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Ancient Eastern European mega-sites: a social levelling concept?
- mihaic 2y agoFor a while now, I've been working on a theory that these mega-sites emerged for matchmaking purposes. Basically, I see it most men and women had a bad deal in choosing their mate in inegalitarian villages, some temporary festivals were held where an example of more fairness being possible was shown and then these mega-sites merged festivals and village in a location that now had hundreds of potential matches for everyone.
- seper8 2y agoSo what facts do you have to support this theory? My man, it's time to lay off the dating apps ;)
- mihaic 2y agoThere are almost no archeological records for social dynamics, so they usually get ignored, or you're forced to base theories on some exercises of imagination. If you were to discover in 1000 years a smartphone without data on it, I doubt you could infer modern social media without some guesswork. You'd get photos, calls, navigation from it having GPS, but not endless hours scrolling feeds. For this matter, what's the point in having a huge village? I can only see protection against warfare and forcing fairness in social interactions and on the matchmaking market. Other things seem to get worse, since increased density makes extracting food from your environment harder. Adult humans have three basic goals: food, shelter, reproduction. They spend most of their energy on these, and any explanation of a society that ignores one of these has to be incomplete. Maybe the fact that we've moved one of these from the social plane onto the virtual makes that harder to see. I've been off the dating apps for some years by the way. :)
- logicchains 2y ago>For this matter, what's the point in having a huge village? I can only see protection against warfare and forcing fairness in social interactions and on the matchmaking market. Division of labour/economies of scale are fundamental to human quality of life improvements. Even without much technology/industry, there's still a lot to gain from division of labour.
- mihaic 2y agoThis was a very egalitarian society, with basic needs. All the benefits from division of labour and trade you already get when your society has a few hundred individuals, and it doesn't give you any incentive to grow as large as these mega-sites were.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y agoIsn't trade more efficient in larger villages, too? Like economics in general
- mihaic 2y agoGiven how basic their lifestyle was, I'd say you hit marginal returns at tens of individuals. Like I said in another comment, a stronger reason would be required for people to want this scale, and I can only see warfare/peacekeeping and matchmaking as reasons.
- flir 2y ago> Given how basic their lifestyle was, I'd say you hit marginal returns at tens of individuals. You might have a circular argument there.
- card_zero 2y agoTrading seems a good explanation, yes. A trading expedition is a big deal, you probably want cram a ship-ton of resources together and exchange all your obsidian for salt, or grain for copper, or whatever, in one go. You don't want to mess around making massive journeys between hundreds of little villages. You want a large, famous, easily-spotted trading destination that has all the goods ready in a big convenient pile.
- poulpy123 2y agowhen tinder becomes tinder
- lukan 2y agoNot sure if I understand you right, but neolithic villages were likely way, way more egalitarian than anything we have today. When you have no material wealth (as a status indicator) that can be passed on that divides people by birth and no formal power system, then the status will be the deeds of the people. And people are not that different on average. Inbreeding would be rather a strong motivation to get fresh blood and have regular festivals to achieve that. But trading, and general coordination and communication to fight of bigger threats were likely a strong motivator as well.
- throwaway11460 2y agoNeolithic communities had both a power and status system, as well as material wealth that couldn't be easily replicated and ensured one's place in society.
- bazoom42 2y agoAre you suggesting disparities in material wealth did not exist in neolithic times? Why would you think that?
- Retric 2y agoNo, it’s suggesting the orders of magnitude were smaller. Bill gates has what 1 million times more wealth than the average person his age, more? There’s no way someone in a Neolithic village could get that kind of advantage over the average person in a neolithic village. Someone having 10x the productivity/wealth/etc sure, but 10,000x just isn’t on the table at least as considered by the time period. We place extreme value on gold where a shiny stone might be worth thousands of tons of food, but nobody back then would make such an exchange. Extreme wealth takes social structures to support it. People 2,000 years ago had less wealth than today on average but you could still have some guy with more concubines in their haram than existed in a Neolithic village.
- lupusreal 2y agoThe average person is very unlikely to meet somebody like Bill Gates. For most practical intents and purposes inequality is much smaller than that.
- aramattamara 2y agoWar was way more abundant and routine in those days. To the east of the study area, there was constant presence of nomadic tribes. I guess it's easier to defend in large groups. The other way to deter invaders is to not have anything to eat yourself (hence frequent fires when settlers burned their own settlements ahead of enemy).
- dimitar 2y agothe horse wasn't domesticated yet, this is a really old archaeological culture
- bjornsing 2y agoInteresting. Perhaps the first example of so called “social engineering” that we’re so familiar with in the Nordics? Also plays nicely into a pet theory of mine, that “social engineering” typically has very different short term and long term effects. It seems in the short term you can change social roles radically by changing rewards and punishment (e.g. communist revolutions). But then people’s personalities start adjusting to the new environment. After 2-3 generations you have radically different personality structures and behaviors in the population. Sadly politics is about the immediate results, and does not even attribute the long term consequences to the policies introduced 2-3 generations ago.
