Nailing my theses to the internet, part 2 of 2

 

This is the second of two posts on my fundamental “theses”: the basic principles of my approach to premodern cities and urbanism.  See the first post here:

 

(4) Cities and urban life are structured by the interplay between two sets of processes: centralized, or top-down, processes originate with kings, elites, and central institutions, whereas generative, or bottom-up, processes arise from the grass-roots actions of individuals not under the control or direction of institutions or authorities.

 

Urban life and organization is made up of a constant interplay of these two kinds of processes of change. My usage is based on common approaches in the social sciences outside archaeology.[1] I distinguish two types of generative process: Grassroots activity refers to the intentional efforts of people to organize and coordinate their activities in pursuit of a goal (Chapter 7). Spontaneous organization describes actions of daily life, including social interactions, that create some kind of order or outcome that was neither planned nor created by authorities (Chapters 3, 7). My prime example of this is energized crowding.

Figure 7.1, from Besim Hakim

While both top-down and bottom-up factors are typically in play, some realms are closer to the institutional or upper domain of society, while others lie closer to the generative realm. For example, most premodern urbanites paid taxes, and taxation is primarily an activity of the state, a top-down institution. While the generative actions of individuals and groups may affect tax collection, these are typically of less importance than the top-down demands at play. Political protest, on the other hand, is primarily a generative process; nevertheless, top-down forces may affect the nature and outcomes of protests. My discussion of urban life proper is divided along these lines: Chapter 6 focuses on institutions or top-down processes, and Chapter 7 is about generative processes. This division flows from my basic definition of cities as settlement where population and activities are concentrated.

 

(5) Social interactions within cities and other settlements create “energized crowding,” which is one of the fundamental causal mechanisms in urban life.

 

As in the case of Thesis #4, this principle also flows from my basic definition of cities. The importance of face-to-face social interaction, in the form of energized crowding, in generating social outcomes is a fundamental component of many theoretical approaches in the social sciences (Brower 2011; Glaeser 2011; Ostrom 1990; Storper and Venables 2004). This perspective has been developed into a set of formal theories with quantitative predictions, known as settlement scaling theory (Bettencourt et al. 2007; Pumain et al. 2006; West 2017). I have participated in one branch of this approach, which views cities as “social reactors” (Bettencourt 2013). We have extended research from contemporary cities into the deep past, revealing broad continuities in the role of settlement size between ancient and modern settlement systems. In this book I explore the nature and implications of social interactions for premodern cities.[2]

 

           An additional consideration that colors how some archaeologists write about ancient cities is what I call the “urban prestige effect.” As a legacy of rigid and universalist schemes of cultural evolution popular form the 1950s through the 1970s

(Service 1975; White 1959), many archaeologists assign a high value, with a high level of prestige, to the categories of cities and urbanism. This signals an unfortunate emotional association with the objects of their study (settlements). Urban sites are seen as “better” than non-urban settlements, resulting in attempts to categorize non-urban settlements as cities. Non-urban villages are not infrequently declared urban by one scholar or another, whether ancient sites like Çatalhöyük (see Case study 2, below) or modern Amazonian villages (Heckenberger et al. 2008). It is almost guaranteed that complex early settlements—such as the Tripalyan “mega-sites”—will be viewed as urban (Chapman and Gaydarska 2016; Diachenko and Menotti 2017), regardless of the nature of the evidence; see Chapter 2. This urban prestige effect only muddies the waters of premodern settlement analysis, contributing little to our understanding of the settlements in question, or to comparative urban studies.

 

REFERENCES

 

Bettencourt, Luís M. A.

2013    The Origins of Scaling in Cities. Science 340: 1438-1441.

Bettencourt, Luís M. A., José Lobo, Dirk Helbing, Christian Kühnert, and Geoffrey B. West

2007    Growth, Innovation, Scaling, and the Pace of Life in Cities. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104: 7301-7306.

Brower, Sidney N.

2011    Neighbors and Neighborhoods: Elements of Successful Community Design. APA Planners Press, Chicago.

Chapman, John and Bisserka Gaydarska

2016    From Domestic Households to Mega-Structures: Proto-Urbanism? In Trypillia Mega-Sites and European Prehistory,  4100-3400 BCE, edited by Johannes Müller, Knut Rassmann, and Mykhailo Videiko, pp. 289-299. Routledge, New York.

Diachenko, Aleksandr and Francesco Menotti

2017    Proto-Cities or Non-Proto-Cities? On the Nature of Cucuteni–Trypillia Mega-Sites. Journal of World Prehistory 30 (3): 207-219.

Glaeser, Edward L.

2011    The Triumph of the City: How our Greatest Invention Makes us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier. Penguin, New York.

