Collapse or Longevity? Failure or Success?

When many people think of the ancient Maya, the term "collapse" often comes to mind. The Mayas were a group that were around for a while, but then collapsed. Archaeologists have spent a lot of time (and a lot of fieldwork and publications) trying to figure out how or why (or sometimes, whether) the Maya collapsed. If they collapsed, there must have been something wrong with Maya society, right? But the Maya cities lasted for some seven centuries before they were abandoned. Think about it. Seven hundred years. Were the Maya a failure (they collapsed), or were they a spectacular success (they lasted 700 years).

The idea that something must have been wrong with ancient cities or civilizations to make them collapse is a popular notion. And while it is a valid question to ask how or why a society like the Classic Maya collapsed, any such question should be paired with a consideration of just how long they managed to thrive. This collapse bias surfaced again today in a paper just posted in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:  "Human domination of the biosphere: Rapid discharge of the earth-space battery foretells the future of himanking" by Rohn R. Schramski, David K. Gattie and James H. Brown. This is a fine paper, about the global chemical energy supply on earth, and how it is being depleted at an incredibly fast rate right now. But they had to throw in a dig at ancient societies:

At local and regional scales, many multiple past civilizations (e.g., Greece, Rome, Angkor Wat, Teotihuacan) failed to adapt to changing social and ecological conditions and crashed catastrophically

Let's take a different look at those four ancient societies in comparison to contemporary nation-states:
 

So, which of these societies seem successful, and which ones seem too young to judge? I am dating the start of the European nation-states to 1648, the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia which created the modern system of nation-states. If European nations manage to survive another half century or so, they will have matched the longevity of ancient Greece (I am using the Classical and Hellenistic periods here). And if they last another 350 years they will match those failed collapsers, the ancient Maya.

I am the last one to deny the significance of the Classic Maya collapse. I think the revisionists who claim that they didn't really collapse are just plain wrong (see some of my posts on Publishing Archaeology about this, such as this one about Jared Diamond and his critics). But if the Maya managed to thrive in the jungle for seven centuries, maybe that fact should outweigh their eventual collapse. They spent centuries doing many things right, and then they got trapped for a few crucial decades and collapsed.

I will just chalk up the collapse quote above to the fact that scholars outside of history and archaeology tend to be clueless about ancient societies. I think the authors of the new paper are correct when they claim that ancient collapses "are of questionable relevance to the current situation." Much as I'd like to believe that the sustainability (or lack thereof) of ancient societies might have lessons for us today, in fact the technological, energetic, and demographic situation today is radically different from that of ancient societies like the Maya. I do think that ancient cities and societies have lessons for us today, and that is a major theme of this blog. But the nature of overall societal sustainability may not be one of those lessons.

Modern use of an ancient farming system

Raised field construction (from Clark Erickson)

Raised fields -- an ancient form of agriculture, practiced by the Mayas, Aztecs, and the ancestors of the Incas -- was one of the most productive preindustrial farming systems anywhere. These fields were abandoned in most areas centuries ago, and largely forgotten. In the 1980s archaeologists excavated ancient raised  fields around Lake Titicaca in the Andes. Based on their findings, modern rural peoples started rebuilding raised fields. They turn out to be well adapted to the natural and social systems of the Titicaca area.

Archaeological interest in ancient raised fields starts with the observation that they were a form of
"intensive agriculture." Urban populations need large amounts of food, and with primitive transportation methods food had to be grown locally (unless we are talking about imperial Rome, where food could be shipped across the Mediterranean from Egypt easily and inexpensively). Under preindustrial conditions, "intensive agriculture" refers to methods that require considerable investment of labor in order to increase the yield on the land. Consider the difference between rainfall agriculture and irrigation agriculture in a given environment. The construction of canals and dams, and their required maintenence, can increase yields tremendously, but at the cost of requiring much more labor than rainfall agriculture. Irrigation is an example of intensive agriculture, while rainfall farming is a kind of extensive agriculture.

Figure 1 - Tiwanaku

Figure 2 - Relic fields on the shore of Lake Titicaca

Large, complex urban societies almost always rely on farming systems with intensive methods to feed their population. The most common forms of preindustrial intensive agriculture around the world were canal irrigation and hillside terracing. The earliest cities in Mesopotamia used irrigation, while the Inka cities of the Andes relied on terracing (with some irrigation). Aztec cities used both methods, plus the intensive cultivation of kitchen gardens. But perhaps the most remarkable form of ancient intensive agriculture were raised fields. This is a method of swamp reclamation, where long, parallel field beds are created by piling up dirt and muck from the swamp. Shallow canals are left in between the raised beds, and these canals have to be cleaned out periodically by scooping up the muck (a natural organic fertilizer) and piling it on the fields.

