 I would like to thank the organizer of the session for letting me present the results of what is, what was my doctoral research within a bigger AHRC funded project on Tripoli amegasites in Ukraine, looking at the possibility of talking about early urbanism in old Europe. The title, I changed slightly the title of my presentation compared to the one in the program to give myself a bit more options, so early cities or mega villages or neither and to add probably more inputs to this to the discussion. What my strength of research within the project was to look at the wider contextual settlement dynamics across of what we know are Tripoli sites in the territory of Ukraine. I will start with a brief introduction to the Tripoli cultural complex cultural group, whatever you want to call it, for people who are not familiar with it. So here's where we are, this is the broader distribution of the known Tripoli sites within the modern Ukraine and this is a close-up to show a bit of the environment where we have these sites, so the majority sits in the mixed forest step zone in central Ukraine and this is a bit of the environment, so we have open landscape and forested wooded river valleys. The chronology is based on pottery typology and this is the breakup of the different phases and during this later period we have the development of these mega sites, so from phase B1, B2 to C2. A bit of material culture, so we have painted pottery and figurines, sorry I forgot to put in some picture of Flint's but we have stone tools as well. One key cartridge is dwellings, so these are two reconstruction of replica houses that we built in the village where we worked and burned because that was a practice common and found across the whole Tripoli world and two weeks ago we went to excavate it but we don't have the results to show you yet. And this is the most interesting or one of the most interesting feature of Tripoli cultural complex, the development of this massive site up to 320 hectares in Talienki and Maidenesk, these are the two biggest ones and these are the results of extensive geophysics done by our German colleagues from Kiel. Our project focused on the site of Nebelivka, which is phase B2, this is the chronological range and this is the result of our geophysics, this is the first completed geophysics plant of Tripoli site, mega site. We did a number of test pits trying to collect samples to have an internal development of chronological internal development of the site but unfortunately most of the dates fall into a plateau of the calibration curve, so 80% of our dates are statistically indistinguishable. Hence we started to develop a theoretical model for the development of this site. My contribution was to trying to use the whole range of settlement dates that we have, the data collected from a publication in Cyclopedia of Tripoli site published in 2004 and after a process of cleaning and data cleaning and checking and georeferencing I come up with an overall distribution of almost 500 sites. So line of investigations, well the research question, trying to understand these mega sites, I try to see if there are agglomeration, aggregation or early cities, mega villages or neither. Where they are located and why, how their appearance influence the overall, the Tripoli settlement patterns, appearance development and demise, so how they impact on the overall settlement pattern. What is their spatial relationship with other coheval settlements? How many people were living in a mega site at the same time and what is the impact of people living in the mega site in the local environment? And then we can start talking about social catchment, see what's happening in the micro hinterland and in the mega hinterland, so where people are coming from. And then we can discuss about the social implications of living so close together. So mega sites where are defined by size, this is a plot representing the sizes for all the 499 Tripoli sites and traditionally the mega site has been classified, defined the one over 100 hectares and this is in the Belifka, the site we're working on. As you can see the size is one of the main characteristics for the definition of mega site because they're really outliers compared to the coheval settlements. So definition by size and by shape, so these are some of the latest results on the site of Tallien, Kiev, Medenezko, Dobrodovi and Nebelivka. So one of like the shape of mega site usually entails a few rings, can be from two up to nine probably Medenezko of circular rings of dwellings and radial rows leading to an empty center. These are other examples taken from the satellite imagery of other mega sites. So they're quite recognizable if visible on satellite imagery and you can see the shape is quite similar. We also have Tripoli and non-mega sites of course the majority are non-mega sites where you still have a hint to the structure of circular structure with an empty space in the middle but the scale and the planning is quite remarkably different. So first of all let's see where are these mega sites within the overall settlement distribution and we can see that the majority are concentrated in the southern book near Per Interflug and we have some later ones isolated let's say isolated not in this area but the majority are in this territory which was known also in the earlier since the earlier phases of Tripoli so if we compare the distribution of mega sites with Tripoli A phase we can see that this region this territory has been colonized since the earlier phases of Tripoli. Why they are there? What I try to do is to see whether there was a settlement you know there were locational strategies the locational strategies of mega sites were different from other coheval settlements and I tackled it in this way performing a logistic regression of site locations of all the Tripoli