Bruce Bower writes:

Nebelivka, a Ukrainian village of about 700 people, sits amid rolling hills and grassy fields. Here at the edge of Eastern Europe, empty space stretches to the horizon.

It wasn’t always so. Beneath the surface of Nebelivka’s surrounding landscape and at nearby archaeological sites, roughly 6,000-year-old remnants of what were possibly some of the world’s first cities are emerging from obscurity. These low-density, spread-out archaeological sites are known as megasites, a term that underscores both their immense size and mysterious origins. Now, some scientists are arguing the settlements represent a distinct form of ancient urban life that has gone largely unrecognized.

Megasites were cities like no others that have ever existed, says archaeologist John Chapman of Durham University in England.

For decades, researchers have regarded roughly 6,000-year-old Mesopotamian sites, in what’s now Iraq, Iran and Syria, as the world’s first cities. Those metropolises arose after agriculture made it possible to feed large numbers of people in year-round settlements. Mesopotamian cities featured centralized governments, bureaucratic agencies that tracked and taxed farm production, and tens of thousands of city dwellers packed into neighborhoods connected by dusty streets. Social inequality was central to Mesopotamia’s urban ascent, with a hierarchy of social classes that included rulers, bureaucrats, priests, farmers and slaves.

Over the last decade, however, researchers have increasingly questioned whether the only pathway to urban life ran through Mesopotamian cities. Chapman, along with Durham colleague Marco Nebbia and independent, Durham-based scholar Bisserka Gaydarska, is part of a movement that views low-density, spread-out settlements in several parts of the world as alternative form of early city life.

Ukrainian megasites were built by members of the Trypillia culture between about 6,100 and 5,400 years ago. Typically covering a square kilometer or more, some of the sites are bigger in area than Manhattan.

Megasites may have been built so that people could better defend against invasions by rival villages or foreign forces. Based on that assumption, some estimates of population at these places run into the tens of thousands. But recent work by Chapman, Nebbia and Gaydarska indicates megasites in general may have had only a few thousand inhabitants.

And Nebelivka appears to have lacked a class of elites ruling over hordes of common folk who did the dirty work. Instead, excavations suggest that the site was organized to promote shared rule among groups of equal social standing. Thus, Nebelivka demonstrates that urban development doesn’t automatically split people into haves and have-nots, Chapman and colleagues argue, a common assumption among those concerned about social and economic inequality in modern societies. [Continue reading…]