Born and educated in Bohemia, the Austrian Empire, Vikentii Khvoiko moved to Kiev in 1876. A modest teacher with an amateur’s interest in archeology, digging in the 1890s near a village named Tripol’e he chanced upon what were found to be the oldest settlements in the area from the Carpathian Mountains to the Dnepr River, dating back to the Neolithic Age, circa 5500 BCE. As it turned out, archaeologists in Rumania in the mid-1880s had unearthed ceramic shards in the Cucuteni quarry that were later found to belong to this same culture. Known today as Cucuteni–Trypillia culture, it remains an active archeological site. Khvoiko became one of the most distinguished archeologists of the early 20th century.