From Ros to Prut (volume 2): Transformations of Trypillia settlements (Scales of Transformation, 19)

Pre-dating the urban revolution in Western Asia, a network of agricultural settlements developed in the forest-steppe zone northwest of the Black Sea in the late 5th and first half of the 4th millennium BCE, some of which are among the largest prehistoric mega-sites in Europe. These enormous so-called Trypillia communities are unique in many respects, and the dynamics of their formation and their development have long been a topic of intensive research. For more than ten years now, research on the transformations of these Chalcolithic societies has been conducted as a Ukrainian-Moldavian-German cooperation. This research does not only focus on some of the largest mega-sites, but also attempts to reconstruct the dynamics of mega-site processes and their economic, social and ideological foundations in different perspectives – local, regional and interregional. Although our research is not yet complete, it is already clear that the emergence of Trypillia mega-sites represented the preliminary culmination of a regionally differentiated and widely interconnected process of settlement formation in the area between the Prut and Ros rivers. These processes were, on the one hand, closely interwoven with Copper Age societies of Southeast Europe and, on the other hand, ushered in the transition to the era characterised by higher settlement mobility.

This volume brings together archaeological, geophysical, archaeobotanical, archaeozoological and geoarchaeological contributions on economy, settlement patterns, material culture and dating from three different test regions in the territory of present-day Ukraine and Moldova. The presentation of our new data contributes decisively to a better understanding of both the enormous variability of settlement trajectories characterising this vast area and to connecting developments throughout time.

Volume 2 contains contributions on the interfluves of the Southern Bug and Dniester, and the Dniester and Prut. Additionally, it provides regionally overarching insights.

Table of Contents

BUG-DNIESTER INTERFLUVE (REGION B)

14. Tracing Trypillia transformations in the Southern Bug – Dniester interfluve: Archaeological explorations in the Kryzhopil microregion, Ukraine
Vitalii Rud, Robert Hofmann, Viktor Kosakivskyi, Olha Zaitseva, Johannes Müller

15. Cult objects from Trypillia settlements of the Vinnitsa Region
Natalia Burdo, Vitalii Rud, Robert Hofmann

PRUT-DNIESTER INTERFLUVE (REGION C)

16. Pits as durable narratives – Results of the 2019 excavation campaign in the Trypillia settlement Stolniceni 1, Moldova
Stanislav Ţerna, Andreea Ţerna, Robert Hofmann, Mariana Vasilache, Marta Dal Corso, Yevhenii Sliesariev, Wiebke Kirleis, Johannes Müller

17. Putineşti 3 and Trinca: Geophysical investigation of middle and late Trypillia settlements in Moldova
Robert Hofmann, Stanislav Ţerna, Ghenadie Sirbu, Liudmyla Shatilo, Vitalii Rud

18. Trypillia settlements after mega-sites: Archaeological and geophysical Investigations in the Cunicea micro-region, Prut-Dniester interfluve
Stanislav Ţerna, Robert Hofmann, Liudmyla Shatilo, Vitalii Rud

TRYPILLIA MACROSCALE
19. Radiocarbon dating: Trypillia detailed chronology, house duration estimates and the contemporaneity of earliest European mega-sites
Johannes Müller, Robert Hofmann, Wiebke Kirleis, Mila Shatilo, Frank Schlütz, Miha Videika, Vitali Rud, Stanislav Terna, Andrea Terna

20. Ring-shaped settlement plans and Trypillia population agglomeration
Robert Hofmann, Liudmyla Shatilo, Knut Rassmann, Vitalii Rud, Stanislav Ţerna, Stefan Dreibrodt, Vladislav Chabanyuk, Wiebe Kirleis, Johannes Müller

CONCLUSION
21. Transformations of Trypillia settlements
Johannes Müller, Robert Hofmann, Wiebke Kirleis, Mila Shatilo, Frank Schlütz, Miha Videika, Vitali Rud, Stanislav Terna, Andrea Terna

Robert Hofmann is a researcher at the Institute for Prehistoric and Protohistoric Archaeology at Kiel University, Germany. After early beginnings in a school club of ‘young archaeologists’ and several years of working in a county archaeological research unit, he studied Prehistoric and Protohistoric Archaology at the Free University of Berlin between 1998 and 2005 (Magister 2005) and completed his PhD in 2011 at Kiel University.

Wiebke Kirleis is professor of environmental archaeology/archaeobotany at Kiel University, Germany. She is deputy director of the Collaborative Research Centre ‘Scales of Transformation: Human–Environmental Interaction in Prehistoric and Archaic Societies’ (CRC 1266, financed by the German Research Foundation/DFG) and a member of the Cluster of Excellence ‘Roots’ at Kiel University. As an archaeobotanist, she is interested in all kinds of plant-related human activities, be they subsistence strategies or food processing, with their socio-cultural implications, as well as the reconstruction of human–environment interactions in the past. Geographically, her research areas span from northern Europe all way to Indonesia.

Johannes Müller (PhD, University of Freiburg, 1990) is a Professor and Director of the Institute for Prehistoric and Protohistoric Archaeology at Kiel University, Germany. He is the founding director of the Johanna Mestorf Academy, Speaker of the Collaborative Research Centre “Scales of Transformation: Human-environmental Interaction in Prehistoric and Archaic Societies” and of the Excellence Cluster “ROOTS – Social, Environmental, and Cultural Connectivity in Past Societies”.

He conducts research on Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe, including the challenge of interlinking natural, social, life sciences, and the humanities within an anthropological approach of archaeology. Intensive fieldwork was and is carried out in international teams, e.g., on Tripolye mega-sites in Eastern Europa, the Late Neolithic tell site of Okolište in Bosnia-Hercegovina, different Neolithic domestic and burial sites in Northern Germany, and Early Bronze Age sites in Greater Poland. Ethnoarchaeological fieldwork has been conducted, e.g., in India. Within the Kiel Graduate School “Human Development in Landscapes”, now the Young Academy of ROOTS, and the Scandinavian Graduate School “Dialogues of the Past”, Johannes Müller promotes international PhD projects.

Vitalii Rud (1990) is a researcher at the Institute of Archaeology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Department of Eneolithic and Bronze Age Archaeology. He has worked there since he was awarded his Master’s degree in Ancient History and Archaeology of Ukraine in 2012 at the National University of “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy”. In 2018 he was awarded a PhD for his thesis concerning Trypillia communities in the Dniester and Southern Bug interfluve in Ukraine in the beginning of IV mill. BC. Rud is also a researcher at the Department of Archaeology at Kyiv Borys Grinchenko University, and in 2018 he briefly worked at the Institute for Prehistoric and Protohistoric Archaeology at Kiel University, Germany.

Stanislav Țerna was a researcher at the “High Anthropological School” University, and previously at the Center for Archaeology, Institute of Cultural Heritage of the Moldovan Academy of Sciences, in Chișinău, Republic of Moldova. His area of research interest was the Copper Age of the north-west Black Sea region, focusing mainly on the settlement structure, anthropomorphic figurines, architecture and social organisation of the Cucuteni-Trypillia societies. He conducted excavations on LBK and Trypillia settlements in Moldova, of which the most important are those at Stolniceni I and Nicolaevca. He died in 2020, at the time when he was undertaking a PhD at the Institute of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Archaeology, Kiel University, within the CRC 1266 subproject “Population agglomeration at Tripolye-Cucuteni mega-sites”.