Maidanets'ke. Development and decline of a Trypillia mega-site in Central Ukraine

Abstract

At the end of the 5th millennium BCE, some of the vastest settlements of the time emerged on the forest steppe north of the Black Sea. The largest of these sites were found between the Southern Bug and Dnieper river. There they occur only tens of kilometres apart and are assumed to be partly coeval. The Trypillia ‘mega-sites’ reached sizes of up to 320 hectares with up to 3000 buildings in one place. During their peak times as many as 11,000 people could have lived in one of those settlements. But how did people come together in these Trypillia ‘mega-sites’ with several thousand dwellings? How long were such sites inhabited, and how many people lived there? Were these settlements the first towns, preceding the Mesopotamian development? To address these questions, this book presents the results of the investigations at the Maidanets’ke ‘mega-site’. To date, Maidanets’ke represents the most complex of these enormous sites and is also among the best investigated ones. Based on new excavations by international teams, the settlement’s history, its structure and regional context are addressed. The excavation results, with features like a pottery production site, a causewayed enclosure and several dwellings, are presented in detail. An extensive radiocarbon dating program conducted on various parts of the site, in combination with pottery studies, revealed several phases of continuous occupation between 3990-3640 cal BCE. According to the number of contemporary structures, the demography of a ‘mega-site’ is reconstructed in detail for the first time. Targeted geophysical surveys in the core area of the ‘mega-site’ phenomenon show that exceptional non-inhabited buildings and so-called mega-structures occur regularly in both larger and smaller settlements. Overall, the Trypillia settlement system appears scalable, with small sites being structurally similar to larger ones. With no clear differences in the settlement pattern except size, the urban character of ‘mega-sites’ is called into question.

Tripolye Typo-chronology. Mega and Smaller Sites in the Sinyukha River Basin

“…Several studies have already been devoted to investigating the development dynamics of Tripolye settlement patterns such as the measurement and mapping of settlement sizes (e.g. Kruts 1989;Diachenko 2010a;Diachenko 2012;Ohlrau 2020).…”

“…By 2017, 16 settlement plans of this kind had been made (see Chapman et al 2014;Muller et al 2014;Rassmann et al 2014;Rassmann et al 2016;Ohlrau 2020) that represented the whole settlement (Apolianka, Talne 3, Moshuriv 1, Moshuriv 3) or only part of it (Maidanetske, Talianki, Dobrovody, Hlybochok, Kosenovka, Grebenyukiv Yar, Vesely Kut, Vladimirovka, Chyzhovka) or the part of the settlement on the area available for the survey (Nebelivka, Smaglievi Beregi [Moshuriv 2], Rogi).…”

“…So several of them have different names in the literature -'old' and 'new' -which can be explained by the fact that the sites were investigated by different specialists, who gave different names to the same settlement. There are a few such sites: 1) Iskrennoe (as indicated on Shishkin's deciphered photos) is called Vasilkov in other works; 2) site Moshuriv 2 is located in the ravine Smaglievy Berega, and both labels are in use, although the latter is more widespread in the literature (Ohlrau 2020); and 3) the settlement of Fedorovka is called Mikhailovka in earlier works (Shishkin 1985), which makes sense (the settlement is located to the east of the modern village of Novomikhailovka). So, whenever it is possible, double names are used in this work.…”

“…The radial lines (that are often double) are often located opposite the space between the structures of the main ring 'i' (in one case opposite the unfinished ring), which can be interpreted as an entrance/exit from the settlement (eight occurrences). Studying the archaeomagnetic plans, some researchers have suggested that the 'main rings' of Tripolye settlements represent the basic unit of the site, since this feature is inherent in almost all the known В1-2-С1 Tripolye sites (Chapman et al 2014;Müller et al 2014;Rassmann et al 2014;Rassmann et al 2016;Ohlrau 2020). Having established the types of Talianki building arrangements, it would be interesting to trace their chronological sequence.…”

“…Between 2013 and 2016, the excavation oftest trenches in different parts of the site and the systematic and exemplary excavation of different categories of features which were determined in the plan of the magnetic survey were performed. Extensive sampling was performed in all the trenches for typo-chronological studies, radiometric dating, soil-scientific and geochemical investigations, zoo-archaeological and palaeobotanical analysis (Müller et al 2014;Videiko et al 2015a;2015b;Ohlrau 2015;Müller and Videiko 2016;Ohlrau 2020).…”