DOME

Cucuteni culture is a European archaeological culture found on the current territories of Romania, Ukraine, and Moldova. The most interesting challenge that calls our attention is that very few human remains have been found in archaeological sites. The discovery of human remains is such a rare thing that we could speak of a system where the humans vanished. And this could be the most sensible conclusion.

However, from an exploratory perspective, to push the limits of understanding, I could use this situation to create an epistemological and hermeneutical simulator. Through an exercise of speculative fiction, yet strongly anchored on scientific analysis, I can simulate Cucuteni culture as an exclusive of facticities where the human is absent. The human traces can be reduced to simple facticities, suspending the deterministic chain of human intervention. We could thus get, as a purely theoretical instrument, a simulator made of a perfect-object-centered system. Cui prodest?

Which epistemological effects can have a simulator for a perfect system of objects? As an artifact system and anthropological ecosystem, Cucuteni culture is paramount, in a systemic approach, for the following:

• historical and cultural value for understanding the European civilization
• epistemological value with possible impact on reconfiguring the meaning of archaeology as the science of archaic anthropological
• speculative value, due to the critical instruments that can be replicated and help us understand the non-human systems or systems where the human presence does not represent the central dimension: digital, artificial, speculative, virtual,

Accordingly, from a systemic perspective, DOME retraces the steps of an entire journey of a circular understanding, starting from the speculative exercise for understanding our existence, and coming back to a consolidated self-understanding, based on the critical exercise of the possible cultures and systems.