Urban Sprawl: What is Urbanization and Why Does it Matter | CLAR 120, Study notes of Classical Philology

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Urban Sprawl: What is Urbanization and Why does it Matter? Mortimer Wheeler Lecture ROBIN OSBORNE introduction: Urbanization in Archaeology URBANIZATION HAS BECOME A SOMEWHAT UNFASIIONABLE TOPIC among archaeologists. Many general books on archaeology published in the 1990s afford it not even a passing glance. To judge from the absence of ‘urban’, ‘urbanization’, ‘city’ and ‘town’ from the indices to Ian Hodder’s 1992 collec- tion Theory and Practice in Archaeology and Chris Gosden’s 1998 Anthropol- ogy and Archaeology: A Changing Relationship, urbanization is a topic which has no part in archaeological theory or practice and to the understanding of which anthropology has no contribution to make. ‘The brief or short introductions to archaeology by Fagan (1997) and Bahn (1996) offer rather similar brief definitions of ‘urban’ or city, but show almost no interest in the circumstances in which cities ate created. Fagan writes: ‘Urban: city-dwelling. Archaeologists have argued for years how to define a city. In general, cities havé more than $,000 inhabitants and are far more complex entities than villages or towns, especially in their social organ- ization and nonagricultural activities’ (Fagan 1997, 27 n. 2). Fagan devotes almost no space to villages and towns, neither of which terms appear in his index, preferring in general to use the term ‘communities’, a term with a social rather than a material referent. Bahn’s version is ‘Archaeologically, one can identify an urban settlement pattern, with cities playing a prominent role—typically a large population centre with more than 5,000 inhabitants, and containing big public buildings and temples. One can often perceive a settlement hierarchy, with the capital at the heart of a network of subsidiary centres and small villages’ (Bahn 1996, 57; compare Renfrew and Bahn 1996, 168). Here again, the town is notable for its elision: we move from ‘small vil- lages’ Lo ‘cities’ via ‘subsidiary centres’, and the ‘city’ is notable for its assumption of an implicit political role as ‘the capital’. Praceedings of the British Academy 126, 1-16. © The British Academy 2005.