Between 6000 B.C.E. and 1000 B.C.E., the people living in the Carpathian Basin of central Eastern Europe experienced a whirlwind of social and technological change.

The first farmers brought domesticated crops. Smaller communities grew into larger settlements, broke apart, and reformed. New technologies such as plows, draft animals, standard measurements, and metalworking transformed working life.

Elsewhere in the ancient world, such changes often heralded increasingly unequal and socially stratified societies. But not in the Carpathian Basin, which covers all of Hungary and stretches to parts of countries including Austria, Serbia, and Ukraine (see map, below).

There, house sizes and grave goods suggest societies remained remarkably egalitarian for 5000 years, hinting that people developed social and political strategies that helped them resist inequality.