Journal of Urban Archaeology

Since at least the Enlightenment, the first cities have been commonly seen as products of a state or other kind of regionally organized polity that enabled the reliable production of a food surplus. In this paper, we re-evaluate the relationship between cities, regionally organized polities, and surplus based on data from the very early urban settlements of Jenne-jeno, San Lorenzo, and Liangzhu. These data clearly show that regionally organized polities were not necessary to feed these cities. The polities developed in reaction to urban life, often replacing more localized subsistence regimes that had provided greater autonomy for producers. We argue that decoupling regional polity formation from urbanization can provide a more accurate understanding of how cities first came into being.

Rivers have always been a magnet for human settlement, providing resources, such as water, food, and energy, and communication and travel routes. Climate- and human-made changes to the environment can easily affect the fragile balance between the ‘natural’ and the ‘urban’, causing droughts, floods, and other changes in riverine systems that challenge economic, environmental, and social sustainability. This is especially true in semi-arid regions and in times of rapid climate change and human-driven deterioration of the environment. Therefore a deeper understanding is needed of the evolution of urban-riverine relationships within long-term historical frameworks. This article presents an integrative and interdisciplinary programme for research, which although exemplified by one case study - the city of Gerasa/Jerash and its hinterland in modern Jordan - can be applied to other locations and regions with benefits.

The Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) is a model of the relationship between environmental degradation and economic development. The model postulates that indicators of environmental degradation tend to be positively correlated with economic growth up to a transition point, after which the society starts deploying measures to reverse the environmental degradation leading to its decrease. This paper will introduce the EKC model and discuss the potential contributions archaeology can make to ongoing debates on the EKC. It will present several archaeological proxies that can be used, thus setting out a theoretical conceptual framework. The case study of Palmyra, a desert oasis city, and its hinterland will be used to demonstrate the potential and challenges involved. Establishing the validity of the EKC model is critical since it determines socio-economic policies. We argue that archaeological data has a strong potential to inform such debates.

Multiple episodes of urban abandonment took place in Bronze Age China, each with its consequences for reconfiguration of socio-political networks. By exploring the causes and the dynamics of these ruptures in urban traditions, this paper reveals the political nature of Bronze Age cities through the vantage point of their demise, where drastic actions of planned urban abandonment were initiated by new regimes to sever the symbolic ties connecting the population of the fallen regimes with their ancestral places. The emergence of commercial cities that outlived the regime change was a relatively late phenomenon of the late first millennium bc. The study of urban development in early China, therefore, needs to address these political ruptures and recognize the cultural significance of urban ruins in the making of the historical landscape, especially how the core components of old cities were transferred to new locations, and how such urban relocation processes changed through time.

The ancient literary tradition, together with piecemeal archaeological evidence, has conventionally served as a basis for investigating the origin of the city of Rome. This study aims to counterbalance earlier studies by using archaeological evidence as the main data of the examination, particularly new archaeological discoveries and scientific studies. The archaeological record from early Rome shows that urbanization was a gradual process taking place over several centuries. However, from the wide range of archaeological material studied in this article, it is evident that an intense wave of urbanization emerged in Rome in the archaic period. Certain features conventionally attributed to cities, such as population growth, monumental architecture, urban planning, networks, public inscriptions, and craft specialization, are visible in the archaeological material from the sixth and early fifth centuries bc.

Among classical scholars there is a widespread assumption that there is no relationship between the sizes of communities and their epigraphic output. In this article, I offer a new model, which suggests two hypotheses for how inscriptions increase with population, depending on whether they can be regarded as a form of infrastructure or a measure of wealth or disposable income. I show that, despite the variation between sites, there is nonetheless a consistent relationship between the numbers of inscriptions and the estimated populations of sites. The numbers of inscriptions increase slower than the estimated populations of sites, however, suggesting that they acted as a form of information infrastructure. This has important implications for our understanding of the mechanisms for transmitting information in ancient contexts, suggesting several avenues for future research.

The Palmyra Portrait Project, led by Professor Rubina Raja, has collected almost four thousand portraits, and collated data on over three hundred recorded tombs from the site of Palmyra, Syria. Combined with the archaeological evidence for building activity, trade, and historical events that affected the city, it is possible to trace the highs and lows of this trading oasis and reveal the growth and decline of Palmyra’s elites. The study discusses the factors and historical events, such as wars or plagues that might have caused changes to the elite’s activities during these specific periods.

Resources from outland regions of the Scandinavian Peninsula have been the topic of several studies about trade in the early Viking Age. In contrast, the distribution of highly refined items from the urban markets in southern Scandinavia in the opposite direction has been largely neglected. This article examines the occurrence of eighth-century millefiori beads of the ‘Blue Period’ in central and northern Norway. Comparing the stock of motifs on these beads with the bead production waste from the urban market of Ribe, the manufacturing of many of them in Ribe is likely. The beads’ distribution is considered to reflect areas rich in resources as well as points of strategic importance along the sailing route. A dual function of the beads as accessories and means of payment is discussed.

Differentiating urban places from rural is often obscure. This paper advances some clarification based on the analysis of settlements from the seventh to the eleventh centuries in Israel/Palestine. In this case study, archaeological sites in central Israel are classified into types based on their finds, settlement types are identified through terminology in texts from or about Palestine, and the results of the two analyses are compared. The main category for distinguishing one settlement type from another is the amount of services it provides, with the greatest range of services in cities. However, cities in this study are not big, not spatially central, and not very industrial; the only entity to answer such criteria is the metropolis. The paper thus highlights the importance of a contextual inquiry, a regional overview, and a bottom-up perspective.

Using examples from medieval Europe and Africa, an approach to understanding urban open spaces is proposed. We argue that new digital and high-resolution methodologies, combined with interpretive frameworks which stress the affective capacities of the material world, call for a reappraisal of open spaces as places of disruption, creativity, and emergent urbanity. We advance an intensive approach to create a methodological basis on which to reimagine emptiness as a stimulus for interaction, applying Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of smooth/striated space. Key themes are the role of open spaces in the negotiation of power, their capacity to facilitate encounters, and their role as a resource from which distinctive forms of urbanity might emerge. The paper advocates for greater attention to be paid to open spaces in the study of medieval urbanism.