Tripolye – Strategy and Results of an ongoing Ukrainian-European Project

The aim of the article is to identify the main tasks, strategies and some results of an ongoing UkrainianEuropean Project that is dealing with the Tripolye culture phenomenon. In order to investigate emergence and decline of giant-settlements with thousands of houses and very specific spatial layouts, the challenge need to be mastered to perform representative archaeological and scientific sampling with reasonable efforts. This is only possible through the combination of non-destructive survey techniques, targeted archaeological excavations and the application of modern scientific methods. In order to gain a deeper understanding of the social, ecological, demographic and economic dimensions of such settlements and underlying transformations of human societies also in their regional variability, the consideration of different spatial investigation levels is required. In the first phases of the project, high-resolution magnetic surveys were applied to different large Tripolye settlements and exemplary investigations were carried out at the local scale of the Maidanetske settlement. At the current stage of the project, the studies focus more on the meso-and macro-regional level.