City of exiles

Every few years I get back into Cucuteni. Anyway Dawn of Everything is in the news again.

The theory here is that Cucuteni - a Romanian site - was indeed an egalitarian town with, in the centre... nothing. The town-commons, in Yankee / Anglian terms. Maybe it was an agora with temporary tents. Maybe it was for town meetings. Maybe they just grazed sheep there. Or choose-your-own-adventure.

But before the culture ended, it changed. (That happens a lot.) The villages emptied (one final ritual burn); the people, however, moved. They moved ... trans-dnestrovie. The big cities are in what's now western Ukraine. All this before the IndoEuropean irruption, Corded-Ware and all that; maybe some of those had moved into Anatolia and/or Tocharia.

Maidanetske 3800 BC - some time after the big farms, and the mouse - has a 200-hectare "megasite" which they don't (yet) want to call a city, given that the Cucuteni towns before it are difficult to define as such. But it has larger buildings. They don't know - yet - if these are what we'd call public, or if they're temples, or palaces. (I doubt festhalls, those seem more IndoEuropean.) Either way they should class as urban, so their "megasites" as urbes.

There's guff about Climate but I doubt this. Climate crises would be 6200 BC then that nasty Bronze Age 22nd-C BC. In between, things should have been fine. Excepting the 3400 BC yersinia which hit the Ukraine-now-urban. Maybe because they'd not been doing the burn ritual anymore.