Case study suggests expanded opportunities drew people to mega settlements and spurred innovation 6,000 years ago

The U.N.’s Human Development Index provides new explanations for the success of Europe’s first mega settlements.

Shards of pottery vessels, traces of house foundations, a few bones—archaeological excavations mainly bring the remains of material culture to light. Numerous tools are needed to draw conclusions about social conditions or the thoughts and feelings of people in the past. Such tools include philosophical concepts.

So far, however, these have tended to be used in fundamental archaeological debates, rather than in the analysis of concrete finds and findings.

In the journal Open Archaeology, two archaeologists and a philosopher from the ROOTS Cluster of Excellence at Kiel University now present a way of using the so-called “capability approach” to directly investigate questions of identity and social organization from archaeological data. As a case study, the authors use the first mega settlements in Europe that existed between ca. 7,000 and 5,000 years ago.

“For the first time, we were ultimately able to relate archaeological categories to those of the United Nations Human Development Index. Thus, the presented approach also enables links to be made between the distant past and the present,” says Dr. Vesa Arponen, one of the three authors.

Applying the Human Development Index to archaeological data

The “capability approach” is a philosophical concept that goes back to the work of the Indian philosopher and economist Amartya Sen in the 1970s and 1980s.

“The approach assumes that human well-being is not only measured by material possessions but also by other means that enable and facilitate action, as well as by the capabilities for groups and individuals to lead an active life,” explains Dr. Arponen.

Today, this concept of human well-being serves as the theoretical basis for the United Nations Human Development Index (HDI). However, applying it to human communities in the distant past poses a major challenge.

“How can we use the static remains of material culture to reconstruct dimensions of the dynamic activity behind it?” says co-author Dr. René Ohlrau, summing up this challenge.

Large settlements up to 7,000 years old as case studies

In order to master these challenges, the authors first related the dimensions and levels of analysis of the Human Development Index to archaeological indicators.

“One of these categories, for example, is the standard of living, which is also reflected at a societal level in the capacity for innovation. Technical innovations can indeed be traced in archaeological finds, for example, when a certain shape of plow or new looms appear in the archaeological record,” explains co-author Prof. Dr. Tim Kerig.

In a second step, the authors applied the newly developed scheme to the Cucuteni-Trypillia communities (ca. 5050-2950 BCE) that were located in what is now present-day Romania, the Republic of Moldova and Ukraine. The communities are known for large, ring-shaped settlements that extended up to ca. 320 hectares in size and were the home of up to 17,000 people.

“The application of our analysis tool confirms previous studies. They maintain that these settlements were characterized by great social equality in their blossoming phase and that people had extensive opportunities to be active themselves,” says Dr. Arponen. “However, our results point to different explanations for this than before.”

Until now, climate change and population growth have often been seen as triggers to which people reacted with innovations in politics and technology.

“Our analytical approach opens up the possibility of interpreting the developments in the Cucuteni-Trypillia societies the other way around. It could have been the expanded opportunities for people and their chance of realization that attracted more people, which then led to population growth and innovation,” summarizes Dr. Arponen.

In future research, the approach will also be applied to other societies of the past and in other archaeological contexts.

“In any case, it offers the opportunity to question traditional patterns of explanation in archaeology and to stimulate new discussions on the interpretation of finds,” Dr. Arponen says.