The early stages of mainland urbanism have received little attention and Anastasia Dakouri-Hild's paper on Middle Helladic Thebes is therefore a particularly welcome contribution. She demonstrates that variability in both the density and architecture of domestic housing is a feature of this early town, and that changing social structures may be reflected in the development of the town through the Middle Helladic. One of the most obvious points of difference between Minoan and Mycenaean towns, the size of public spaces and courts, is taken up and explored from the Mycenaean viewpoint by William Cavanagh. Open spaces and courtyards in Mycenean towns have their own distinctive character and functions. They have little to do with public meeting places, but much to do with public ceremonial processions and progress. The ceremonial roads which lead from the courts, lead also beyond the urban centres to their rural hinterlands. John Cherry and Jack Davis explore the settlement of those hinterlands in an attempt to understand better what sustained the central places. Their case study of the Nemea valley reveals only a handful of other potential towns in the region of Mycenae, forming a second tier in the urban hierarchy. Below this there appear to be only villages, hamlets and farmsteads. John Bennett and Cynthia Shelmerdine, examining the case of Pylos and its nearest neighbours, are able to outline the growth of the nucleated settlements, and by relating the archaeological to the textual data, to suggest the way in which relationships between first and second rank centres may have developed. Stelios Andreou examines a very different region, in central Macedonia, where small-scale societies endured for millennia. In the Late Bronze Age a small number of significant nucleated settlements with features like perimeter walls, spatial organization, and acquisition of long-distance trade objects, were clearly the focus for social activity and the exercise of power. This is the sort of complexity we might associate with towns but should that term be applied to these Macedonian mounds?
Certainly, as we noted earlier, size is not everything when it comes to defining urbanism, the provision of social and economic services and amenifies are essenfial features of towns. It is appropriate therefore that the volume begins with Christopher Mee's discussion of nucleation and dispersal in Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Laconia. He demonstrates that the growth of nucleated settlements alone neither announces the arrival of urbanism nor does it always necessarily prepare the way for it. But to explore how and why towns develop is not only a long and difficult task, it is also a different one to that which the fifth Round Table set itself.
World History
