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8 results

Urban Life in the Distant Past
  • The Prehistory of Energized Crowding
  • Michael E. Smith
  • Published online:
    15 March 2023
    Print publication:
    30 March 2023
  • In this book, Michael Smith offers a comparative and interdisciplinary examination of ancient settlements and cities. Early cities varied considerably in their political and economic organization and dynamics. Smith here introduces a coherent approach to urbanism that is transdisciplinary in scope, scientific in epistemology, and anchored in the urban literature of the social sciences. His new insight is 'energized crowding,' a concept that captures the consequences of social interactions within the built environment resulting from increases in population size and density within settlements. Smith explores the implications of features such as empires, states, markets, households, and neighborhoods for urban life and society through case studies from around the world. Direct influences on urban life – as mediated by energized crowding-are organized into institutional (top-down forces) and generative (bottom-up processes). Smith's volume analyzes their similarities and differences with contemporary cities, and highlights the relevance of ancient cities for understanding urbanism and its challenges today.

  • Chapter 1 - Making Politics from Sunshine, Earth, and Water

  • from Part One - Cities of the Rivers
  • Carl H. Nightingale, State University of New York, Buffalo
  • Book:
    Earthopolis
    Published online:
    10 May 2022
    Print publication:
    09 June 2022, pp 33-60

  • Summary

    Chapter 1 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet elaborates on both the myth of Inanna’s chaotic riverboat journey to Uruk and the vision of the goddess’s ordered urban state depicted on the Warka Vase to meditate on the many birthplaces and birthdates of cities and their surrounding “urban worlds.” It identifies river valleys (and other Sun and Earth-delivered sources of fresh water) as crucial to our ability to harvest enough energy from the Sun and Earth to build cities and it discusses the importance of “energized crowds” that arise in large, proximate, specialized, diverse, and anonymous settlements. Ultimately, though, the chapter argues that urban political communities and the especially powerful institutions of state required to govern them best account for cities' ultimate indefinability: their sheer variability and the sheer unpredictability of their human uses, ranging from immense acts of creation to immense acts of destruction. Cities, it concludes, are places where we harvest enough energy from the Sun and Earth, through water, to engage in the ambitious and dangerous human-directed practice of city-enabled politics – the polis of Earthopolis, the only Urban Planet we know of.

  • 6 - Architectural Choices in Etruscan Sacred Areas

  • Edited by Charlotte R. Potts, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    Architecture in Ancient Central Italy
    Published online:
    31 March 2022
    Print publication:
    07 April 2022, pp 148-173

  • Summary

    Earlier studies have examined manifold connections between the city of Tarquinia and other parts of Italy and the Mediterranean. This chapter adds to these with a rich holistic analysis of the ‘monumental complex’ and the Ara della Regina sanctuaries, drawing out the cultural and religious attitudes of the community at Tarquinia that may have shaped their adoption and adaptation of external stimuli. Connections between the buildings on the plateau, the city they served, and the natural world around them are explored in ways that yield new potential insights into Etruscan rituals and the buildings that supported them. In arguing for the embeddedness of architecture in local and religious contexts, the chapter emphasizes the importance of returning to the lived experience of buildings, and in so doing raises important issues concerning the interplay between the local and the international in architectural design.

  • 7 - Writing and the city in early China

  • from Part II - Early cities and information technologies
  • Edited by Norman Yoffee, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
  • Book:
    The Cambridge World History
    Published online:
    05 March 2015
    Print publication:
    12 March 2015, pp 131-157

  • Summary

    This introduction presents a brief history of the study of early cities, archaeological research on the nature of ancient cities. It also provides an overview of key concepts covered in the subsequent chapter of this book. The book delineates some distinctive features of ancient cities and then compares these features. It first concerns early cities as arenas of performance, which includes studies of Egyptian, Maya, and Southeast Asian cities. Next, the book analyzes early cities and information technologies. Then, early urban landscapes are explained. The book also considers cities in the Harappan tradition and their successors in South Asia, and explains the rise and fall of Cahokia. Finally, the book focuses on Rome in the early centuries CE, the capital cities of imperial Assyria in the early to middle centuries BCE, and Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, in the fourteenth to early sixteenth centuries CE.

  • 24 - Mexico-Tenochtitlan: origin and transformations of the last Mesoamerican imperial city

  • from Part VI - Early imperial cities
  • Edited by Norman Yoffee, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
  • Book:
    The Cambridge World History
    Published online:
    05 March 2015
    Print publication:
    12 March 2015, pp 491-512

  • Summary

    This chapter address early urban formations that for various reasons have been viewed as lying outside of the normative structures of typical ancient cities. It focuses on case studies and other recent research to consider alternate ways of being urban and to advocate for models of urbanism that recognize the existence of a broad range of organizational structures and institutions through which power could be distributed in early cities. The chapter explores the urban features of many ancient cities, with the larger goal of understanding why and how different urban forms developed and were sustained. Even in the most hierarchical and dictatorial of political systems, rulers cannot control all aspects of life, ceding some degree of autonomy to various corporate groups and institutions. Urban life can offer many opportunities to city residents, and ancient cities were often magnets that drew dispersed rural populations and families and individuals to them in search of a better life.

  • 11 - Tiwanaku urban origins: distributed centers and animate landscapes

  • from Part III - Early urban landscapes
  • Edited by Norman Yoffee, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
  • Book:
    The Cambridge World History
    Published online:
    05 March 2015
    Print publication:
    12 March 2015, pp 229-252

  • Summary

    The rapid development of early cities at different dates in many regions of the world affected their hinterlands profoundly. Ancient Egypt, in many periods a territorial state unlike the typical city-state configuration of the other regions in most periods, presents some of the largest monuments and the longest timespan for investigation, but its urbanism is imperfectly understood. Classic Maya performances were strongly sonic, with anticipation fortified by blasts of trumpet or conch, the pounding of large drums or tapping of smaller ones under the arm, whistles and maracas, singing, and the musical collisions of shells on the king's body. Secular performances in Southeast Asia could involve hundreds or thousands of urban residents as participants and as spectators. Public movement was generally toward a restricted space: ceremonies within a royal court could only ever have small numbers of participants and be observed by relatively few.