history. Cucuteni–Trypillia has always stood out as something of an anomaly, because its settlements seemed to have been egalitarian societies that were devoid of social hierarchies. That challenged long-held archaeological ideas that large settlements inevitably develop a ruling elite — as was seen in the ancient Mesopotamian city of Uruk, in what is now Iraq.

A vase found in Poduri, Romania, that was made around 6,000 years ago.Credit: Constantin Preoteasa, *Cucuteni Culture: Apogee of European Prehistoric Art. Exhibition Catalogue* (C. Matasă Publishing House, 2023)

But some of the latest studies have found hints of social stratification in later Cucuteni–Trypillia settlements — leading to tantalizing suggestions that this stratification could have played a part in the culture’s demise.

The emerging picture is helping to transform archaeologists’ understanding of why the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture built such unprecedentedly large settlements, and why the inhabitants eventually abandoned them. But since 2022, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has shut down many archaeological sites and stalled some studies.

“At the moment, fieldwork for us is not possible. For Ukrainian archaeologists, it is a difficult situation,” says Johannes Müller, an archaeologist at Kiel University in Germany.

No elites

The combined name of the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture captures the early history of research on these people. Their distinctive pottery was discovered almost simultaneously in two locations in the late nineteenth century: Romania (where the culture was named after a site in Cucuteni) and Ukraine (where the same culture was named Trypillia, also after a community where artefacts were found).

Throughout the twentieth century, archaeologists filled in more details. The Cucuteni–Trypillia culture covered a huge area: at its greatest extent, it stretched east from the Carpathian Mountains to the Black Sea and north to present-day Kyiv on the Dnieper River (see ‘Cryptic culture’). For more than 2,000 years, between about 5050 bc and 2950 bc, the group made pots, hunted and gathered, farmed, raised cattle and lived in settlements where all the houses were the same size. People ate legumes and cereals grown on the rich soils of Ukraine, which were well manured by cattle. Livestock animals were also eaten, although isotope analysis of rare human remains shows that meat made up only roughly 10% of people’s diets¹.

Cucuteni–Trypillia settlements were of varying sizes. Many were modest villages, such as the Poduri site in Romania. But some settlements in what is now Ukraine were big — really big. Their true extent was revealed in the 1960s and 1970s, when they were photographed from the air. The largest sites² included up to 3,000 houses and spanned as much as 320 hectares — about the size of Central Park in New York City.

In recent decades, aerial photography has been replaced with studies that survey the sites using magnetometers, which can detect buried settlements. Helpfully, the Cucuteni–Trypillia often burnt their houses, perhaps as part of rituals, leaving neat squares of ash that contain magnetic oxides formed by the burning of iron compounds in the clay daub used to finish the walls. Researchers have used magnetometer data to create detailed city plans of many settlements.

Such maps and the artefacts found in all those identical houses have answered some questions and raised many more.

Socialist utopias?

Despite the organized urban design of Cucuteni–Trypillia megasites, there were no palaces, no grand temples, no signs of centralized administration and no rich or poor houses. There were no special graves for high-ranking people. A bestselling 2021 book by anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, brought wider attention to these sites, which the authors describe as “proof that highly egalitarian organization has been possible on an urban scale”.

At the centre of every Cucuteni–Trypillia megasite is a mysterious void: a large area with no buildings at all. According to Graeber and Wengrow, these could have been used as a place of assembly for debates or instant referendums — an arena for direct democracy. They could equally have been used to pasture cattle. Without any artefacts, it is hard to know.

It is precisely because there’s no evidence of ruling elites, centralized bureaucracy or special economic structures that some scholars hesitate to call these megasites cities, even though they were undeniably large population centres. Cucuteni–Trypillia villages also have an open central space, just on a smaller scale.

