No collapse in sight: enclosures, the mortuary arena and the Big Other in the Trypillia world

Abstract

It is well known that the Cucuteni-Trypillia (CT) group constitutes an exception to the late 5th – early 4th millennium cal BCE trend of settlement dispersion through its continuation of Neolithic lifeways (settlement nucleation and exuberant material culture) for far longer than most other Balkan and Carpathian groups. This alone makes it hard to fit CT into a grand narrative of 5th millennium cal BCE collapse or even transformation and impossible to link such persistence to palaeo-environmental changes. But, at the same time, no general story of changes can omit the CT group and their deviant trajectories. In this paper, we propose that the CT Big Other was a vital source of continuity and cultural heritage, helping CT to continue for almost two millennia and distributed over 250,000 km². The widespread acceptance of the CT Big Other minimized schismogenesis – the greatest danger to climax Copper Age communities. Our approach is to seek to integrate the internal development of significant planning practices, which reached their apogee in the Trypillia megasites (TMS), with the changing interactions between forest-steppe communities and those living further East and South in the steppe zone. The two advances in archaeological science that allowed the development of these ideas face opposite directions: while new techniques of geophysical investigation focussed on the local, the advances of aDNA forces archaeologists to consider regional and inter-regional aspects of mobility if not migration. The combination of a weakening of Trypillia cohesive community planning and the availability in the form of steppe barrow burial of an attractive alternative to the CT Big Other led to the eventual disappearance of Trypillia lifeways in the early centuries of the 3rd millennium cal BCE.