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Smith, Michael E., and José Lobo, 2016 Comment on Jennings and Earle, "Urbanization, State Formation, and Cooperation: A Reappraisal". Current Anthropology 57(5):485-486.
Since at least the Enlightenment, scholars have linked urbanization to state formation in the evolution of complex societies. We challenge this assertion, suggesting that the cooperative units that came together in the earliest cities were premised on limiting outside domination and thus usually acted to impede efforts to create more centralized structures of control. Although cities often became the capitals of states, state formation was quicker and more effective where environments kept people more dispersed. Data from the Andes and Polynesia are used to support this argument. In the Lake Titicaca Basin, household-and lineage-based groups living in the city of Tiahuanaco structured urban dynamics without the state for the settlement's first 300 years, while similarly organized Hawaiian groups that were isolated in farmsteads were quickly realigned into a state structure. By decoupling urbanization from state formation , we can better understand the interactions that created the world's first cities.
I describe a new approach to understanding processes of village aggregation and urbanization in the past. The key concept—energized crowding—refers to the social effects of large numbers of social interactions that take place within settlements. Demographic processes of population growth and settlement nucleation (aggregation and urbanization) lead to increased energized crowding, which in turn generates a variety of social outcomes. I discuss those outcomes under three headings: scalar stress, community formation, and economic growth. In this model, aggregation and urbanization are crucial processes that lead—by way of energized crowding—to many documented social outputs in both contemporary and past settlement systems. Because this is a new approach for archaeology, conceptual tools for understanding these processes must be borrowed from other social sciences. In particular, recent research on settlement scaling provides empirical and theoretical support for the notion that aggregation and urbanization were of fundamental importance in generating social change in the past. Population aggregation—the concentration of formerly dispersed people into villages, towns, and cities—is one of the most consequential processes in the history of human society. When people come together in a settlement, the number and level of interactions among individuals increases exponentially, and these interactions have generative power. That is, they bring about a variety of social changes, both positive and negative. Research by sociologists and anthropologists has tended to focus on the negative consequences of urbanization—increased levels of stress, crime, poverty, and alienation. Research by economists and geographers, on the other hand, emphasize the positive consequences of aggregation. The acceleration of face-to-face social interaction in larger and denser settlements stimulates knowledge transfer, technological innovation, and economic growth. One well-documented finding for contemporary cities is that as cities grow larger, their per-capital productivity increases; individuals are more productive in larger cities (Bettencourt 2013; Pumain 2012). These positive and negative consequences of aggregation and urbanization are two sides of the same coin. Whether talking about the aggregation of small early farming groups into villages or the processes of rural-to-urban migration that lead to urbanization in the developing world today, the results are similar. Increased numbers of people living in close contact activates a process that architectural historian Spiro Kostof (1991:37) called energized crowding: " Cities are places where a certain energized crowding of people takes place. This has nothing to do with absolute size or with absolute numbers; it has to do with settlement density. " While research suggests that the magnitude of the social effects of energized crowding does in fact depend on
Ortman, Scott G., Kaitlyn E. Davis, José Lobo, Michael E. Smith, Luis M.A. Bettencourt and Aaron Trumbo (2016) Settlement Scaling and Economic Change in the Central Andes. Journal of Archaeological Science 73:94-106.
There is a longstanding debate in anthropology and history regarding the extent to which the determinants of past economic change are similar in any specific ways to those that operate today. In this paper, we examine the extent to which increasing returns to settlement scale in material outputs, which are apparent in contemporary urban systems, also operated in the Late Pre-Hispanic Tarma and Mantaro drainages of the Peruvian Central Andes. Proxy measures for material outputs across settlements and households show that this region experienced a marked economic expansion following its incorporation into the Inka Empire ca. 1450 CE. We argue that these changes in living standards are consistent with expectations of an emerging framework known as settlement scaling theory that specifies relationships between human aggregation, social connectivity and material outputs. Our results suggest that inten-sification of human social connectivity and material flowsdas measured through settlement size dis-tributionsdcan be sufficient to raise living standards even in the absence of markets.
Current Anthropology
Steinkeller's Response to: "Entropic Cities The Paradox of Urbanism in Ancient Mesopotamia"2018 •
The growth of cities in antiquity is paradoxical: before modern health and sanitation standards, early urban dwellers suffered high mortality as a result of epidemics and chronic diseases arising, respectively, from propinquity and poor sanitation. At the same time, lower-status individuals within those cities would have endured depressed birth rates because, typically, many toiled in partially or fully dependent occupations not conducive to early marriage or stable families. The interplay between these compounding forces implies that early cities would not have been viable over the long term and could not have grown without a continual flow of immigrants. The early cities of Mesopotamia were no exception. In an earlier publication, I argued that the growth of the first centers that emerged in the alluvial lowlands of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers during the fourth millennium BC was predicated on migratory inflows that took place, in part, in the context of self-amplifying cycles whereby the replacement of imported commodities with locally made, mass-produced substitutes catalyzed increases in specialization, employment, market size, and trade (Smithian growth). In this article, I expand on these ideas, explore their applicability to later periods of Mesopotamian history, and consider further iterations of substitution-fueled growth cycles in those periods.
CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY
Entropic Cities The Paradox of Urbanism in Ancient Mesopotamia2018 •
The growth of cities in antiquity is paradoxical: before modern health and sanitation standards, early urban dwellers suffered high mortality as a result of epidemics and chronic diseases arising, respectively, from propinquity and poor sanitation. At the same time, lower-status individuals within those cities would have endured depressed birth rates because, typically, many toiled in partially or fully dependent occupations not conducive to early marriage or stable families. The interplay between these compounding forces implies that early cities would not have been viable over the long term and could not have grown without a continual flow of immigrants. The early cities of Mesopotamia were no exception. In an earlier publication, I argued that the growth of the first centers that emerged in the alluvial lowlands of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers during the fourth millennium BC was predicated on migratory inflows that took place, in part, in the context of self-amplifying cycles whereby the replacement of imported commodities with locally made, mass-produced substitutes catalyzed increases in specialization, employment, market size, and trade (Smithian Growth). In this article, I expand on these ideas, explore their applicability to later periods of Mesopotamian history, and consider further iterations of substitution-fueled growth cycles in those periods.
This project utilizes network analysis and agent-based modeling to examine long-standing questions that can only now be asked with the rich data provided in southwestern Colorado and southern France: how Gauls and colonists established economic partnerships, how violence may have shaped the development of multiple levels of leadership, and how early farmers interacted with their environments. Writing a dissertation composed of three distinct case studies, two from the U.S. Southwest and one from the south of France, I use tools developed in complexity science to better address how people in the past dealt with challenges related to resource acquisition. Agent-based modeling and network analysis (both social network analysis and trophic network analysis) will allow me to characterize human decision-making processes and discuss how sharing of strategies within a group can lead to greater fitness of those in the in-group.
In; Rethinking the Aztec Economy, ed. D. Nichols, F. Berdan & M. Smith. 2017. University of Arizona Press
American Antiquity
How to make a polity (in the central Mesa Verde region)2017 •
The degree to which prehispanic societies in the northern upland Southwest were hierarchical or egalitarian is still debated and seems likely to have changed through time. This paper examines the plausibility of village-spanning polities in the northern Southwest by simulating the coevolution of hierarchy and warfare using extensions to the Village Ecodynamics Project's agent-based model. We additionally compile empirical data on the population size distribution of habitations and ritual spaces (kivas) and the social groups that used them in three large regions of the Pueblo Southwest and analyze these through time. All lines of evidence refute an "autonomous village" model during the Pueblo II period (A.D. 890-1145); rather, they support the existence of village-spanning polities during the Pueblo II and probably into the Pueblo III period (A.D. 1145-1285) in some areas. One or more polities connecting the northern Southwest, with tribute flowing to an apex in Chaco Canyon, appears plausible during Pueblo II for the areas we examine. During Pueblo III, more local organizations likely held sway until depopulation in the late thirteenth century. El grado de igualitarismo o jerarquización social en el seno de las sociedades prehispánicas del norte de las tierras altas del suroeste de Estados Unidos y los cambios de dicho aspecto a través del tiempo continúan siendo objeto de debate. Este trabajo examina la plausibilidad del surgimiento de sistemas de gobierno a nivel de villas múltiples en la región del Suroeste a través de simulaciones sobre la coevolución de la jerarquía y del conflicto utilizando una extensión de la modelización basada en agentes del proyecto Village Ecodynamics. Además, recopilamos datos empíricos sobre la distribución de los tamaños poblacionales en los lugares de habitación y los espacios rituales (kivas), y sobre los grupos sociales que las utilizaron, para tres de las mayores regiones del Suroeste norteamericano, analizando estos datos a través del tiempo. Todas evidencias refutan el modelo de villas autónomas durante el periodo Pueblo II (890-1145 d.C.). Al contrario, las evidencias sugieren el surgimiento de sistemas de gobierno a nivel de villas múltiples durante el periodo Pueblo II y probablemente durante el Pueblo III (1145-1285 d.C.) en algunas áreas. Parece plausible que durante el periodo Pueblo II, uno o más sistemas de gobierno conectaron la zona norte del suroeste de Estados Unidos mediante un sistema de tributos que fluyó hacia un epicentro situado en Chaco Canyon. Probablemente durante el periodo Pueblo III y hasta la despoblación de la región del final del siglo XIII, las organizaciones locales ganaron en influencia.
The development of large agglomerations is one of the most important phenomena in later Eurasian prehistory. In west-central temperate Europe, the origins of urbanism have long been associated with the oppida of the second to first centuries BC. However, large-scale excavations and surveys carried out over the last two decades have fundamentally modified the traditional picture of early centralization processes. New results indicate that the first urban centres north of the Alps developed over time between the end of the seventh and the fifth century BC in an area stretching from Bohemia to southern Germany and Central France. Sites such as the Heuneburg, Závist, Mont Lassois and Bourges produce evidence of a process of differentiation and hierarchization in the pattern of settlement that was concurrently an expression of, and a catalyst for, increasing social inequality. Although contacts with the Mediterranean world would certainly have played a role in such processes, endogenous factors were primarily responsible for the development of these early Central European agglomerations. This paper summarizes recent fieldwork results, showing the heterogeneity and diversity of Early Iron Age central places and outlining their diachronic development. The fragility and ephemeral character of these centres of power and their territories is highlighted. Their demise was followed by a period of decentralization that constitutes a prime example of the non-linear character of history.
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