Cucuteni–Trypillia civilization
From 4800 to 3000 BCE[1] in what's now Moldova, Romania and Ukraine, the Cucuteni-Trypillian civilization had a population of more than 1 million people.[2] Cucuteni-Trypillian society appears to have been highly egalitarian, peaceful, and ecologically sustainable.
The largest site is Taljanky which, covering 300 hectares, has no known government buildings or monuments. There are over 1000 houses forming circular patterns with an empty central area that might have been used for popular assemblies and ceremonies.[3]
Culture
Although houses are the same size and look the same on the outside, the insides have extremely varied decorations suggesting individuality and playfulness. Moreover, the neighborhoods, while sharing circular arrangements, have different enough arrangements that archeologists believe the planning must have been from the bottom up.[4]
Before leaving a village or city, Trypillians would burn their houses.[5]
Ukrainian minimalist fashion designer Svitlana Bevza has studied Cucuteni-Trippilian culture and based designs on it. She says, "The most precious part of Trypillian ceramic culture is cherishing the woman. And the symbolism of the woman - like a goddess, like a symbol of fertile land, like a symbol of birth - they cherished it a lot."[6]
Environment
The ecological impact of Cucuteni-Trypillia cities is surprisingly light, leading Graeber and Wengrow to speculate that residents "consciously managed their ecosystem to avoid large-scale deforestation."[7]
According to Svitlana Bevza, "There are a lot of things that we have to learn from the ancient people, from Trypillian people: their attitude to life and nature, because they understood that they depend on the nature."[8]
- ↑ Peter Gelderloos, Worshiping Power: An Anarchist View of Early State Formation (Oakland: AK Press, 2016), 221.
- ↑ Valeria Kovtun, "Cucuteni-Trypillia: Eastern Europe's lost civilisation," BBC, 6 August 2021, https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210805-cucuteni-trypillia-eastern-europes-lost-civilisation.
- ↑ David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), 293.
- ↑ Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 294-5.
- ↑ Kovtun, "Cucuteni-Trypillia".
- ↑ Kovtun, "Cucuteni-Trypillia".
- ↑ Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 293.
- ↑ Kovtun, "Cucuteni-Trypillia".