- dsign 2y agoSocial engineering has been along for ... well, since we ended prehistory. The convergence to monotheism with very specific demographic outlooks and group self-identification ("we are the chosen people, the others are not") is early evidence of social engineering. > Sadly politics is about the immediate results, and does not even attribute the long term consequences to the policies introduced 2-3 generations ago. Our modern political systems at the current scale have been around for only a few short hundred years. Time will tell how they work out, but I doubt they will be eternal.
- ponow 2y ago> early evidence of social engineering Or early adaptation of culture to nature.
- Trow839rn 2y agoAre we sure elites actually lived on those sites? Eastern Europe always had "warlords", that traveled with their army around their empire (Rus, Avars, Mongols...). Transportation of food and goods was not practical over large areas, so the elites moved instead. I bet those "mega houses" were just for slaves!
- District5524 2y agoI think it's pretty far-fetched to draw conclusions from cultures that were at the same place like 4500 years later. How do you think they could have kept like 10000 slaves in place and convince them to remain slaves? And other Cucuteni sites had population estimates around 45 000 people...
- Trow839rn 2y agoI do not have to: > The use of house size as a proxy for the economic status and social power of households in a society is based on broad cross-cultural evidence from ethno-archaeological studies and archival sources as it has been found that household wealth and house size are correlated in many societies Basic premise of this study is wrong, based on recorded history from the same region. Nomadic herding warriors do not live in houses, and do not leave the same mark in archaeology records. Early agriculture can support a huge number of people, but they will be malnourished, and always be dominated by meat fed elites!
- card_zero 2y agoWell, no. I mean kind of. These grain-farming Cucuteni were squeezed out by the Kurgan culture, tall pastoralists coming from the East (that culture became the indo-europeans, us), the process possibly assisted by a few hundred years of drought. Ordinarily, the farmers had food surpluses, though having all the bread you can eat is not the same as having all the meat, admittedly. Your nomadic herding warriors leave graves behind - Kurgan - as well as distinctive pottery, as clues to the general area they were being nomadic in, which was initially elsewhere while the Cucuteni were thriving. I don't think maintaining slaves at a distance works as a concept.
- Jupe 2y agoConcerning when an article like this makes assertions but doesn't mention key social concerns associated with the culture such as the periodic burning down of the houses. [1] Given the "social strata" ideas presented in the article, I have bias concern alarms going off. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burned_house_horizon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burned_house_horizon (edited: grammar)
- baerrie 2y agoYeah, the disenfranchised burned down the rich people’s homes, same dif
- digging 2y ago> key social concerns associated with the culture such as the periodic burning down of the houses. What do you mean by key social concerns? Are you suggesting House Burning was a form of intracommunal violence? The linked article doesn't support that.
- Jupe 2y agoMass burning of homes, on a recurring 60 to 80 year cycle, then to rebuild the same structures, seems odd. Not mentioning it in the posted article seems like an substantial omission.
- digging 2y agoI don't think I agree, given the motivations and actual practices of burning are both unknown. They mention burnt homes, indicating they're aware of the practice, but steer clear of including in their study. IMO that makes the most sense because while House Burning (which may or may not have been done en masse) could be related to egalitarian home size, it's not clear that it is related; and if it is related, it's not clear at all what the relationship would be. The only value of tying the two things together would be saying "We don't and maybe can't actually know anything about these people," which is useless. Instead they took a focused approach to using a known tool, the Gini coefficient, to make some specific guesses.
- xdennis 2y agoAs a Romanian, the renaming of the culture really bugs me. We discovered it first, in a village called Cucuteni, so we called it Cucuteni culture. The Russian imperialists discovered it afterwards in Ukraine and called it Tripolie culture. After independence the Ukrainians renamed it after the proper name of their village: Trypillia. But it doesn't change the fact that it was first discovered in Cucuteni.
- digging 2y agoMost English publications refer to it as the "Cucuteni–Trypillia culture", apparently in reference to the fact that two distinct discoveries were made in different locations and later recognized as belonging to the same culture. Seems TFA is an outlier in preferring only the latter name. Of course, neither name accurately describes the actual neolithic culture at all. (Wikipedia elides the ~5-10 year gap between publication of Cucuteni and publication of Trypillia... very possible the latter discovery was just Ukranian Vincenc Chvojka trying to "get in on the action" after hearing about Cucuteni.)
- msolujic 2y agoFew weeks ago archeologists found similar, older settlement bit west from that one, that belongs to Vinca culture, that spanned in current Serbia, South Hungary and western Romania Here is HN story about it Archaeology team discovers a 7k-year-old settlement in Serbia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40220691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40220691 All those are obviously connected and related