1 Introduction Article Swipe
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· 2020
· Open Access
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· DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110664959-005
· OA: W4239353697
In the first chapter, we introduce readers to the world of Central and East European prehistory and, in particular, the Cucuteni-Trypillia group, which covered up to 250,000km 2 and lasted over two millennia.This group was one of the largest networks ever to develop in European prehistory prior to the Bronze Age and one of the challenges is to identify mechanisms which enabled the survival of such a network.The key aspect of this massive network concerns settlement size, which reached a range of 1-5ha in the Cucuteni zone but expanded to the largest settlements yet known in 4th millennium Eurasia in one part of the Trypillia zone.The largest of these massive sites -known as 'megasites' -ranged from 100ha to 320ha and were comparable in size to the first Near Eastern cities.The lack of a prior inter-disciplinary project to investigate Trypillia megasites led to the establishment of an agreement between the Institute of Archaeology NAS (Dr.
