The mega-settlements of Trypillia were abandoned by 3000 BCE. As at Çatalhöyük thousands of years before, people dispersed into smaller settlements.

Since 1960 a nucleated pattern has superseded the dispersed one that developed after the Civil War. The new pattern is interpreted in context of three eras of settlement for rural blacks.

Settlement patterns dispersed during the later Bronze Age and Iron Age, and the landscape started to fill with numerous smaller settlements. In the Hellenistic/Roman period a major canal probably ...