Heckenberger, Michael J., J. Christian Russell, Carlos Fausto, Joshua R. Toney, Morgan J. Schmidt, Edithe Pereira, Bruna Franchetto, and Afukaka Kuikuro

2008    Pre-Columbian Urbanism, Anthropogenic Landscapes, and the Future of the Amazon. Science 321: 1214-1217.

Ostrom, Elinor

1990    Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Pumain, Denise, Fabien Paulus, Céline Vacchiana-Marcuzzo, and José Lobo

2006    An Evolutionary Theory for Inerpreting Urban Scaling Laws. Cybergeo: European Journal of Geography  (article 343).  http://cybergeo.revues.org/2519?lang=en.

Service, Elman Rogers

1975    Origins of the State and Civilization: The Process of Cultural Evolution. Norton, New York.

Storper, Michael and Anthony J. Venables

2004    Buzz: Face-to-Face Contact and the Urban Economy. Journal of Economic Geography 4 (4): 351-370.

West, Geoffrey B.

2017    Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Lifein Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin, New York.

White, Leslie A.

1959    The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome. McGraw-Hill, New York.

---

[1] I wish to distinguish my usage of top-down and bottom-up from a particular archaeological usage in which “top-down” refers to studies of kings and elites, while “bottom-up” denotes studies of households. My usage, in contrast, is based on drivers of change and causal mechanisms (Chapters 3, 6, 7).

[2] The research and publications of the Social reactors project are presented at: https://www.colorado.edu/socialreactors/.

Nailing my theses to the internet, part 1 of 2

Martin Luther nailed his theses to the door of the church to mark the public expression of his ideas. I believe that scholars should similarly make their fundamental principles public. My book, Urban Life in the Distant Past, is built on a foundation of five “theses,” or fundamental principles. These describe the major outlines of my theoretical and comparative approach to premodern cities. In this post, taken from chapter 1, I describe the first three of my theses; the other two will be in my next post. This is the modern version of nailing one’s thesis to the wall (a custom that survives in Swedish universities, where they still must nail completed thesis to the wall!).

 

(1) Definitions are tools; one’s definition of city or urban depends on one’s goals and questions.

 

Scholars of cities today spend little time agonizing over how one defines the terms city and urban. In fact, they typically use the term “definition” to refer to operationalization: the measures that capture the phenomena scholars want to study. Premodern cities exhibit far more variability than modern cities in the size, form, functions, and activities; in addition, their political and economic contexts are more varied. For example, virtually all cities today exist within nation-states. But premodern cities could be part of a chiefdom, a city-state, an empire, or a weak state (Chapter 4). Cities today are embedded in a globalized, capitalist world system, whereas premodern cities could be part of a command economy, a small-scale commercial economy, or a far-flung globalized early commercial economy (Chapter 5). Because of this variability, the ways premodern cities may be defined also vary greatly. There is no “best” definition of city or urban (Smith 2020). This principle is often neglected by scholars of ancient cities, who may agonize over the “correct” definition of urban, or how to document and study the essence of cities and urbanism, which leads to my next principle.

 

            (2)  Do not reify the concepts of city or urban.

 

Cities and urbanism—particularly in the premodern domain—are not real things. Settlements, on the other hand, are real. They exist in this world. Archaeologists excavate their remains, and it is usually obvious whether a given site was a place where people resided. “City” and “urban,” on the other hand, are categories or concepts that we apply to some settlements, when it suits our goals. If we have different goals, we may use different definitions. In the language of philosopher John Searle (1995), 

John Searle

settlements are brute facts, while cities are institutional facts. One of Searle’s examples is money. The fact that a piece of paper in my wallet has value and can be exchanged for goods and services is an institutional fact. It depends on the existence of institutions and beliefs that allow particular kinds of pieces of paper to be used to purchase things. But the physical properties of this same dollar bill—its ability to be folded or rolled up, or burned, or marked with a pen—are brute facts. They do not depend on an institutional framework or common beliefs within a community of people. There is no “brute fact” of “citiness” or “urbanity” as intrinsic attributes of a settlement, something waiting to be discovered; these are institutional facts that only make sense from a given perspective, with a given definition. The consequence of this principle is the following:

 

(3) The settlement should be the primary unit of analysis, not the city. We should acknowledge that some “urban” attributes and practices apply to non-urban settlements.

 

If settlements are “brute facts,” then it makes sense to use them as a basic unit of analysis. When our research shows that a given settlement was large and complex, or served as a hub in a regional economy, then we may want to classify it as an urban settlement; in Searle’s framework, this is an institutional judgment. The fact that some key features of cities also characterize smaller, non-urban, settlements is a further warning about the dangers of reifying the concept urban. Settlement scaling research shows that key quantitative outcomes of social interactions in settlements characterize both urban and non-urban settlement systems (Ortman and Coffey 2017); see Chapter 3. Similarly, comparative work on neighborhoods shows that this urban social-spatial unit is also found in non-urban settlements (Smith et al. 2015; Tuzin 2001); see Chapter 7. These findings suggest that we can proceed with analyzing settlements without agonizing over definitions or worries about whether or not they are urban.[1]

            See the next post, Part 2, for the rest of my theses.

