Stone Age · 40th–39th century BC · Stăuceni-'Holm', Botoșani, Botoșani County, Romania
Copper Age megastructure in Romania yields dates at odds with Cucuteni chronology
A 350-square-metre building at Stăuceni-'Holm' near Botoșani gave radiocarbon dates of the 40th or 39th century BC, later than its pottery phase is thought to have ended.
Peer-reviewed paper
Stăuceni-'Holm', Botoșani, Romania Archaeologists have partly excavated a building of about 350 square metres at a Cucuteni culture settlement near Botoșani in north-eastern Romania. Radiocarbon dates from its floor place its construction in the 40th or 39th century BC. That is later than the accepted dating of the pottery phase the site belongs to, and the team says that if the dates hold, the absolute chronology of that phase, and probably of the whole culture, may be called into question.
The work at Stăuceni-'Holm', six kilometres east of Botoșani, was carried out between 2020 and 2024 by the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU) and the Botoșani County Museum, with excavations led by Doris Mischka. The results are published in PLOS ONE. Only five other megastructures in the Cucuteni-Trypillia world have been investigated by excavation.
A settlement mapped from above
The site lies on a promontory of about four hectares on the north-eastern slope of the Sitna valley. Geomagnetic surveys in 2021 and 2022 showed a settlement of at least 45 buildings of the Cucuteni A3 phase. Such surveys measure small variations in the Earth's magnetic field caused by buried burnt clay, ditches and pits, and produce a plan called a magnetogram. The houses stood in five or six roughly parallel rows. Three partly parallel ditches ran along the southern side, a fourth surrounded the inner settlement, and there were at least two palisades.
Between the ditch systems lay a building measuring 35 by 10 metres. The settlement's ordinary houses range from 70 to 120 square metres, with a median of 91.
In four-week campaigns in the summers of 2023 and 2024, the team opened four trenches at the building's south-western corner. The walls stood in a rectangular foundation trench at least 15 centimetres wide, with pits for large wooden posts every 70 to 90 centimetres. The posts were wedged with burnt daub and clay from earlier buildings, which suggests the megastructure went up during an advanced phase of the settlement. The floor was made of small tree trunks split in half and laid flat side down, then covered with smoothed clay. The fire that destroyed the building baked this clay and preserved the impressions of the trunks. Two postholes more than 80 centimetres deep lay on the central long axis, and the researchers suspect a third in the unexcavated part, which would divide the interior into eastern and western halves.
The excavation also tested how magnetograms of megastructures are read. Archaeologists had assumed that anomalies inside these buildings were hearths, platforms or other fittings. The team took geomagnetic measurements at each excavated level and found that the internal anomalies almost completely disappeared once the burnt daub from the collapse was removed. Only the foundation trench remained, and the postholes appeared. The authors say researchers should be cautious when interpreting geomagnetic results without excavation. The trenches themselves only became visible after 20 to 30 centimetres of apparently sterile sediment had been removed.
Dates that do not fit
Two samples of short-lived plant remains from the floor were dated: a fragment of a fruit pit of the genus Prunus, and a mixed sample of Polygonum convolvulus seeds and grass awns. Both point to the 40th or 39th century BC. On the evidence of pottery styles, Cucuteni A3 began around 4350 BC and ended around 4230 BC, or 4050 BC at the latest. The authors say more absolute dates from good contexts are needed before the development of pottery styles and the role of megastructures can be understood.
Finds inside the building were sparse, as in other excavated megastructures. In a posthole at the western end, 1.15 metres below the surface, lay a fine small vessel 10.3 centimetres high. Its shape is typical of Cucuteni A3, but its decoration and firing imitate the earlier Precucuteni tradition, and it was painted with red ochre after firing. A near-identical vessel is known from Trușești. The building also produced a bull's head attached to a bowl, a clay cone, three ladles and 87 flint artefacts, about half of them burnt. No human figurines were found in the excavated area, although 30 fragments came from surface surveys. A preliminary analysis of plant remains at the Archaeobotany Laboratory of the State Office for Cultural Heritage of Baden-Württemberg identified poorly preserved cereals, crop weeds, cornelian cherry, plums, elderberry, hawthorn and mineralised black henbane, a plant with psychoactive and medicinal properties.
The authors do not assign the building a firm function. They consider storage or communal eating unrealistic and see no clear sign of cult use. They suggest it may have been a larger house for a larger family, a communal building for decision-making, or a meeting place for high-ranking inhabitants that would reflect a shift towards a more hierarchical community.
The Cucuteni-Trypillia culture spread across parts of Romania, Moldova and Ukraine between about 5000 and 3000 BC, and some of its Ukrainian settlements held thousands of houses. Stăuceni-'Holm' shows that megastructures also stood in modest Cucuteni settlements in Romania. Its deep foundation trench with large postholes matches the oldest known megastructure, at Baia-În Muchie in Suceava county, dated to around 5000 BC, but has not been recorded in the Ukrainian examples. About 75 per cent of the Stăuceni building remains to be excavated, and work at the site will continue in the coming years.
Sources
- A 350-square-meter megastructure discovered in Romania challenges theories about early egalitarian societies in Europe (La Brújula Verde)
Paper: Study of the megastructure at Stăuceni-'Holm', Romania, PLOS ONE
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