Fig. 3 - Clark Erickson

I talked about Aztec raised fields (called "chinampas") in a previous post. Here I want to focus on raised fields in the Andes. Tiwanaku was major urban center in Bolivia near Lake Titicaca, that flourished between AD 600 and 800 (fig 1). The plain around Lake Titicaca today is full of remnants of ancient raised fields (fig 2) that helped support the ancient city's population. A number of archaeologists have excavated and studied these ancient fields (see bibliography below). Here, I focus on the work of Clark Erickson (fig 3).

Fig 4

Clark Erickson (an old pal from graduate school at the University of Illinois) began with excavation and mapping of the fields, but then decided to see whether he could re-introduce the system for use by contemporary campesinos. In many ways ancient forms of intensive agriculture would seem to work well in the developing countries today -- they have high yields, use simple technology, they rely mainly on human labor, and they keep control of farming in local hands. This is a low-tech approach to economic development, using principles pioneered by EF Schumacher in his book, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (fig 4). It is the opposite of the high-tech approach that involves mechanized equipment, petrochemicals, and hybrid seeds. While many development agencies championed the latter approach, in fact it can be detrimental in poor rural areas. Once the foreign funding runs out, farmers can't buy or repair equipment, they can't afford the fertilizers and herbicides, and the result is that a few people get rich and most get poorer.

Fig 5 - Rebuilding ancient fields

Fig 6 - Ancient and rebuilt raised fields

Fig 7 - Building new fields

Clark managed to get some people to rebuilt and rehabilitate ancient raised fields (figs 5, 6), and others to build new fields from scratch (fig 7). He made use of a publicity campaign involving comic-book like pamphlets with text in both Spanish and Aymara (fig 8). At first the fields were a real success, and some farmers had yields higher than those who were following the high-tech development approach. Although his efforts were opposed by development experts from the United Nations and other development organizations, up to ten square km were planted in new raised fields in the 1980s.

By the 1990s, however, the results were mixed. Most of the farms that had been built communally, by large groups, had been abandoned. But the household-level farms, where individual families had built and farmed the new fields, were still functioning.

Fig 8 - Local publicity material

Clark Erickson has since moved on to pursue similar research in the swampy plains of eastern Bolivia, the Llanos de Mojos. He is just one of the archaeologists who have tried to re-introduce ancient farming systems to modern farmers. Alan Kolata has also worked on the Lake Titicaca raised fields, and Christian Isendahl is now working on ancient/modern connections with other indigenous farming systems in Bolivia. I tried doing something similar once in Mexico. An agronomist and I wanted to excavate Aztec terraces, study how they worked, and then try to get modern campesinos to rebuild the ancient terraces and use them again. We could not get funding for our project, however, and then we both ended up working on different topics.

The work of Clark Erickson and the other archaeologists mentioned above are great examples of how archaeological research on ancient cities is relevant to the concerns of the modern world. As we search for solutions to problems of hunger and poverty in the developing world, it behooves us to pay attention to ancient cities and cultures. Many of them were highly successful, and they have clues that can help us today.

• Check out Clark's homepage at the University of Pennsylvania. He has copies of these and other papers available to download:

Erickson, Clark L.
1989    Raised Field Agriculture in the Lake Titicaca Basin: Putting Ancient Agriculture Back to Work. Expedition 30 (3): 8-16.

1992    Applied Archaeology and Rural Development: Archaeology's Potential Contribution to the Future. Journal of the Steward Anthropological Society 20 (1-2): 1-16.

1992    Prehistoric Landscape Management in the Andean Highlands: Ridged Field Agriculture and Its Environmental Impact. Population and Environment 13: 285-300.

2003    Agricultural Landscapes as World Heritage: Raised Field Agriculture in Bolivia and Peru. In Managing Change: Sustainable Approaches to the Conservation of the Built Environment, edited by Jeanne-Marie Teutonica and Frank Matero, pp. 181-204. Getty Consserfation Institute, Los Angeles.

2006    Intensification, Political Economy, and the Farming Community: In Defense of a Bottom-Up Perspective on the Past. In Agricultural Strategies, edited by Joyce Marcus and Charles Stanish, pp. 334-363. Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA, Los Angeles.

Erickson, Clark L. and Kay L. Candler
1989    Raised Fields and Sustainable Agriculture in the Lake Titicaca Basin of Peru. In Fragile Lands of Latin America: Strategies for Sustainable Development, edited by John O. Browder, pp. 230-248. Westview Press, Boulder.

• For other relevant research, see:

Janusek, John W. and Alan Kolata
2004    Top-Down or Bottom-Up: Rural Settlement and Raised Field Agriculture in the Lake Titicaca Basin, Bolivia. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 23: 404-430.

Kolata, Alan L.
1986    The Agricultural Foundations of the Tiwanaku State: A View from the Hhinterland. American Antiquity 51: 748-763.

