THE CITY DIFFERENT AND DIFFERENT CITIES IN THIS BOOK

Santa Fe is clearly different from Albuquerque, the Gotham City of New Mexico, with about a half-million inhabitants. Some of them

DIFFERENT CITIES

Come to Santa Fe for its "services," that is, the art galleries, festivals, and restaurants, whereas few Santa Feans descend (2,000-feet down and 100 km to the south) to the Duke City (The Duke of Albuquerque was a conquistador in the Spanish conquest of the region). Santa Fe, as a city, is also different from New York City in ways that are obvious. Is there a great utility, then, in declaring that Santa Fe is a city and so is New York City? This is not an idle question in discussing cities in this volume. Some "cities" that are the subjects of our chapters are approximately 10 ha in area and are estimated to have a few hundred or a few thousand people; others are tens of square kilometers (or more) and have a mIllion or more people.

I present a table (Table 12.1) of approximate areal sizes (rounded-up and usually of largest size/period) and population estimates for some cities in this volume. I draw these figures from the chapters, correspondence with the editors and authors, and published information. My purpose is only to delineate some apples and oranges in the comparisons below. Dates are those given in the chapters, with some rounding.

FULL DISCLOSURE

The editors asked me to discuss chapters in this volume since they had read my review of recent books on ancient cities (Yoffee 2009) and assumed, rightly, that I'd be interested in new studies and new perspectives on studying ancient urbanism. I also am engaged in a project to edit a volume in a new Cambridge History of the World in which volume three is on early cities. There has been a conference of chapter authors of that volume at the Institute for the Study of the

Ancient World in New York City, and I must write the introduction and conclusion of that volume. My edited volume will differ from other volumes on early cities, including this one, in that it does not consist solely of essays on cities. Rather, the cities are grouped in topical sections: early cities and the performance of power; early cities, writing, and administrative technologies; early cities and their landscapes; early cities and the distribution of power; cities as creations; imperial cities. The three or four authors of chapters in these sections will also write a conclusion to their section in which controlled comparisons of the cities in their section will be essayed.

When I received the table of contents of the present volume, I was intrigued with the choice of cities. Upper Mesopotamian sites, such as Titris and Kazane, are discussed whereas the large Mesopotamian cities of the south, such as Uruk or Ur or Lagash or Babylon, are not. Are these northern Mesopotamian sites comparable to the great Mesopotamian cities to their souTh? For the Aegean world, cities like Athens or Corinth are not represented, but sites on Cyprus, not considered a heartland of cIties, and on Crete, also not usually thought of as urban places, are. In Africa there is a chapter on Swahili sites, not Jenne-Jeno or Aksum or GreaT Zimbabwe or early cities in Egypt. For Mesoamerica the great Maya sites like Tikal are not discussed, nor is there much mention oF the urban metropolis of Teotihuacan. Although I was pleased to see new sites being discussed, new research reported, and new perspectives on these sites advanced, one does wonder why these important sites were not represented in a volume on early cities. I was pleased to see the inclusion of Cahokia as an early city, as it is in my own forthcoming edited volume.

My discussion is, of course, not a review of the chapters in the volume; that will be someone else's task. Mine is to ascertain the qualities of "city-ness" in the presented chapters and to ask what if any qualities of "city-ness" hold the volume together.