Although there is a certain common tendency to think of the Neolithic -the last stage of the Stone Age- as a unitary period, the appearance of agriculture and livestock allowed sedentarization and with it the birth of the first agrarian societies, so that inevitably there had to be considerable diversification. In fact, simultaneous Neolithic cultures were born in various corners of the Earth without connection to each other and then, within each one, they evolved subdividing themselves. In Europe, one of the most peculiar was the one known as Burned House Horizon (Horizon of Burnt Houses), a name that alludes to its main characteristic.
We are talking about a vast region whose inhabitants had the peculiar custom of setting fire to their homes cyclically, every sixty or eighty years or so, as shown by the curious archaeological record. Curious about the vitrification due to the effect of fire of the remains found, since those architectural structures were made with the technique of wattle (panels of interwoven branches) and mud (in reality a mixture of damp earth, clay, manure and straw), equivalent to what in America is known as bahareque and that there are also in other places like Africa and Anatolia.
After all, the Burnt Houses Horizon stretches across southeastern Europe, from the Balkans to Ukraine's border with Russia, circling the northern Black Sea coast and encompassing countries like Montenegro, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova and Ukraine. Chronologically, it developed over four and a half millennia, between 6500 B.C. and 2000 BC, so it falls within the aforementioned Neolithic but also reaching the Chalcolithic (Copper Age) and even the transition to the Bronze Age.
In all the named countries, without obviously coinciding with their current borders, diverse cultures arose that can be included within the Horizon of Burnt Houses, such as the Körös, the Starčevo, the Dudești, the Vinča, the Boian, the Tisza, the Gumelnița– Karanovo and Bubanj-Sâlcuta-Krivodol, in addition to groups that belong to the Ceramic Band Culture, in the case of Szakálhát. From this list, it is worth highlighting Cucuteni (or Cucuteni-Tripilia), the classic example of the Horizon of Burnt Houses, as it is the most recent of all, because it was the one that burned for the longest time -more than a millennium and a half-, and because these were recorded in all their phases.
It flourished from the Carpathians to the Dniester and Dnieper regions, in an area of about 350,000 square kilometers that today occupies northeastern Romania, western Ukraine and all of Moldavia, between 4500 B.C. and 3000 BC. Its main site -the one that gives it its name- is located in northeastern Romania, in the district of Iași, although that of Tripilia, in the Ukrainian oblast of kyiv, can be added; there are others, of course, up to two thousand identified enclaves of different sizes. But the first was not discovered until 1884, beginning to be excavated already in the 20th century, while more were appearing. It was in Romania, although later it was considered that the true center of culture had to be located in Moldavia.
The Cucuteni culture evolved from the Danubian one of Ceramic Bands and is usually defined as the first case of urban settlement in Europe (there are even those who speak of incipient city-states), despite the fact that they are generally small towns, separated from each other by a few meters. three or four kilometers. This is because in a more advanced phase they grew and came to house up to four tens of thousands of inhabitants, as happened in Tripilia (in Cucuteni the towns were somewhat smaller, with no more than 4,000 people).
They were built taking advantage of the orography as a natural defense, adding moats and other protection systems. Inside, the urban scheme was radial, succeeding tight streets flanked by dozens of crowded buildings -joined together, even-, with their artisan neighborhoods and everything. Life was fundamentally communal, with weak hierarchy and no political elite. The economy, almost subsistence, had hardly any trade until copper began to arrive; it was halfway, then, between the hunter-gatherers and the civilizations that would emerge in the Bronze Age.
Cereals were grown and there were domesticated livestock, although it is not clear if this includes the horse; the toys found indicate that they knew the wheel but no carts have been found. Instead, they produced salt and, in fact, the population of Starčevo exploited what is considered the first known salt pan, in the Romanian region of Moldavia. It should not be surprising, since the Cucuteni were possibly the most advanced culture in the world at that time, technologically speaking. They practiced ceramics and in the elaboration of tools and weapons they used polished stone, flint, obsidian, bone and wood.
