The City Is Dead! Long Live the City!

The urban way of life is considered to be a major milestone in human development. It has attracted unparalleled research interest, breaking boundaries between time and space and between modern academic disciplines. The 150-year-long history of this research in archaeology has witnessed shifting paradigms and has coped with ever-growing new evidence, so that it can substantiate the claim that diversity is what underpins the urban phenomenon worldwide. This long history, however, has also resulted in deeply rooted pre-conceptions of the characteristics of ‘urban’ and the replication of outdated constructs which assess new evidence as ‘wrong time, wrong place’. This article offers the views of a novice, unrestrained by top-down approaches and equally interested in the local origins of cities, as well as the global variability of what makes people dwell in that way. It is inspired by anomalously large sites dated to the 4th millennium bc – the so-called Trypillia mega-sites, in modern Ukraine. The inconsistent engagement with archaeological theory of current urban studies hinders the analysis of these sites within this framework and cannot provide a definitive answer to the question: ‘were these sites urban or not?’ The alternative suggested here is a discussion around four major issues, whose development would move the urban debate on significantly.