Kolata, Alan L., O. Rivera, J. C. Ramírez, and E. Gemio
1996    Rehabilitating Raised-Field Agriculture in the Southern Lake Titicaca Basin of Bolivia. In Tiwanaku and its Hinterland: Archaeology and Paleoecology of an Andean Civilization. Volume 1, Agroecology, edited by Alan L. Kolata, pp. 203-230. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC.

Ancient Urban Sustainability

Why did some past cities flourish for many centuries, even millennia, while others grew and declined over a period of years or a decade?

Tiwanaku: sustainable city??

Archaeologists have an incredibly extensive set of data on ancient urban sustainability, but we have yet to pursue targeted analyses of those data. I think that someday we will be able to answer the question posed above, but we are not yet close to an answer. I am following a theme I first addressed in my 2010 paper, "Sprawl, Squatters, and Sustainable Cities: Can Archaeological Data Shed Light on Modern Urban Issues?" Cambridge Archaeological Journal 20:229-253. I make the same point for all three topics -- that archaeologists have relevant data, but have not analyzed it yet in ways that can contribute to contemporary debates on urban issues.

I assigned my 2010 article in my ancient urbanism class (advanced undergrad) a year ago. One perceptive student (Seven Tomek) asked why I wasted time describing what archaeologists had not done yet - why didn't I just go out and do the analyses? Well, if I didn't already have several other research projects that take up most of my research time, I would do that. But it will take considerable dedicated effort to turn existing archaeological data into systematic and useful findings that are relevant to contemporary urbanization.

The Yautepec Valley of Morelos

Here I will review one of the examples originally included in my 2010 paper: the longevity of settlements in the Yautepec Valley of central Mexico. This is based on a full-coverage regional survey that I carried out with two graduate students, Timothy Hare and Lisa Montiel (for details see our technical report or their dissertations). Actually, they did most of the work! For my 2010 paper I identified all "urban" sites located in the survey. This was a quick-and-easy definition: any site larger than the smallest Aztec city-state capital was counted as urban. The rationales is that we know the Aztec sites were functionally urban, so this was a convenient cut-off for earlier sites as well.

My measure for sustainability was longevity; that is, how long were cities occupied? This fits theoretical discussions in the sustainability literature that stress longevity as a marker of sustainability (e.g., Bernard C. Patten and Robert Costanza  (1997)  Logical Interrelations between Four Sustainability Parameters: Stability, Continuation, Longevity, and Health. Ecosystem Health 3(3):136-142). I arranged sites in chronological order, from the earliest urban sites (Late formative Period) up to the Aztec period. Here is the graph:

Longevity of urban sites in the Yautepec Valley. Each vertical bar is an urban site.

I should start out by saying that I have yet to carry out a systematic analysis of these data. My remarks here are impressionistic and suggestive, not definitive.There were several waves of urbanization. The first, in the Late Formative period (green bars), generated three cities that flourished for over a millennium. Their success is almost certainly due to their locations: adjacent to the the largest expanse of rich farmland in the entire Yautepec Valley. The biggest single wave of urbanization occurred in the Classic period (red bars), when the valley was conquered by an empire based at Teotihuacan. These towns probably organized the cultivation of cotton and its shipment to Teotihuacan. When Teotihuacan influence waned after a couple of centuries, these sites were abandoned (except for one).

Shortly thereafter, a period of lowered rainfall set in (yellow on the map), and few new cities were founded. The increased rainfall in the 12th century AD coincided with the arrival of the Aztec peoples in this area. A new wave of urbanization took place, first in the Early Aztec period, and then in the Late Aztec period. These new cities were small capitals of city-states. Most were then destroyed in the Spanish conquest of 1521.

While this description is too provisional and subjective to produce definitive results, a few implications can be drawn. First, a range of factors must be considered in explaining the longevity or success of ancient cities. These include soil quality, rainfall, imperial conquests, and local demographic processes. Second, different causal factors came into play at different periods. Classic period urbanization was part of imperialism, whereas earlier cities were formed and flourished for largely environmental reasons. Third, these results suggest that if archaeologists were to assemble parallel data form other survey projects, we would learn quite a bit about why some cities flourished for many centuries while others did not.

I deal with ancient urban sustainability in an earlier post:

Were ancient cities sustainable?

REFERENCES:

Hare, Timothy S.  (2001)  Political Economy, Spatial Analysis, and Postclassic States in the Yautepec Valley, Mexico. PhD dissertation Dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University at Albany, SUNY.

Montiel, Lisa  (2010)  Teotihuacan Imperialism in the Yautepec Valley, Morelos, Mexico. PhD dissertation Dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University at Albany, SUNY.

