What Is a City? Archaeological and Historical Perspectives

A CSH Workshop

In a previous post I wrote about a workshop I organized at the Complexity Science Hub, which focused on new databases, analytic methods, and testing theories. Today’s post is about the second workshop that took place last week, but addressing a very different theme. This workshop “Cities: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives” was co-organized by Kathryn Bard (Boston University) and myself. Below I include its description and agenda, but I also wanted to make a couple of observations.

The first day was devoted to empirical issues with four archaeologists giving overview of the evolution of cities in four different world regions. For example, Patrick Mullins talked about the Moche Valley in what is now Peru.

On the second day we heard several talks on modeling and quantitative analysis. What I found inspiring was the high degree of synergy between empirical and theoretical talks. Modelers referred to preceding empirical talks, while practicing archaeologists immediately connected to the theoretical issues at the center of modeling presentations. This kind of synergy is precisely what I aim to achieve in workshops and conferences I organize.

Finally, how did we answer the question, “what is a city?” This is a similar question to “what is a state?” In the Seshat project, we try not to fit historical entities into Procrustean binary categories. Instead, we quantify different features that make a polity more “state-like,” such as presence of professional full-time administrators, militaries, etc; sophistication of governance expressed in such institutions as examination systems and merit promotion for bureaucrats; and more. Once this is done, others can choose where to draw the boundary between states and non-states, while I prefer to use a quantitative scale reflecting the sophistication of governance.

There was general agreement in the workshop that a similar approach should be used when defining a city. Roland Fletcher in his talk showed a graph that plotted all settlements in his database along two dimensions: the total population and population density. Clearly, the more populous and dense a settlement is, the more “city-like” it becomes. To these two dimensions I would add a third one, reflecting various functions that a city can fulfill. Is there a temple? A ruler palace? Infrastructure, such as paved streets, aqueducts, and sewage? Entertainment structures like theaters and stadiums? The more such structures a settlement has, the more right it has to be called a city.

Workshop Description

Today over half of the world’s population live in cities.[1] But cities are a relatively recent phenomenon in human evolutionary history. They only developed in the past 5,000 to 6,000 years, in areas, such as Egypt, Mesopotamia and China. Despite this, cities have played a very important role in cultural, social, political and economic developments over history. Studying the factors that promoted urbanism throughout history, and in turn, cities’ contribution to historical processes is thus crucial for understanding long-term dynamics of human social organization, including its tremendous scaling-up over the course of the Holocene.

The evolution of urbanism also presents an interesting puzzle. It is well known that until the 19th century large cities were “population sinks”, in which mortality exceeded birth rates. Such unfavorable demographic conditions were due to crowding, poor sanitation, high disease and parasite loads, and malnutrition. As a result, cities were able to grow, or even sustain themselves, only by constant population influx from the countryside. Thus, sustained urbanism and the important role of cities in history is clearly a complex phenomenon that requires answering the question: why did urbanism spread despite such severe costs? Did cities serve important functions whose benefits outweighed their demographic costs? If so, what were these functions? And how did the selection mechanism that favored the spread of urbanism work?

Other potential questions to address:

- cities’ role in developing culture and “civilization”

- cities’ role in wealth and status inequalities

- warfare as a cause of aggregation

Here are some characteristics commonly present in early cities.[2]

The physical city:

· A permanent settlement with a large population and dense housing

· A monumental core with palaces and administrative buildings

· Market places/public spaces

· Differentiated housing: neighborhoods

Geography of cities:

· A city extracts resources from a hinterland

· It is connected to other centers by a transport system

· Large variation whether a city is part of a larger political unit (state, empire) and the amount of political autonomy it has

Socio-political organization of cities (hierarchy of statuses:):

· Rulers and government: a centralized institution

· Elites

· Full-time specialists

· Unspecialized: laborers, farmers

Economy:

· Specialized production, which is more efficient in cities

· Specialized services

· Accumulation of wealth/capital

Ideology: a common set of beliefs/religion

· Temples and ritual spaces

· Colleges and academies that socialize elites

· Distinct ethnic/religious groups that play a specific economic or social role, with various degree of integration and political rights

This framework is proposed as a starting point for discussion, rather than an end point.

The Workshop Goals

There are many divergent opinions about the phenomenon of cities, not only their origins and history, but how cities affect human life today. Thus, the study of cities is a large-scale research problem that is worthy of more fine-tuned analysis, such as the Seshat databank can investigate.

We propose to discuss the following questions in the workshop:

· What is a city? What is not a city? Our goal is not to derive an “ideal” definition from theoretical considerations, but refine the definition of a “city” in a way that has the most practical benefit for studying and understanding long-term historical developments.

· Why and when cities arose in some places and not in other places?

· Do different elements that make a city appear/evolve in a patterned way? What are the important functional differences among cities in different regions and times? (if any)

· What is the role of cities and urbanism in social and political developments in history? Were cities really “essential” or only a “byproduct” of political or economic processes?

· What theories/explanations have researchers proposed to explain the rise of the city as well as any empirical patterns that characterized this evolution?

· In particular, why did urbanism spread despite its substantial demographic costs?

· What do we need to do to obtain data that would allow us to test these hypotheses?

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[1] Joyce Marcus and Jeremy A. Sabloff, eds. 2008. The Ancient City. New Perspectives on Urbanism in the Old and New World, p. 6. Santa Fe: A School for Advanced Research Resident Scholar Book.

[2] Inspired by a 2005 NAS colloquium “Early Cities: New Perspectives on Pre-industrial Urbanism” that one of us (KB) attended, see Marcus and Sabloff 2008: 20.

Agenda

Thursday, Nov. 13

9:00 Introduction (Turchin)

9:15 Kathryn Bard: A Tale of Four Early Cities in Africa: Akhetaten (Egypt), Kerma & Meroe (Nubia), Aksum (Ethiopia).

10:00 Roland Fletcher: The Conundrum of Defining Urbanism

10:45 Coffee Break

11:00 David Carballo: Urban Infrastructure, Institutions, and Resilience: Examples from Mesoamerica

11:45 Discussion: dynamics of urbanism and warfare in the Americas compared to Afro-Eurasia

12:30 Lunch

14:00 Patrick Mullins: Landscapes, People, and Power: Prehistoric Settlement Patterns of Kingdoms and Empires in the Moche Valley of Peru

14:45 Yuqi Chen: Cities and Inequalities in Early China

15:30 Break

15:45 Jakob Zsambok, Jenny Reddish, Peter Turchin: An interim report on building Cities and Warfare Database for Mesopotamia; followed by discussion (Zhiwu Chen, Yuqi Chen, Daniel Kondor)

17:30 Adjourn

19:00 Workshop dinner

Friday, Nov. 14

9:00 Natalia Fedorova: The behavioral ecology of human settlement

9:45 Daniel Kondor: Landscape of fear: modeling spatial settlement dynamics in non-state societies

10:30 Break

11:00 Jim Bennett: Geographically connecting settlements to polities using Cliopatria

11:45 Discussion: How can we integrate computational models with data analysis?

12:30 Lunch

14:00 General Discussion: what practical steps can we take to address the workshop goals, as listed below? (Peter Turchin)

15:00 Adjourn