site locations against four major independent environmental variables and we saw that we checking at the p-values we see that there is a correlation but if we check if we check the location of mega sites against the location of known mega sites and the dependence of it against the environmental variables there is no correlation so that means that the reason why they settled they developed the mega sites in that area probably is not is less to do with the environment but more to do with a social sphere. What is the impact of the development of these mega sites? This is a Gini coefficient done on site size per phase so AB1B2C1C2 and the central phase where we have the development of mega sites the size variability is quite stable so we can that shows that you don't have a development of middle tier settlement so we don't have like a development of a settlement size hierarchy so we have smaller sites and big sites and that's also demonstrated by if we plot the number of mega sites and the number of coheval sites which increase linearly so we don't have a movement of people in mega sites and abandonment of smaller sites but both grow. What is this partial relationship between so what is what level of centrality we can define for mega sites against smaller sites? I perform the global morons eye cluster analysis to see assess what scale the mega sites become outliers within with at what scale they become outliers and center of a neighboring cluster so as you can see for both major the major phases of Trupelia mega sites we have site clustering at a hundred kilometers so within a hundred kilometers a mega site is statistically a high value in the size the size size size wise so if we define a hundred kilometer if we can take a hundred kilometers as you know a scale at which the mega sites become central sort of central places for people and we model a catchment area of people from coming from up to a hundred kilometers and compare the number of dwellings per mega sites and within and for each catchment of a hundred kilometers per mega site we can see a constant ratio where you have that people coming from a hundred kilometer can feel up to half of the mega site so this mega site can fit a lot of people two minutes okay we have this okay so if we take Nebelivka for instance as case study as comparison of this ratio between number of dwellings of the of the mega site compared to the settlements for evil settlements we can see that the development of what what I model as early neighborhoods within the mega site so the number of dwellings of of these neighborhoods is comparable to the number of dwellings of the the overall number of dwellings of coheval settlement so everyone coming from these coheval sites can fit within what is more or less half of the full plan of the site what is the local the human impact on the local environment this is a simplified like a sort of user-friendly version of the Poland sequence and we can see that if you compare if you compare it against the lifespan of Nebelivka we have a very little human impact compared to previous and later phases so if we if we model a permanent population living in mega in the belief that we can't really have this sort of signals to conclude and to try to bring everything together a piece of evidence together we can see a confluence of people coming from up to a hundred kilometers both to the mega cluster the southern southern in the flu and to the the other mega site outside the outside the mega cluster we can see a definition of neighborhoods and quarters probably in a sort of bottom-up way because we don't have in the archaeological records assemblages between across the different dwellings are pretty similar we have a definition of a built-up area dwellings and also a built empty space in the middle we have people living together for a few weeks socializing living very little little in having little impact on the local environment returning the next year relying on solid structure this is one of our replica houses after two winters and two summers with no maintenance and then more people coming the site develops until and expands neighborhood shifts until the scalar stress is unsustainable and people move to other mega sites we also have quite an overlapping overlap chronology for some of these mega sites so we might have more than one mega site active what we still don't know is why they left and we still have to understand is why they left the mega site we still have 200 years almost 200 years of pottery production to be a potter production after the abandonment of the last mega site and this is for future research and this is the very last slide few key concept for the discussion so we talked about social aggregation agglomeration even urbanism I think we have to consider the whole because most people in special interpelia studies focused on mega sites but nobody really look at the wider landscape of settlement so how central where these places we can talk about mega hinterland social catchment so how many people and where the people coming from we can propose a bottom-up developments of mega sites of what Jenny the call of cooperative units of people collaborating and that is and that is can be explained with sustainability so if people come together in a bottom-up way for a short time periods throughout the year so seasonally this can be more sustainable because you don't have to keep people together permanently and you can that could work without an authority without a social organization and then as you said centrality and scale of mega sites and the importance of in-build empty space so maybe I this is still a questions maybe we can talk about the development of urban like identity so probably not a city not an urban space but an urban identity of people coming together and developing closer social interactions thank you