The Mystery of 'Burning Houses': Why Do People Burn Their Own Houses Every 60 Years?
Archaeological evidence shows that the fires were not random accidents .
Between 5500 and 2750 BC, the present-day countries of Romania, Moldova, and Ukraine were inhabited by a group of people, known as the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture.
Although not as well known as the Sumerians of neighboring Mesopotamia, the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture was equally significant. They are the oldest known society in Europe, and may have been one of the important ancestors of human civilization as a whole.
Surrounded by the Carpathian Mountains and the Dnieper and Dniester rivers, the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture was highly advanced. They grew wheat, barley, and legumes. They also built large kilns to fire pottery and wore bronze jewelry. The Cucuteni-Trypillian axes were also made of bronze, and were used to cut down trees to build houses.
In fact, the word 'impressive' is an understatement to the culture's capabilities. Reinforcing wooden frames with dried clay, the Cucuteni-Trypillia were able to build one of the largest buildings in the world – multi-story and the size of two basketball courts (nearly 700 square meters).
The Cucuteni-Trypillia buildings have puzzled archaeologists for centuries. The reason is not the size of the structures, but their extraordinary state of preservation – every 60 to 80 years, the buildings mysteriously burn down .
In fact, Cucuteni-Trypillia is not the only ancient human community to record this phenomenon. Houses burned down so frequently in Central and Eastern Europe that scientists have given it a special name: the 'Burned house horizon'.
Causes of fires
For a long time, fires were thought to be started by mundane causes like lightning strikes or enemy attacks. It was a plausible theory, especially since most prehistoric homes were filled with flammable materials like grains and textiles. After all, what reason would anyone have to deliberately destroy their own property?
However, scientists have come up with some surprisingly plausible reasons for the phenomenon of burning down one's own house.
Mirjana Stevanovic, an archaeologist from Serbia, argues that the structures of the houses in the area 'were destroyed by deliberate burning and most likely for symbolic reasons'.
Image of the Cucuteni-Trypillia cultural community reconstructed by researchers.
Her research echoes that of Vikentiy Khvoyka, another scholar who believes that houses burn down when their inhabitants die.
Meanwhile, Evgeniy Yuryevich Krichevski, a Russian archaeologist, has taken a more practical approach. He argues that prehistoric peoples in Eastern Europe were not destroying their homes, but rather reinforcing them.
According to him, the heat of the fire would have hardened the clay walls, while the smoke would have helped repel insects. More recent studies have also developed a more realistic theory, arguing that the old structures were burned mainly to make room for new ones.
Rediscover the past
In 2022, a team of Hungarian archaeologists and conservationists sought to better understand the nature of this house fire phenomenon by analyzing soil and plants recovered from a site near Budapest. The results showed that of the three burning events that occurred at the site, known as Százhalombatta-Földvár, two appeared to have been started intentionally.
Archaeologists Arthur Bankoff and Frederik Winter took a different approach. In 1977, the pair purchased a dilapidated house from a farming family in the Lower Morava Valley of Serbia. It happened to be made of the same materials as the burned houses, so the archaeologists wanted to know what would happen if they burned it down.
The results showed that while the wooden roof was destroyed, the house's clay-plastered walls remained surprisingly intact. This, coupled with the fact that the experiment required a huge amount of fuel, suggests that the prehistoric fires were intentional rather than accidental.
Typical structure of a house built by the Cucuteni-Trypillia community
Bankoff and Winter aren't the only researchers to commit arson in the name of science. In 2018, a team of Ukrainian and British archaeologists burned down not one but two historically accurate structures.
However, this experiment differed in that instead of buying a pre-existing house, they took the initiative to build a house in the style of the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture. In the end, the results were almost identical. The walls of both buildings remained intact, as did many of the clay pots and figurines inside. Furthermore, no fire was able to spread, suggesting that the activity was safe and controllable.
Once again, the researchers were surprised by the amount of fuel that prehistoric people would have used to reach the maximum temperatures recorded in the sediments. Specifically, they would have needed the equivalent of more than 130 trees for each one-story building and 250 trees for a two-story building. Therefore, a settlement of 100 houses would have required a forest area of nearly 10 square kilometers to burn.
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