An artist’s reconstruction of a giant settlement that existed around 3800 bc in Maidanetske, Ukraine.Credit: Susanne Beyer, CAU-Kiel, Institut fur Ur-und Frilhgeschichte

Archaeologist Aleksandr Diachenko at the Institute of Archaeology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv suggests that the megasites grew so large, in part, because they became swollen with climate refugees. He and his team have worked to reconcile older, relative-dating methods based on pottery styles with radiocarbon dates determined using an accelerator mass spectrometer. Diachenko suggests that Cucuteni–Trypillia people from the western forests moved east into larger settlements in the steppe grasslands in response to climate change.

“As the climate became more arid in this area,” says Diachenko, “it became overpopulated and, in order to deal with subsistence issues, these people had to move farther to the east.”

“The megasites actually mark the outcome of these migrations,” he says. Megasites might have been fairly short-lived centres where immigrants landed before spreading out across the steppe.

Hints of hierarchy

At Kiel University, archaeologists have been working on the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture since 2012. Over years of excavations at the Talianki megasite in Ukraine, Kiel archaeologist Mila Shatilo grew familiar with the typical contents of its houses. To Shatilo and other Kiel researchers, the cookie-cutter dwellings are a strong indication that the culture was intentionally egalitarian. “The ornaments of pottery could be different, but you know what to expect from every house; it doesn’t seem that one household was really much richer than another,” says Shatilo.

One difficulty for archaeologists studying this culture is the general absence of graves, which are usually rich sources of data. No one is entirely sure what these people did with their dead. But the lack of post-mortem hoards for most of their history sheds light on the society’s world view. Instead of being buried with their owners, metal objects might have been melted down and reused, suggest some researchers. By measuring the houses and noting the lack of elite graves, Müller says, “we are detecting that their ritual and spiritual life is not linked to the wish to express social differences”.

However, Kiel archaeologists do see subtle signs of possible social hierarchy in what the megasite builders left behind. Data from high-resolution magnetometry surveys have revealed buildings of unusual size, form and position at a 200-hectare megasite in Maidanetske, Ukraine³. Many researchers agree that these ‘megastructures’ — some large, others in prominent locations — were likely to be public buildings. But were they churches, storehouses, senates or feasting halls? Archaeologists have proposed several explanations.

A Cucuteni sculpture from northern Romania shows a seated pregnant figurine alongside other statuettes.Credit: Constantin Preoteasa, *Cucuteni Culture: Apogee of European Prehistoric Art. Exhibition Catalogue* (C. Matasă Publishing House, 2023)

One theory is that agglomerations of people from multiple communities banded together at the megasites, either for security or perhaps, as Diachenko argues, as fellow migrants. Communities in different neighbourhood might each have maintained a communal megastructure. Given the artefacts found in them, which include grindstones, storage jars and cattle and pig bones, Shatilo and her colleagues have proposed³ that megastructures were places where people worked together on tasks such as grinding grain and weaving, and where they stored communally owned goods and feasted. Over time, however, there seem to have been fewer of these community-specific centres, as if power was centralizing.

Others suggest that the megastructures were temples. Raised platforms inside a large building at the Nebelivka megasite in Ukraine have been interpreted as altars. This idea, say researchers, is supported by figurines and animal bones found at this site.

A world of clay

Archaeologist Constantin Preoteasa is the curator of the Cucuteni Museum in Piatra Neamț, Romania, and discovered the vase in Poduri in 2006. “Emotion, pleasure, honour and privilege,” were the feelings he had when he found it. “The first person seeing, touching and admiring such prestigious artefacts after several millennia: I am really lucky, indeed!”

Preoteasa suggests that the megasites were, by and large, peaceful places. But he thinks that there was probably some hierarchy, based on skills. The potters could have been highly respected and even feared, he says, because of their ability to “transform the raw materials in artefacts using fire”.

Certainly, one can’t help but feel a sense of awe when looking at their pottery. More surprising still is the fact that the gorgeous art pieces on display at the museum were found in everyday homes. They were not reserved for the elite.