Funerary artifacts, figurines (female, the most abundant) and some buildings identified as temples tell us about their religious beliefs and rituals. Before, it was thought that they constituted a matriarchal society worshiping a mother goddess until the patriarchal model of the Indo-European invaders was imposed by external influences; this, however, has been harshly contested today and it is considered that that society was more complex than that. It would be necessary to determine if the custom of burning the houses was due to a ceremonial reason.
Because if something characterizes the Horizonte de Casas Quemadas in general and the Cucuteni-Tripilia culture in particular, it is the tradition of setting fire to their homes cyclically. The latter, the periodization, is important to deduce that these were not accidental fires, as the successive excavated strata show. The strangest thing of all is that not only one building was destroyed but those of the entire community, without knowing for sure if the town was abandoned or simply rebuilt, which has led to speculation with multiple theories.
When the studies of the deposits began in the first half of the 20th century, it was thought that everything was involuntary, the result of wars or even accidental fires that could not be stopped (the houses were built very close to each other and with quite flammable materials). . But what seemed logical turned out not to be so when new settlements of different cultures from Southeast Europe appeared and they all presented the same conditions. Of course, with some formal and chronological differences:in some there were human remains buried inside (without signs of force), in others a larger quantity of household items, some from the early Neolithic, those from the Chalcolithic, etc.
That lowered the importance of one fact:that among the incinerated were also the grain silos, that is, the food reserves, something absurd at first. In the second half of the century, the hypothesis of ritual fire began to prevail, therefore intentionally, thanks to the recreation of fires under the same conditions:starting from the idea of a fire originating in the kitchen, the result after thirty hours was that the flames completely devoured the vegetal roof but practically did not affect the walls, of which a minimal part was baked (remember that they were made of clay) compared to the vitrified remains that the archaeologists had unearthed.
The question then was to try to unravel why and there a few proposals arose. The Russian archaeologist Evgeniy Yuryevich Krichevsky suggested a rather audacious one in the 1940s:those people tried to strengthen the walls and make them waterproof by firing the clay from which they were made, although that does not explain why there were burials and belongings inside, apart from the fact that the registry Archaeological evidence shows that the buildings collapsed due to the flames.
In 1993, another archaeologist, the American Gary Shaffer, published a work in which he reformulated Krichevski trying to show that wattle and mud houses were flimsy, so their occupants burned them from time to time to rebuild them with walls hardened by the heat; Apparently, he found examples precisely in Cucuteni-Trypilia, with combustible material (straw, wood) accumulated around the houses to achieve the high temperatures of vitrification.
There are those who give it a twist and maintain that it was done to fumigate, in what would undoubtedly be a forceful, but excessive, pesticide method. Another possibility pointed out was the demolition to obtain space, something based on what we said before about the scarcity of space in the towns of that culture. However, archeology again denies it:the new houses were rebuilt on the foundations and ruins of the previous ones. So none of these theories was capable of solving the great enigma of the Culture of Burnt Houses; it was then necessary to resort to the spiritual world.
If it is assumed that the religion of those peoples was animist, this would mean that all objects would have a soul, including houses. At the end of their useful «life» -and here we have to look back, to that fragility that Shaffer pointed out- they would be deliberately set on fire to release said spirit and facilitate a rebirth with the reconstruction that was done just above. That would explain why they were burned with the trousseau inside and also the reason why abundant stacked combustible material has been found in the deposits; the entire community would participate in the event.
The mystery extends to the end of the Cucuteni-Tripila culture. We have already seen one possibility:the arrival of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, more specifically the Kurgans or Yamnas, who from the Pontic steppe penetrated the Danube valley. Defended by the Lithuanian Marija Gimbutas, it has the problem of chronological discrepancy, since Cucuteni-Tripila was older and both cultures would have been in contact for no more than three centuries.
Starting in 1997, with the growing awareness of climate change, this explanation was proposed for the time, taking as a reference the so-called Blytt-Sernander Theory:the cooling experienced since the last Ice Age caused what was the greatest drought suffered on the continent until then, ruining agriculture, which was the basis of the Cucuteni-Tripila economy. It would have ended up absorbed by the kurgans, who were shepherds and better tolerated those adverse conditions. In other words, there are many questions and few certainties. This is prehistory after all.