This volume follows in a long tradition of archaeological studies of cities. In addition to current texts devoted to particular cities,
Regions, or concepts (e. g., Algaze 2008; Arnauld et al. 2012; Aufrecht et al. 1997; Coulston and Dodge 2000; Gates 2003; Fash 2009; Hansen 2000, 2006; Kenoyer 1998; McIntosh 2005; Nichols 1997; Osborne and Cunliffe 2005; M. E. Smith 2008; Van de Mieroop 1999), there have been a few recent edited volumes that explore various aspects of past urban environments in multiple world regions (Marcus and Sabloff 2008a; M. L. Smith 2003a; Storey 2006). These volumes demonstrate the continued relevance and vitality of ancient cities as an area of archaeological inquiry. Of these, Monica Smith's approach has the most in common with the present volume and represents one of the more recent attempts to see ancient cities as a new social order in which numerous groups, both nonelite and elite, had to coexist. Some contributors to Smith's volume examine the role that these various groups played in the formation and development of particular cities.
MAKING ANCIENT CITIES
In contrast to Smith's (2003a) emphasis on social processes in cities, Storey's (2006) volume focuses primarily on the demography of preindustrial urban populations and largely declines to place these populations in the contexts of the specific urban built environments they might have inhabited. Marcus and Sabloff's (2008a) volume shares the global perspective of the present volume and of Smith's (2003a) book. In addition to regional studies, there are introductory, concluding, overview, and response essays that focus on issues such as how to define "the city" and how scholars have studied ancient cities. Although the editors (Marcus and Sabloff 2008c:325) acknowledge in the conclusions that the process of urbanism can involve both top-down decision making directed by elites and bottom-up decisions made by commoners, this theme is touched on in only a few essays. By contrast, the present volume is less concerned with the definitions and trajectories of urbanism, focusing instead specii-cally on how particular ancient cities, or their constituent parts, were produced by the social actions and interactions of their inhabitants.
This volume avoids restrictive definitions of "city" or "urban" based solely on population size or density - factors that are notoriously difficult to substantiate in archaeological contexts (Trigger 2003:120-121; see also M. L. Smith 2003b:8). Instead, we take a broad view of cities, which recognizes the differentiation or specialization of roles evident in urban environments vis-a-vis their hinterlands (Trigger 1972; Southall 1973:6), as well as the unique opportunities for social interaction and information production and exchange
That are a vital part of the urban experience (Knox 1995; M. L. Smith 2003b). This approach encompasses highly nucleated, high-density cities, such as Rome or the cities of China, the eastern Mediterranean, or Mesopotamia, as well as settlements that resemble McIntosh's "clustered" cities (McIntosh 2005:185), and low-density (Fletcher 2010, 2012), dispersed or multicentric urbanism, including cities of Mesoamerica, the east coast of Africa, and the Native American site of Cahokia, which is often ignored in more traditional considerations of ancient urbanism. Many of this volume's chapters emphasize the functions that define cities, and residents are viewed as active participants in the activities that generate and give meaning to cities and urban space. There are significant political and economic differences between a city the size of Rome and a 10-40 ha city elsewhere, but we contend that the processes that produce urban built environments are similar in each case. Although the chapters address different times and places, and range from regional analyses to case studies of single sites, macroscale to microscale, and synchronic to diachronic, they are linked by the application of the theoretical perspectives discussed here, as well as an emphasis on the importance of cities as generators of sociopolitical change. In the following section we introduce the world regions and cases covered in this volume, highlighting their contributions to these topics.
World History
