"Jane Jacobs' 'Cities First' Model and Archaeological Reality" (2014) (original) (raw)
Related papers
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (2014) 38 (4):1525-1535.
"In The Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs conjectured that the world’s first cities preceded the origins of agriculture, a proposition that was most recently revived by Peter Taylor in the pages of this journal. Jacobs’ idea was out of line with extant archaeological findings when first advanced decades ago, and it remains firmly contradicted by a much fuller corpus of data today. After a review of how and why Jacobs formulated her ‘cities first’ model, we review current archaeological knowledge from the Near East, China and Mesoamerica to document the temporal precedence of agriculture before urbanism in each of these regions. Contrary to the opinions of Jacobs and Taylor, archaeological data are in fact sufficiently robust to reconstruct patterns of diet, settlement and social organization in the past, and to assign dates to the relevant sites. Our response illustrates how generations of archaeological discoveries have yielded solid empirical foundations for the evaluation of wider social scientific debates."
Bridging Prehistory and History in the Archaeology of Cities.
Archaeology is ideally suited for examining the deep roots of urbanism, its materialization and physicality, and the commonalities and variability in urban experiences cross-culturally and temporally. We propose that the significant advances archaeologists have made in situating the discipline within broader urban studies could be furthered through increased dialog between scholars working on urbanism during prehistoric and historical periods, as a means of bridging concerns in the study of the past and present. We review some major themes in urban studies by presenting archaeological cases from two areas of the Americas: central Mexico and Atlantic North America. Our cases span premodern and early modern periods, and three of the four covered in greatest depth live on as cities of today. Comparison of the cases highlights the complementarity of their primary datasets: the long developmental trajectories and relatively intact urban plans offered by many prehistoric cities, and the rich documentary sources offered by historic cities.
FERNÁNDEZ-GÖTZ, M. and Smith, M.E. (2024): The Archaeology of Early Cities: “What is the City but the People?”. Annual Review of Anthropology 53: 231-247.
The archaeology of early urbanism is a growing and dynamic field of research, which has benefited in recent years from numerous advances at both a theoretical and a methodological level. Scholars are increasingly acknowledging that premodern urbanization was a much more diverse phenomenon than traditionally thought, with alternative forms of urbanism now identified in numerous parts of the world. In this article, we review recent developments, focusing on the following main themes: (a) what cities are (including questions of definitions); (b) what cities do (with an emphasis on the concentration of people, institutions, and activities in space); (c) methodological advances (from LiDAR to bioarchaeology); (d) the rise and fall of cities (through a focus on persistence); and (e) challenges and opportunities for urban archaeology moving forward. Our approach places people—with their activities and networks—at the center of analysis, as epitomized by the quotation from Shakespeare used as the subtitle of our article.
Urbanized Landscapes in Early Syro-Mesopotamia and Prehispanic Mesoamerica
2018
The emergence of cities was one of humanity’s great transformations. As Robert McC. Adams recognized early in his career, the process of early urbanization was most profitably considered from a comparative perspective. Over subsequent decades scholars have significantly expanded our empirical knowledge of these ancient places and their hinterlands, yet they have reached surprisingly little consensus regarding where to focus their comparative as opposed to idiosyncratic lenses. Nor have general covering laws regarding early cities and their development been broadly accepted. In this essay I undertake a reconsideration of the comparative perspective on early urbanism, advocating the explanation of patterns of diversity or variation in the histories and characteristics of early cities, and a focus on fleshing out social mechanisms that link distinctive micro-patterns of behavior with macro-processes that characterize different sequences of urban development. The reframing of how we loo...
"Why Archaeology is Necessary for a Theory of Urbanization" (2020)
Journal of Urban Archaeology, 2020
In recent decades researchers in several disciplines have promoted 'urban science' to acknowledge the advantages of multidisciplinary approaches and the expanding ability to collect data for contemporary cities. Although practitioners tend to treat the city as the object of study, in our view the more appropriate focus is the process of urbanization. When framed this way, the archaeological record becomes central to a robust theory of urbanization, and even helps to clarify aspects of urbanization that are difficult to study in a present-day context. In this paper, we illustrate this point by discussing examples where archaeological evidence has clarified and expanded aspects of settlement scaling theory, an approach that was initially developed in the context of contemporary cities but which applies to settlements of all shapes, sizes, and periods.
Archaeological research on early cities has a long tradition, and works such as V.G Childe's seminal paper on the "Urban Revolution" have shaped scholarly debates for decades. While we have now developed much more nuanced understandings on the roles and characteristics of early urban sites, the questions of when, how, and why people came together to form early cities and towns remain a key topic within archaeological agendas. Childe envisaged his concept of the urban as part of a liberating vision of human history. Yet some critics today target it as a construct of Eurocentric theory, or the epitome of a constraining, evolutionary theory, perpetuating the agency of coercive states. In this session, we want to bring together innovative approaches to the archaeology of early urbanism, from the first cities of the ancient Near East or the Indus Valley, to Iron Age oppida, Roman cities, and medieval towns. We also welcome cases that highlight debates on the meaning or boundaries of the concept of urbanity. In particular, we welcome papers that incorporate novel theoretical and methodological perspectives (e.g. urban network analysis, low-density urbanism, urban scaling theory), with cutting-edge fieldwork strategies including various forms of remote sensing, geoarchaeology, and high-resolution stratigraphic excavations. Additionally, we welcome contributions that illustrate how research on ancient cities can help to address urban challenges in the present.
"Definitions and Comparisons in Urban Archaeology" (2020)
Journal of Urban Archaeology, 2020
I discuss two key issues for the analysis of early urban settlements: definitions, and comparative analysis. There is no 'best' definition of terms like city or urban. These are not empirical descriptions of the archaeological record; they are theoretical terms whose definition should match the research goals and questions of a study. Most archaeological definitions of city and urban use combinations of six dimensions of variability: size, functions, urban life/society, form, meaning, and growth. I then review seven reasons for archaeologists to pursue comparative analysis of past cities. Comparative analysis is necessary if we are to move beyond descriptions of individual cities to build an explanatory science of urbanism in the past.
Theorizing Urbanism in Ancient Mesoamerica
Ancient Mesoamerica, 2009
In this article I consider recent research on urbanism in ancient Mesoamerica, especially over the past twenty years. I focus on the theoretical perspectives that archaeologists use to address cities, urbanism, and urbanization. I argue that despite some significant advances in how we understand urbanism, most research continues to be embedded within cultural evolutionist, functionalist, and elitist theoretical frameworks. I highlight approaches drawn from poststructural theory that hold promise for developing a more dynamic, complex, and culturally compelling view of Mesoamerican urbanism. Using examples from pre-Hispanic Oaxaca, I discuss how a focus on practice, social negotiation, and materiality draws attention to the actions of people within their social, cultural, and material settings rather than on abstract high-level forces such as cultural evolutionary structures or the functioning of urban centers within broader societies.