— — — Written and illustrated by Sylvia Eden — — —
I’m greatly interested by the remnants of Stone Age cultures and what we can understand or infer about their lives. I love to illustrate the cracked and weathered artifacts they leave behind. I love to imagine how their shelters looked, how their clothes fit, how they spent their time. For me, from within the technological superstructures of the Anthropocene, the imagery conjures up a kind of heartsick yearning for something simpler. ‘Neolithic’ names a way of life that feels familiar to me the way an elder who died in my childhood might; in the presence of their absence, my view of them is affectionate, but simplified and mythologized.
Although I am critical of the long-term outcomes of human tool-making, the fault does not lie with our ancestors. Nonetheless, here we are, the only remaining hominins of a family tree of more than twenty different species, spiritually and materially estranged from the Earth by many layers of abstracting technology. Our tools have swallowed us and now use us as their active components.
There can, of course, be no time-traveling regression to ‘fix’ this issue. It would always lead us back to this ordeal. What we can do is look back at these earlier ways of organizing ourselves and, with the foresight of what has happened since, begin piecing together a conceptual mosaic of approaches to post-civilized life and culture.
It should not need reiterating that civilization is not fundamental to the human species. It is a process of organization that non-self-sustaining and therefore cannot be perpetual. I believe it is our responsibility now to consider ways of gradually transitioning out of it. To do this, I want to explore a culture situated at the end of the New Stone Age, just prior to the civilizing Bronze Age.
We will be looking at the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture, existing in Southeastern Europe from 5,500 to 2,750 BCE. Both Cucuteni and Trypillia are names of modern-day villages where their relics were found, and we have no idea what these people actually called themselves, so to suit my phonetic preferences, I will be calling them the Cucuteni in this essay.
The Cucuteni people lived and died at the Western edge of the Great Eurasian Steppe, a gigantic swath of land stretching 5,000 miles (8,000 km) from Romania to Manchuria. Steppes are a fascinating ecoregion characterized by large grassy plains— the semi-arid climate classification indicates that steppes are too dry to support a forest, but too wet to be a desert.
The temperatures of the day and night vary drastically in the steppe; temperatures can reach intense heat at midday and plunge to below-freezing at night. The soils of the Great Eurasian Steppe are highly fertile, and particularly suitable for grasses; unsurprisingly, this has led to large portions of the steppe being used for large-scale agriculture. The particular zone the Cucuteni lived in is called the Pontic-Caspian steppe. It was populated with the yellow flowers of Galatella villosa, swaying bunches of feathergrass, and magenta patches of Brachypodietalia pinnati.
The Cucuteni people built the largest, most populated settlements in Neolithic Europe. Some of their settlements had thousands of structures, and were home to tens of thousands of people; for some time, they were the largest human settlements on Earth, nestled along the Siret, Prut and Dniester river valleys between modern-day Romania and Ukraine. Most Cucuteni villages were 3-4 kilometers apart, a comparatively dense network that would have made foot travel between settlements very easy.
Being situated by so many riverbanks, clay was an abundant material for these early European farmers. As such, ceramics are found in equally abundant distribution throughout the remains of their settlements. In fact, historians have designated the Cucuteni culture’s true emergence based on their ceramic technology: they hand coiled their pots, using long snakes of clay layered into varying shapes and sizes before smoothing their surface and firing them in kilns.
Cucuteni society shared its core features with most Neolithic societies: they were not particularly socially stratified, they had no discernible political elite, their economy was subsistence- or gift-based, and the main form of farming was subsistence-based as well. There was almost no division of labor in Cucuteni settlements, in that most households had one or more individuals who could complete all the tasks of survival in a day: tending plantations, hunting and fishing, animal husbandry, gathering clay and wood, and so on. There was very little need for trade between households because they were each self-sufficient.
The Neolithic marked a transition from nomadic to stationary living. In other words, humans, who until the Neolithic had moved and migrated nomadically like so many other animal species, began stilling to the pace of plants. In doing so, we also took on a greater share of occult sympathy with plants, not to mention a new intimate relationship with them as we learned to cultivate and process the grasses of the Steppe into food and cloth. In taking on this deepened plant kinship, we behaviorally branched off from animals, who, for hundreds of thousands (even millions) of years, moved through the Land alongside us as prey and fellow predators. Even the nomadic animal herders that predated agriculture lived as animals, as part of a herd, in a way that grain-planters could not.
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