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Yet, even now, these Ukrainian sites almost never come up in scholarship. Careful analysis by archaeologists shows how the social freedoms of the Ukrainian city dwellers were maintained through processes of local decision-making, in households and neighborhood assemblies, without any need for centralized control or top-down administration. The true complexity of these early cities lay in the political strategies they adopted to prevent such things. Residents definitely produced a surplus, and with it came ample opportunity for some of them to seize control of the stocks and supplies, to lord it over the others or fight for the spoils, but over eight centuries we find little evidence of warfare or the rise of social elites. Researchers are far from unanimous about what sort of social arrangements all this required, but most would agree the logistical challenges were daunting.
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Living at the frontier of forest and steppe, the residents were not just cereal farmers and livestock-keepers, but also hunted deer and wild boar, imported salt, flint and copper, and kept gardens within the bounds of the city, consuming apples, pears, cherries, acorns, hazelnuts and apricots - all served on painted ceramics, which are considered among the finest aesthetic creations of the prehistoric world. If it all sounds a little drab or “simple,” we should bear in mind the ecology of these early Ukrainian cities.