Journal of Urban Archaeology

This paper offers three figures of thought for research on the origin of urban places and societies. As an alternative to linear, evolutionary models of urbanization, I propose to see the formation of urbanism as an evolving field guided by ‘strange attractors’, which tend to converge towards particular constellations of practices and institutions. In this view, the study of ‘odd’ urban sites and societies, anomalocivitates, which have reached unusual constellations, can be revealing. A key attractor for urban societies is so-called ‘weak ties’, connections that reach beyond close social clusters. I suggest ways to study urban sites from the point of view of evolving social networks. To illustrate these concepts, the paper discusses coastal and riverine trading ports, emporia in northern Europe in the eighth-tenth centuries ad.

As with Anomalocaris, urbanism is one label for many phenomena. However, the varied phenomena of urbanism are defined locally yet talked about universally, while local traditions are entitled to their own definitions. What we have is immense variety and a risk that the category will become so malleable that it loses integration or has lost meaning and interpretative value. To integrate a consistent analytic approach to the varied forms of settlement which are included in the category ‘urban’ and allow different but complementary questions to be asked about their variety, we need to recognize them as representatives of different trajectories which can be comprehended in relation to each other within a single frame of reference - the interaction and communication constraints which affect the communities in all settlements.

Although there has been extensive research on urban form, including quantifying various aspects of settlements, there has been less consideration of why certain cities had certain features. In this article, I suggest a new method for investigating the relationship between the presence and absence of monuments and the sizes of settlements, before applying it to the Roman Empire. The results show that there is a strong relationship between both the numbers and diversities of buildings and the presence and absence of different monuments and the sizes of sites. This reveals not only how the constituent elements of the built environments of cities changed as they increased in size, but also what order structures emerged in, potentially indicating what features we would expect a city of a certain size to have.

At the end of the fifth millennium bc, some of the largest settlements of the time emerged on the Pontic forest steppe. Some scholars proposed to include these mega-sites into the concept of low-density urbanism. These characterizations were, however, limited by a single-site perspective. Now, with ongoing surveys and radiocarbon-based internal settlement chronologies it was possible for the first time to trace the trajectory of the whole range of Trypillia mega-sites. It was found that they did not follow a low-density trajectory. Instead, they show a high volatility and appear to bounce off the low-density threshold. While the crossing of the 100 ha threshold on the Interaction-Communication Matrix suggests a potential urban status of these sites, no evidence for a functional rural-urban divide was found.

Research on Iron Age agglomerations has a long tradition, but only recently have the environs of these temperate European central places begun to attract greater attention. Expanding the focus from site cores to their wider landscapes challenges the traditional dichotomies of rural and urban. This can also be observed in the internal structure of many complexes, which, despite their complexity and manifold functions, often included rural-like settlement structures. Here, we argue that the concept ‘rurban’ encapsulates the resemblances many Iron Age centres had with elements of farmed landscapes, and that they should be considered within the framework of low-density urbanism. We argue that comparative analogies help to expand our interpretative frameworks, while new fieldwork strategies may lead us to a better understanding of the use of space within these agglomerations.

The Samnites ringed southern Italian mountains with monumental fortified centres. Livy and Strabo referred to some as urbes/oppida and πόλεις. Modern scholars, however, interpret these hillforts, which lack the monumental architecture and street grid expected of ancient Mediterranean cities, as non- or proto-urban. I contend Samnite hillforts, in concert with ancient sources, expand our ideas about Mediterranean urbanism. Livy and Strabo prioritized urban functions over appearance. I apply this understanding to the evidence from seven excavated centres as a first step towards archaeologically investigating Samnite hillforts as cities.

Monte Albán was founded in the Valley of Oaxaca (Mexico) around 500 bc and grew quickly in size and monumentality. We offer new theoretical perspectives on the dynamic processes associated with this transitional episode of change. Adopting a multiscalar approach, we frame this transition and the rapid growth of the hilltop centre as an innovative social response to defensive concerns as well as other factors that offered new opportunities both to certain powerful individuals and to larger segments of the population. The collective mode of governance that was instituted at Monte Albán coincided with significant in-migration and an era of internal demographic growth. The organization of the early centre, its institutions and layout, were foundational for a highly sustainable urban settlement that endured for more than a millennium.

Palmyra, the UNESCO world heritage site that tragically made headlines following ISIS’s destruction of several of its key monuments in 2015, was once a thriving city in the heart of the Syrian Desert. Settled from Neolithic through modern times, the documented urban history of the site spans a millennium, from the late centuries bc until the late first millennium ad. Palmyra has often been cast as ‘the bride of the desert’, and the apparent paradox of a sizeable city 150-200 km from major areas of cultivation has spurred considerable scholarly interest. In this article, we discuss the roles of climate change, geopolitical changes, and nomad-settled interaction in the urban biography of Palmyra, drawing on published palaeoclimatological evidence and general evidence offered by urban development, epigraphy (inscriptions), and settlement size.

The small island of Walcheren in the estuary of the river Scheldt is home to a number of important early medieval settlements. Building on the results of new fieldwork, this paper discusses their urban character and challenges the conventional narrative of disjointed stages rooted in settlement typology. It proposes a contextualized biographical approach in order to reconstruct a more encompassing view of urban continuities and discontinuities. In doing so, it highlights the long persistence of urbanism on the island, across conjunctural shifts and low points, and relates the observed patterns of change to developments locally and more broadly, in the Low Countries and beyond.

Issuing from Jane Jacobs’s concepts of ‘import replacement’ and ‘adding new work to old’, this paper proposes that these processes can be traced in the archaeological record of the early stages of the medieval city Odense in Denmark. It is suggested that Jacobs’s concepts help model the drivers of urban growth and expansion of economy. Therefore, it is suggested that Jacobs’s concepts are an alternative way of studying and comparing settlements regardless of their functional, topographical, or administrative traits. The paper also proposes that social processes of interdependency, related to co-presence and the dynamics of growth, are defining for the urban way of life. The argument is developed through an analysis of use and strategies towards animal resources - meat, bones, fur, and leather.

I discuss two categories of settlement that resemble cities in limited ways. Voluntary camps are places away from settlements where people gather for short periods. They are dense settings of intense social activity and communitas that teach us about urban-related social processes of gathering at high densities. Practical machine sites is Kevin Lynch’s term for regimented settlements established by a dominant institution for a specific practical purpose. These teach us about the roles of central planning and control and their relationship with the social dynamics of longer-term occupation. A fuller, comparative understanding of these various anomalous urban settlements can help us develop better explanations of settlements and urban dynamics in the past and the present.