Swedish theses nailed to the wall

REFERENCES

Ortman, Scott G. and Grant D. Coffey

2017    Settlement Scaling in Middle-Range Societies. American Antiquity 82 (4): 662-682.

Searle, John R.

1995    The Construction of Social Reality. Free Press, New York.

Smith, Michael E.

2020    Definitions and Comparisons in Urban Archaeology. Journal of Urban Archaeology 1: 15-30.

Smith, Michael E., Ashley Engquist, Cinthia Carvajal, Katrina Johnston, Amanda Young, Monica Algara, Yui Kuznetsov, and Bridgette Gilliland

2015    Neighborhood Formation in Semi-Urban Settlements. Journal of Urbanism 8 (2): 173-198.

Tuzin, Donald

2001    Social Complexity in the Making: A Case Study Among the Arapesh of New Guinea. Routledge, New York.

---

[1] Perhaps ironically, this caveat has not stopped archaeologists—including me—from arguing about definitions of city and urban; see discussion below.

Forbes publishes an error-filled article on Teotihuacan

This tweet came through yesterday, advertising an article in Forbes:

Geologists have mapped a secret tunnel and chamber found beneath an Aztec Pyramid: http://on.forbes.com/6015EBVRt 

Geophysical prospection work recently uncovered a tunnel/chamber deep underneath the Pyramid of the Moon at Teotihuacan. This is potentially exciting news; the most spectacular finds at Teotihuacan in the past decade are from another tunnel, excavated by Sergio Gomez under the Feathered Serpent Pyramid at the site. Indeed,t some of these objects are part of the current exhibit of Teotihuacan art, "Teotihuacan: City of Fire, City of Water" now at the Phoenix Art Museum.

A big problem with the Forbes article is that it calls Teotihuacan an Aztec site. Oops. As is well-known, Teotihuacan was abandoned and in ruins centuries before the Aztecs came on the scene. Several us us posted complaints on twitter, including Caroline Dodds-Pennock. Then I got an email from Alex Knapp, Associated Editor for Science at Forbes, asking just what was wrong with the article. I replied by sending him this list:

(1) Error in the title:  This is not an “Aztec” pyramid, as claimed. It was built and abandoned long before the Aztec period.

(2) Error in the first sentence: In contrast with the text, Teotihuacan was not an important center “during the Aztec empire.” It flourished a thousand years before the Aztec empire.

(3) Misleading date in the second sentence: Technically, the claim that Teo monuments “predate the Aztec empire by at least 300 years is correct. With the same logic, you could claim that the Romans preceded the United States by at least 300 years. This is technically correct, but misleading.  Teotihuacan flourished from AD 100 to 600.  Aztec society dates to AD 1100-1521, and the Aztec empire dates to AD 1428 – 1519.

(4) Error in second paragraph, the Moon pyramid does not “appear taller” than the Sun pyramid, as claimed. See photo.

(5) Misleading statement, last paragraph: “The origin of the tunnel system - and the city – remains mysterious.” The term mysterious is frequently taken by the public to mean that some feature is too advanced or complicated for mere mortals to have devised, and thus one must invoke aliens. It is a common term on “Ancient Aliens” and pseudo-scientific internet sites that claim ancient cities were built by aliens. Archaeologists have data on the origins of the city, and this particular tunnel has not been sufficiently studied to reconstruct its chronology. There is nothing mysterious about the city or the tunnel.

(6) Error, last paragraph: “Archaeologists attributed the foundation of Teotihuacan to various Mesoamerican cultures, like the Toltec, Zapotec, Mixtec, and even Maya.” I know of no archaeologist who has ever claimed any of these cultures as the founders or source of Teotihuacan. Prior to 1941, some archaeologists speculated that Teotihuacan was a Toltec site (that is, built by the historical Toltecs). But after 1941, it was recognized that The Toltec capital was Tula, not Teotihuacan, and that Tula rose to prominence 400 years after the fall of Teotihuacan. The other suggestions are ridiculous.

(7) Misleading statement, last sentence: “Then the Aztec took over the abandoned ruins.” The Aztecs were aware of the ruins, and they even built some towns on the site of the ancient city. But they did not “take over” the ruins, in the sense of establishing an official presence, or regulating the ruins, or claiming them as belonging to the Aztec state or empire.

(8) Error, last sentence: the Aztecs “rebuilt the old temples and expanded the preexisting tunnel-system.” The Aztecs did not rebuild the temples of Teotihuacan. As for the tunnels, we don’t know yet whether the Aztecs used or modified them.

