The Nebelivka Hypothesis

<p>A revolution is taking place in our understanding of cities, arising from the laboratory of the past. Using an array of new techniques, archaeologists are discovering traces of urban landscapes that, until now, have been entirely lost to human memory. Such evidence is not ‘unearthed’ from the ground. It is interior to the soil and inseparable from it.</p> <p>Between the southern Bug and Dnieper rivers of central Ukraine, less than a metre below agricultural fields, geophysical surveys reveals the unsuspected legacy of 6,000-year-old settlements, similar in scale to the early cities of Mesopotamia. But these early Ukrainian cities are centre-less. Or rather, they are organised as concentric rings of domestic buildings, around a mysterious open space. No trace is found of temples, palaces, administration, rich burials, nor any other signs of centralised control or social stratification.</p> <p>What’s more, studies of the ancient environment around these huge sites reveal a surprisingly light ecological footprint. It has even been argued that their foundation accelerated the formation of chornozem, among the richest soils in the world. The famous black earths of the Ukrainian forest-steppe may turn out to be anthrosols: human-produced soil, confronting us with a system of urban life that enhances the vitality of its own environment. If so, then we must also confront a tragic historical irony.</p> <p>Since Greeks first settled on the northern shores of the Black Sea, the yield of chernozem attracted waves of colonisers and feudal empires. In the last century, policies of forced collectivisation under Soviet rule produced famine from abundance, while for the Nazis this was <em>Lebensraum</em>: a quest for life-space that turned it to bloodlands. Could these dark earths—the target of so many violent appropriations—have originated thousands of years ago, as an effect of human social experiments undertaken millennia before the dawn of the Anthropocene?</p> <p>If these ancient Ukrainian sites are indeed to be considered cities, then our very concept of ‘the city’ and its ‘territory’ as rooted in a history of extraction, predation, and hierarchy must also change.</p> <p>This is what we call ‘The Nebelivka Hypothesis’.</p>