Journal of Urban Archaeology

Famously defined as large, dense, and heterogeneous settlements, urban sites have been compared by archaeologists as a basic parameter of social complexity globally. In such optics, the key dimensions for the evolution of early urban sites have been size and density. Recent studies and critique, however, suggest that there is great variation between the size and density of urban societies and their potential to facilitate a differentiation of identities and activities. This puts the onus on heterogeneity. This article asks how we may reframe comparative archaeological studies of early urban societies to focus on social heterogeneity. We outline concepts, methodologies, and data that can allow robust comparisons between places and societies, and models that can frame an understanding of patterns and trajectories in this perspective.

This paper examines the Heit el-Ghurab site of Fourth Dynasty settlement at Giza in terms of complexity, imposed, top-down, by central authorities, and bottom-up, self-organized, and emergent. Brian Arthur’s concept of technology as the capture of phenomena, either physical or behavioural, clarifies how central authorities combined existing architecture of storage magazines with standard components of a house and replicated the design in modular barracks to house members of phyles, a unit of labour adapted from age-set systems such as were endemic to East Africa and the upper Nile in more recent centuries. HeG functioned more like a company town than an emergent, robust, adaptive city. Until more settlements are excavated near later pyramids, we cannot tell if the innovation of the HeG barracks was influential, or short-lived and anomalous. We do know that over the longue durée, the HeG was one manifestation of continuous urban development that saw cycles of nucleation and distributed settlement in Egypt’s capital zone, just above the Nile Delta apex.

The cities of northern Mesopotamia during the early fourth millennium bc were among the world’s earliest and provide the opportunity to examine pristine urban socio-economic developments. Tell Brak in north-east Syria conforms to Wirth’s definition of cities as large, dense, and internally heterogeneous. Brak’s urban landscape and occupation density were highly variable. Its power institutions were both secular and religious, reflecting hard and soft power. Economic heterogeneity is reflected in multiple manufacturing locations and new modes of production, comprising both centralized organization of manufacturing and flexible private production. Brak’s diversity of production modes fits Arthur’s concept of complexity economics (1999; 2015), in which the economy is constantly in flux rather than equilibrium, problems are not well defined, and ‘rational’ economic responses are not necessarily effective.

This paper focuses on the evolution of technology and its potential for making inferences on differentiation of urban activities over time. W. Bryan Arthur’s (2009) theory of ‘combinatorial evolution’ is explored with emphasis on comparative urban archaeology and heterogeneity. The emerging City of Dilmun on Bahrain serves as the study’s empirical point of departure as c. 2000 bc it became a hub for technological ‘opportunity-niche’ formation. Here the introduction of managed bureaucracy was accompanied by a suite of administrative technologies and devices that provide a unique test lab for such a case study. By dissecting the bureaucratic devices into the components and the subsystems of which they were (re)composed in their new urban condition, a clearer picture of the evolution of urban heterogeneity emerges.

With cultural, economic, and technological ties with the Mongolian Gobi in the north and the middle Yangzi in the south, Anyang’s urban spectacle was characterized by the grand ritual sacrifices sponsored by the royal and elite lineages, the operation of massive craft production workshops, and the movement of diverse peoples (envoys, armies, captives, and artisans) and goods in and out of the city. After Anyang fell to the Zhou conquest in the final decades of the second millennium bc, Zhouyuan took its place by developing a diverse urban society consisting of elite lineages of the Zhou and its allies as well as the Shang elite and artisan lineages relocated from Anyang. The Zhou urban development involves combining and recombining Shang social and material technologies for its ends, especially the adaptation of Shang artisan skills and scribal knowledge, resulting in a significant expansion of urban heterogeneity in Zhouyuan.

This paper reconsiders the archaeological picture and the involved historical narratives proposed by important seasons of excavations at the third-millennium bc site of Altyn Depe (Turkmenistan) by the former Soviet academy. Thanks to these intensive efforts the site is and will remain crucial for the reconstruction of the evolution of social complexity in southern Central Asia and the neighbouring civilizations; however, we question the validity of some assumptions and interpretations, which appear somehow biased by an aprioristic desire to validate the influential paradigms on early urbanism of V. G. Childe, even at the expense of a realistic assessment of the archaeological evidence. Finally, the paper proposes some new hypotheses which might be tested by future fieldwork.

This article explores the relation between imperial hegemony, social heterogeneity, and technological change. The abundance of archaeological and epigraphic evidence makes it possible to both reconstruct a historical geography of urban heterogeneity on the global scale, and to explore its impact at the level of individual regions and cities. This article argues that urban heterogeneity became unequally distributed over the Roman Empire, peaking in the core of the empire in central Italy. Emerging heterogeneity created ideal circumstances for technological innovation, and several key innovations from the Roman period can not only be associated with these extremely heterogeneous micro-regions, but also seem to be facilitated by their very heterogeneity. This perspective adds a new dimension to debates about technological innovation in the Roman Empire.

Although there has been increasing appreciation of the existence of non-linear relationships between aspects of the built environments of ancient settlements and their estimated populations, it is still often difficult to make meaningful comparisons between sites, given their wildly different sizes. Here, I begin by offering a detailed review of the evidence for scaling relationships within the Roman Empire, before showing how deviations from relationships can be used to create a unique fingerprint for each site, which reflects its individual social and economic circumstances, using four pilot case studies. I then conclude by briefly outlining the potential of these measures for future work, including identifying errors, improving estimates of the populations of sites, and revealing the extent to which ancient patrons and architects designed structures with future growth in mind.

The characteristics of what is usually considered as urbanism from the perspective of comparative archaeology, adopts, in the pre-Hispanic Central Andes, very different modalities in different regions and times. Consequently, it is more appropriate to speak of different urbanisms than of a single theoretical concept, valid both from a global and local perspective. Due to their characteristics, low population density, very high formal heterogeneity, and frequently large sites, the settlement patterns in pre-Hispanic Peru could be called anti-urban systems. The settlements, considered as urban, have a spatial organization and function as ceremonial centres with large areas of public architecture and very small residential areas. It is the main purpose of this article to present and discuss the seven major particularities of Andean urbanism.