Chunchucmil, a Maya city in Yucatan, isn't like most other Maya cities. Specifically, there is no monumental architecture as the central focus of the city, and it cannot be claimed that it's a "regal-ritual" city. Its population is quite dense, organized into quadrangles, but these segments of the population are not ethnic groups or wealth groups, according to Aline Magnoni et al. Furthermore, if there
Was central planning of the sacbe-routes through the site, the stone boundary walls of the neighborhoods were presumably constructed by the neighborhoods themselves. Does it matter that Chunchucmil was a Maya city far from the great Classic Maya cities in the Peten to the south? Why was there less of an "investment in charismatic authority," as Colin Renfrew (1978) once put it, in this Maya city? In any case, Chunchucmil collapsed, ca. AD 650-700, sharing the fate of mostly later collapses of the Peten cities.
DIFFERENT CITIES
In the other chapter on Mesoamerican cities, Barbara Stark raises the possibility that there was a great deal of open space, for example, in Cerro de las Mesas and Nopiloa, which she has studied over many years, and in Monte Alban, the famous Oaxacan site. For a comparative case, one might cite the verses from the Mesopotamian poem of Gilgamesh, who describes his city of Uruk: "One square mile is city, one square mile is orchards, one square mile is clay pits, as well as the open ground of Ishtar's temple. Three square miles anD the open ground comprise Uruk" (Dalley 1989:50; archaeologists reckon Uruk at the ostensible time of Gilgamesh as 3.5 km2 and with a population of over 30,000). Shannon Dawdy has recently also written on vacant land in modern and historical cities as ruins, negative space, and the magico-realism of cities (Dawdy 2010). Such are new perspectives on cities that deserve the attention of urban archaeologists.
Cahokia was a city in John Kelly's and James Brown's depiction, sharing the view of Tim Pauketat, whose latest book is titled Ancient Americas Great City on the Mississippi (Pauketat 2009). In this they rehabilitate, partly, the opinion of Patricia O'Brien, whose views on the complexity of Cahokia had been generally disregarded. However, O'Brien wrote of Cahokia as a state, and Kelly and Brown write of Cahokia as a city, but not a state. Indeed, in Table 12.1, it can clearly be seen that Cahokia's size and population are certainly in the range of sites everyone calls cities and much larger than the sites that several authors in this volume call cities. If Cahokia is a city, and I do not dispute Kelly and Brown in this, what kind of city was it? Apparently, following the authors, Cahokia did not have a king or central government with specialized bureaucratic managers, but did have leaders who owed their power to their place in a kinship and/ or ceremonial system. But, couLd a city the size and heterogeneity of Cahokia be managed by this kind of leadership? It is a commonplace in urban studies that cities effect changes in their political, social, and demographic structure (see, for an egregious example of this kind
Of thought, Glaeser's Triumph of the City ([2011]). Cahokia, however, collapsed in the fourteenth century, around 300 years after the "Big Bang" that created it. One is tempted to infer that precisely because Cahokia did not develop state-like institutions, it was profoundly unstable, and that attempts at integration in fact led to its collapse. Moreover, if this inference from an outsider to Mississippian studies is worth considering, one might conclude that determining that Cahokia (or any other site) was a "city" can actually deflect more important questions such as what kind of leadership did it have and what sort of division of power and authority existed in the site and ultimately, why was the "city" unstable?
Anna Razeto attempts a comparison between the roughly contemporary cities of Rome anD Chang'an, capitals of states and/or empires. She focuses on the nature of manufacture in workshops and the degree of control of overarching state institutions as opposed to private/non-state initiatives. Max Weber, whose influence on urban studies has been great, termed ancient cities "consumer cities;" that is, cities in which wealth was created by control of the countryside and rents paid to urban landlords and the state. Some ancient cities, certainly, were not consumer cities; in this volume, those studying Chunchucmil discuss the important role of trade and commerce, and the importance of long distance is well known from Mesopotamian cities in which the traders were entrepreneurs.
Finally, the authors of chapters on Northern Mesopotamian cities (Andrew Creekmore and Yoko Nishimura), on Cyprus (Kevin Fisher), on Azoria (Rodney Fitzsimmons) and Galatas on Crete (Matt Buell), and on Swahili cities (Stephanie Wynne-Jones and Jeffrey Fleisher) present cases for the urban character of relatively small sites (see Table 12.1), which I review next.
World History
