The Nebelivka Hypothesis

Simulation of the life, growth and decline of Nebelivka (Forensic Architecture, 2023)

‘As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting . . . Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all.’
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

Soil mark annotations on aerial imagery of Nebelivka. (Forensic Architecture, 2023)

A revolution is taking place in our understanding of cities, arising from the laboratory of the past. Using an array of new techniques, archaeologists are discovering traces of urban landscapes that, until now, have been entirely lost to human memory. Such evidence is not ‘unearthed’ from the ground. It is interior to the soil and inseparable from it.

Details of cropmarks and snow marks as seen through satellite images, revealing the settlement of Nebelivka across different seasons. (Forensic Architecture, 2023)

A rendered impression of the archaeological settlement of Nebelivka, reconstructed geophysical data. (Forensic Architecture, 2023)

Between the southern Bug and Dnieper rivers of central Ukraine, less than a metre below agricultural fields, geophysical surveys reveals the unsuspected legacy of 6,000-year-old settlements, similar in scale to the early cities of Mesopotamia. But these early Ukrainian cities are centre-less. Or rather, they are organised as concentric rings of domestic buildings, around a mysterious open space. No trace is found of temples, palaces, administration, rich burials, nor any other signs of centralised control or social stratification.

A 50 x 25 cm grid indicating the variable strength of the geomagnetic signal recorded at the Nebelivka site. The darker areas suggest geomagnetic anomalies (higher signal levels), which can indicate the presence of archaological remains beneath the ground. Here, the data reveals the shape of buried remains of a Trypilian house. (Forensic Architecture, 2023)

A reconstructed 3D model of the archeological remains of a typical house in Nebelivka, developed based on the geomagnetic data. (Forensic Architecture, 2023)

What’s more, studies of the ancient environment around these huge sites reveal a surprisingly light ecological footprint. It has even been argued that their foundation accelerated the formation of chornozem, among the richest soils in the world. The famous black earths of the Ukrainian forest-steppe may turn out to be anthrosols: human-produced soil, confronting us with a system of urban life that enhances the vitality of its own environment. If so, then we must also confront a tragic historical irony.

A rendered image taken from an agent-based model with input parameters ranging from soil mineral content, aggregate size, worm activity, depth of occupation layer, and density of fragments of burnt daub. This render approximates the soil density and structure between 65 and 100 cm beneath the surface of the ground, at which point archaeological fragments can begin to be seen. (Forensic Architecture, 2023)

Since Greeks first settled on the northern shores of the Black Sea, the yield of chernozem attracted waves of colonisers and feudal empires. In the last century, policies of forced collectivisation under Soviet rule produced famine from abundance, while for the Nazis this was Lebensraum: a quest for life-space that turned it to bloodlands. Could these dark earths—the target of so many violent appropriations—have originated thousands of years ago, as an effect of human social experiments undertaken millennia before the dawn of the Anthropocene?

A digital model representing the potential spread of chernozem within the area of the settlement over a period of millennia. (Forensic Architecture, 2023)

Map of the chernozem belt spanning Ukraine and parts of Russia, based on the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO) Soil Map of the World dataset. (Forensic Architecture, 2023)

If these ancient Ukrainian sites are indeed to be considered cities, then our very concept of ‘the city’ and its ‘territory’ as rooted in a history of extraction, predation, and hierarchy must also change.

This is what we call ‘The Nebelivka Hypothesis’.