We'll see what happens.

Burial goods and wealth in urban, state societies

I am looking for comparative and conceptual works related to a project of examining burial goods at Teotihuacan for evidence of wealth or status variation. My needs right how are highly specific; they are set out in numbered bullets below. In brief, I would like to find comparative or analogical cases that provide a justification or warrant for using grave goods to monitor wealth or status in state-level societies. I have had trouble finding anything, so perhaps this does not exist, or perhaps I am just looking in the wrong places and readers can point me in the correct direction.

Let me begin with another, parallel, case to illustrate what I am looking for: the relationship of wealth and house size. I have been involved in using the sizes of houses to monitor wealth for many decades, publishing both empirical studies and conceptual works (Kohler and Smith 2018; Olson and Smith 2016; Smith 1975, 1992, 1993, 2014, 2016; Smith et al. 2014) . If you ask how I justify using the size of houses as a measure of wealth, I can provide many citations to ethnographies, ethnoarchaeological studies, and historical and archaeological works. They show that in many or most cases with quantitative data (and within a given society or settlement system), wealthy households (as measured from documentary or other independent evidence) live in bigger houses. There is strong cross-cultural support for this claim, which justifies using house size to measure wealth in the absence of independent wealth data. We will include a list of such studies when our book on wealth variation in archaeology comes out (Kohler and Smith 2018). If your reaction is, "But I can think of exceptions," then you don't get the point. This is a statistical relationship, not an invariant relationship, so of course there are exceptions. If you think that the exceptions invalidate my claim, then either you have dozens of cases I haven't seen, or else you may want to take a statistics class.

Does such evidence exist for burial goods? I don’t want to get involved in arguments about the Binford-Saxe model, the postprocessual critique, or particularistic claims that this or that ethnographic case don't fit the model that burial goods reflect wealth (Ucko 1969). I want some hard comparative evidence so that I can make an empirical judgment about the likely strength of the relationship between burial goods and wealth in urban, state societies. Here is what I want:

•          Best case: Ethnographic, historical, or archaeological cases (state society, ideally Premodern) with these characteristics:
• a.   There is a good sample of households of known wealth
• b.   There are burials with burial goods that can be linked to those households. That is, either the burials are spatially associated with individual houses, or else there is textual data linking households to burials. The wealth measures should be independent of the burials.
• c.    It would be nice also to have independent data about the extent of wealth and class variation in the society.
•          Second-best case: Ethnographic, historical, or archaeological cases (state society, ideally Premodern) with these characteristics:
• a.   There is a good sample of burials with burial goods
• b.   There is independent data about the extent of wealth and class variation in the society. That is, the burials could be from a cemetery and thus not linked to individual houses or households.
•          Third-best case: Archaeological studies of a sample of burials with burial goods that use quantitative analysis to reach conclusions about the nature and extent of wealth or class variation in the society.

If you can help me out with citations, please email me!  Thanks.

REFERENCES:

Kohler, Timothy and Michael E. Smith (editors)

2018 Ten Thousand Years of Inequality: The Archaeology of Wealth Differences. University of Arizona Press (in press), Tucson.

Olson, Jan Marie and Michael E. Smith

2016 Material Expressions of Wealth and Social Class at Aztec-Period Sites in Morelos, Mexico. Ancient Mesoamerica 27 (1): 133-147.

Smith, Michael E.

1975 Temples, Residences, and Artifacts at Classic Teotihuacan. Senior Honors Thesis, Department of Anthropology, Brandeis University.

1992 Archaeological Research at Aztec-Period Rural Sites in Morelos, Mexico. Volume 1, Excavations and Architecture / Investigaciones arqueológicas en sitios rurales de la época Azteca en Morelos, Tomo 1, excavaciones y arquitectura. Memoirs in Latin American Archaeology, vol. 4. University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh.

1993 New World Complex Societies: Recent Economic, Social, and Political Studies. Journal of Archaeological Research 1: 5-41.

2014 Housing in Premodern Cities: Patterns of Social and Spatial Variation. International Journal of Architectural Research 8 (3): 207-222.

2016 Quality of Life and Prosperity in Ancient Households and Communities. In The Oxford Handbook of Historical Ecology and Applied Archaeology (book in press), edited by Christian Isendahl and Daryl Stump. Oxford University Press, New York.

Smith, Michael E., Timothy Dennehy, April Kamp-Whittaker, Emily Colon, and Rebecca Harkness

2014 Quantitative Measures of Wealth Inequality in Ancient Central Mexican Communities. Advances in Archaeological Practice 2 (4): 311-323.

Ucko, Peter J.

1969 Ethnography and Archaeological Interpretation of Funerary Remains. World Archaeology 1 (2): 262-280.