Recent theoretical and methodological shifts in approaches to the built environment have reoriented how and why archaeologists investigate ancient cities. This volume examines these developments and their implications through culturally and chronologically diverse case studies. Its primary goal is to examine how ancient cities were made by the people who lived in them. It takes the view that there is a mutually constituting relationship between urban form and the actions and interactions of a plurality of individuals, groups, and institutions, each with their own motivations and identities. Space is therefore socially produced as these agents operate in multiple spheres. The volume provides examples of top-down actions by political authorities, often manifested in varying degrees of urban planning achieved through the exercise of structural power (Wolf 1990, 1999), mid-level actions of particular socioeconomic groups or neighborhoods and districts, and grassroots actions seen in the daily practice of households and individuals. It is clear that these processes operated simultaneously in ancient cities, although there is an ebb and flow as to when and where any of these spheres of agency might have had the greatest effect on particular urban landscapes. It is also apparent that these spheres had competing or conflicting interests that materialized in changing patterns of public and private space through time. This is manifested in the concept of heterarchy and multifocal distributions of power discussed in several chapters of this volume.
Tremendous variability is evident in the development and layout of ancient cities, not only between regions, but also within
Them. Detailed analyses of individual urban centers and their life histories, as well as comparative analyses within and between regions, are crucial to understanding this diversity. This volume includes both types of studies, bringing together a number of experts in the social aspects of ancient urbanism who represent a wide variety of regional and chronological specializations. This book is therefore global in scope, and the case studies address the social production of city space in both Old and New World regions, including Mesopotamia, the eastern Mediterranean, the Roman Empire, China, eastern Africa, North America, and Mesoamerica. Individual essays address both theoretical and methodological approaches to ancient cities, urbanism, and urban form in each of these geographical areas and, in many cases, make comparisons between urban sites within and between regions. The thread that links these diverse case studies is their emphasis on city space and how it articulates with the social processes that produce, transform, reproduce, or destroy the built environment. Although many chapters address top-down, mid-level, and bottom-up processes, the chapters are organized by which level is emphasized. The opening chapters (Creekmore, Nishimura, Wynne-Jones and Fleisher, Magnoni et al.) focus on household and mid-level actions, whereas the middle chapters (Fisher, Fitzsimons) address the tension between high - and mid - or low-level actions, and the remaining contributions (Buell, Kelly and Brown, Razeto, Stark) address mainly top-down planning by elites and state institutions, or the role of cosmology in shaping the city.
The cities explored in this volume are, in many cases, not the usual suspects that populate textbooks and edited volumes. And yet, most are not unusual examples for their respective regions. Too often a single, earlier-discovered, better-known, or exceptional city or subregion stands as the type-city for a given area, and cities that do not fit that mold are given less consideration in discussions of urban space. Our volume addresses this issue by introducing cities that receive less attention in the general literature, alongside some of the best-known cases, and investigating each with new approaches that, while grounded in the empirical analysis of archaeological remains, engage issues of power, materiality, agency, meaning, and idenTity. These diverse cases and approaches encourage readers to consider regions and perspectives with which they are less familiar, and to look at familiar regions or cases in a new light.
In what follows, we place our volume in context with a discussion of changing archaeological perspectives on ancient cities, including a brief review of other current offerings on the subject. This is followed by an introduction to the regions covered in the volume and a review of the major themes addressed by its contributors, focusing on the production of urban space at various socio-spatial scales, its intersection with the encoding and communication of meaning in urban environments, and the role of these processes in sociopolitical transformation. Finally, we conclude by outlining some of the challenges and prospects for further study of the social production of space in ancient cities.
World History
