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The Neamţ River’s valley forms a natural path from the Carpathian Mountains to the Moldavian Plateau, part of the great eastern European plain. Where it leaves the mountains, it crosses the hilly Subcarpathian area, where also the Precucuteni and Cucuteni communities had to adopt to the less confined topographical settings. No longer restricted to small hillsides, they had the potential to evolve bigger sites and concentrate larger communities. But did they do this?
Since 2017, a joint project of the Neamţ National Museum Complex (Romania) and the Institute of Pre- and Protohistory of the FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg (Germany) aims for the complete survey of all Precucuteni and Cucuteni settlements in the Neamţ Depression. The main objective is to get reliable data on the organization of the settlements’ plans and based on the number of houses, the settlement intensity, and further data to participate on the discussions of demographic estimations regarding the temporal sequence.
Long-term extensive field walking, which finally covers the whole area, located the sites, and lead the path to the gradiometer-survey. Nearly done for all sites, these surveys revealed the settlements’ sizes, numbers of houses, fortification systems and the remains’ current state of preservation. In addition, more complex structures then expected showed off, like overlapping ditch systems even on sites assumed to be only one-phased, based on the surface finds. To sharpen our understanding of the spatial-chronological processes of all these sites, a second project phase, based on intensive surface collections just started.

EAA2021: Abstract

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