Journal of Urban Archaeology

I discuss two key issues for the analysis of early urban settlements: definitions, and comparative analysis. There is no ‘best’ definition of terms like city or urban. These are not empirical descriptions of the archaeological record; they are theoretical terms whose definition should match the research goals and questions of a study. Most archaeological definitions of city and urban use combinations of six dimensions of variability: size, functions, urban life/society, form, meaning, and growth. I then review seven reasons for archaeologists to pursue comparative analysis of past cities. Comparative analysis is necessary if we are to move beyond descriptions of individual cities to build an explanatory science of urbanism in the past.

Archaeology has conventionally managed information about settlements into a set of types: campsite-encampment, hamlet-village, and town-city. These were tightly defined but have now become rather less specific. They are broadly understood as categories of different magnitude and still tend to be framed within a stage-theory premise of linear transformation from smaller settlements with more mobile communities to larger ones with less mobile communities. However, what has become apparent is that the agrarian-based urbanism contains compact, high-density settlements with sedentary populations and dispersed, low-density settlements of considerable size and also contains urban settlements which were seasonal and entirely mobile. In addition, it is now clear that definitions of urbanism are regionally specific and that global definitions have become tenuous and increasingly decoupled from material actuality. Therefore, to communicate cross-regionally we need to respect regional uniqueness and analyse the dynamic trajectories of urban settlements as the basis for consistent global cross-comparison of patterns of difference.

A cross-regional assessment finds varied trajectories of how, at the expense of alternatives, humans in Holocene Africa gradually opted for urbanization as the lifeway of choice. However, based on locally centred benchmarks and descriptors, what is the nature of and evidence for urbanity and urbanism across Africa’s regions? Inspired by the African philosophy of hunhu/ubuntu and decolonial analytical lenses, this contribution engages with case studies of variable shades of urbanity scattered across southern Africa’s deep and recent pasts, to strike comparison with corresponding behaviours etched elsewhere on the continent and outside of it. It ends by sketching, as motivated by African ways of knowing, conditions, and peculiarities, profitable lines for future interdisciplinary forays into urbanism and nested comportments.

The role of peripheries and satellite settlements around ancient cities is a critical issue in understanding past urban phenomena. The relations between core urban centres and other settlements have often been considered using centre-periphery models. The limitations of such approaches are now emerging as new evidence for interdependency, fluidity, and changeability between cities and their surroundings increases in quality and complexity. This paper reviews the relations between ancient capital centres in Africa and their peripheries, using Aksum and Great Zimbabwe as case studies. It attempts at reconciling indicators of interdependency between these sites and core urban areas that current narratives of urban settlement struggle to accommodate. The exercise opens new avenues to reconfigure spatial representations and understandings of centre-periphery relations at specific sites and begin to think about urban regions and textured landscapes.

Rome’s hinterland, Latium, has long been a focus of research. It offers a remarkably rich set of information, archaeological, epigraphical, and literary, and especially for the period 200 bc to ad 200. We can see a densely settled countryside with a scatter of urbanized settlements, and we can trace links between them and repetitive cultural behaviours. This paper presents the potential of a new database, combining three major surveys, and relates this first to the model of the globalized countryside, and then argues for the relevance of actor-network theory and assemblage theory. The intention is to encourage a renewed collaborative effort to understand ‘urbanity’ at a regional level, in central Italy and elsewhere.

This article presents the results of the weaving together of two traditions. The first is the cultural history of Etruscan urbanism which has been widely presented in numerous accounts and is not offered in detail here. The second is the regional-survey tradition of settlement archaeology which has not previously been synthesized as one continuous historical process from the late second millennium bc into the first millennium bc. The combined result is a stronger balanced study that will, in time, allow comparison of Etruscan urbanism not only with the better known cases of urbanism in the Mediterranean, but with others in the Old and New World. From this combination of intellectual traditions, it is apparent that some features of Etruscan urbanism are distinctive and others exhibit important potential comparisons with other urban societies.

During the Late Iron Age two processes developed in Iberia: a process of growing demography and a trend towards nucleated settlements. Both processes ended in the appearance of large fortified settlements (oppida), well known through archaeology and written sources. As in other areas of Europe, there were probably substantial differences between settlements, in terms of geographical setting, size, form, and function. In the end, the first cases of urbanization at the end of the Iron Age are presented as changing and multi-faceted entities in space and time, with similarities and unique characteristics. We discuss this process and the insights we can glean from it. Two worlds, the Mediterranean in the east and south and the Atlantic in north and west, had contacts through inland territories and navigations. The exploration of the relationships between oppida, demography, social organization, and urbanization is considered in this paper.

In recent decades researchers in several disciplines have promoted ‘urban science’ to acknowledge the advantages of multidisciplinary approaches and the expanding ability to collect data for contemporary cities. Although practitioners tend to treat the city as the object of study, in our view the more appropriate focus is the process of urbanization. When framed this way, the archaeological record becomes central to a robust theory of urbanization, and even helps to clarify aspects of urbanization that are difficult to study in a present-day context. In this paper, we illustrate this point by discussing examples where archaeological evidence has clarified and expanded aspects of settlement scaling theory, an approach that was initially developed in the context of contemporary cities but which applies to settlements of all shapes, sizes, and periods.