The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

By 4500 BC, chernozem was widely distributed between the Carpathian and the Ural Mountains, where a mosaic landscape of open prairie and woodland emerged capable of supporting dense human habitation.23 The Neolithic people who settled there had travelled east from the lower reaches of the Danube, passing through the Carpathian Mountains. We do not know why, but we do know that – throughout their peregrinations in river valleys and mountain passes – they retained a cohesive social identity. Their villages, often small in scale, shared similar cultural practices, reflected in the forms taken by their dwellings, female figurines and ways of making and serving food. The archaeological name given to this particular ‘design for life’ is the Cucuteni-Tripolye culture, after the sites where it was first recorded.24 So the Ukrainian and Moldovan mega-sites did not come out of thin air. They were the physical realization of an extended community that already existed long before its constituent units coalesced into large settlements. Some tens of these settlements have now been documented. The biggest currently known – Taljanky – extends over an area of 300 hectares, outspanning the earliest phases of the city of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia. It presents no evidence of central administration or communal storage facilities. Nor have any government buildings, fortifications or monumental architecture been found. There is no acropolis or civic centre; no equivalent to Uruk’s raised publ...