Smith, Michael E. (editor)  (2006)  Reconocimiento superficial del Valle de Yautepec, Morelos: informe final. Report submitted to the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

Aztec Urban Agriculture

Chinampa farming in Tenochtitlan

Urban agriculture is a hot topic right now, but it's nothing new. The Aztecs were doing this 600 years ago. Today, the cultivation of crops within cities is expanding all over the world. This practice is being promoted by city administrations, by planners, and by grassroots organizations. Urban agriculture provides food for urban residents; the food is fresh; and the maintenance of green areas has health benefits. This practice is being touted as a positive force in creating more sustainable cities.

The growth of urban agriculture is also the target of a rapidly growing scholarly literature. Agronomists are studying the soil nutrients of urban agriculture, engineers are looking at water supplies, anthropologists and sociologists are examining the social aspects of urban farming. This research targets both developing countries and the developed world.

What people don't seem to realize is that urban agriculture was quite extensive in ancient cities. Although a few writers acknowledge that ancient societies practiced urban agriculture, they view it as in isolated and rare practice limited to a few isolated places. Most writers about modern cities, of course, just ignore deep history. To them, urban agriculture is something new, a product of the sustainability movement. For example, the "Solutions" website wrote in November 2010 that urban agriculture is "a new movement."

In fact, urban agriculture was a "new movement" several thousand years ago.  The history of ancient urban agriculture has yet to be written, but there are some good archaeological and historical examples from the area where I do fieldwork, ancient Mesoamerica. Swedish archaeologist Christian Isendahl (2010) performed chemical analysis of ancient soils to show that the ancient Maya grew crops within their low-density cities. Calixtlahuaca, the Aztec-period urban site where I am working now, was a giant cultivated hillside; people built stone terraces for their houses and for gardens. But the most spectacular example of ancient urban agriculture in Mesoamerica was the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan.

Tenochtitlan, the island capital

Urban agriculture at Tenochtitlan is not a new discovery. It was known to Europeans from the time Hernando Cortés and his band of Spanish soldiers entered the Aztec capital in 1519. They remarked on the many green areas devoted to farming. The famous Aztec chinampas (often incorrectly called "floating gardens) covered many acres of the city. Built on a island in a large lake, Tenochtitlan was crossed by many canals. Indeed, the Spaniards called it "the Venice of the New World."

The chinampas are a remarkable form of agriculture. They were very intensively cultivated, with three to four crops a year. The chinampas are an example of a more widespread farming system called raised fields. This was a system of farming in swamps or shallow lakes. Soil was scooped up from the lake bottom and piled onto long parallel rows. The fields were sometimes held in place with trees or wood stakes. Crops planted on top of the rows had easy access to water, and the soils were very rich. Periodically the canals between the fields were cleaned out and the muck piled on top of the field (a process known as "mucking"). This material was rich in decaying organic material, a great natural fertilizer.

Aztec map of a chinampa area

Raised fields were devised a thousand years or more before the Aztecs in lowland Mesoamerica, and the system was  used by the Classic Maya (AD 0-800). In South America, raised fields were invented independently, and large systems were built in the Llanos de Mojos of Bolivia, and around the edges of Lake Titicaca between Bolivia and Peru.

By the time Tenochtitlan was founded (AD 1325), this was an ancient agricultural method in Mesoamerica, although rare in the highlands. The Mexica people founded their city in the shallow waters of Late Texcoco. As the city expanded, vast areas of chinampas were constructed at the city edges.The island was located in an area where the salty waters of Lake Texcoco met the fresh waters of Lake  Xochimilco in the south. When Tenochtitlan grew large, a system of dikes was built to keep the salty waters away from the city (and to control flooding).

Urban chinampa fields in Tenochtitl

A remarkable Aztec map (black-and-white figure at right) shows one area of Tenochtitlan with large canals and footpaths, blocks of parallel chinampas, and the houses of farmers. Soon after the Spanish conquest, the Aztec peoples started using the machinery of the Spanish legal system, including written wills. These chinampa farmers left
their houses and fields to their descendents, and the wills often contain maps of their holdings. The next figure shows some of these drawings, compiled from such wills by ethnohistorian Edward Calnek. Most farmers owned two or three fields, located adjacent to their houses. As shown by the painting of Tenochtitlan at the top of this entry, the Aztec capital (with its 100,000+ inhabitants) was ringed with chinampas.

In addition to Tenochtitlan, Lakes Xochimilco and Chalco (south of the city) were covered with chinampas in Aztec times. Although this system was highly productive, it met only a portion of the food needs of the imperial capital. Food was also obtained through the markets and through taxes.

Chinampero in 1900

After the Spanish conquest, Tenochtitlan became Mexico City. Lake Texcoco was drained and the chinampas no longer functioned. In Lake Xochimilco, however, the chinampas continued to be farmed in the colonial period and are still active today, growing flowers and vegetables for the Mexico City market.

Tourist boats at the "floating gardens"

The chinampero (chinampa farmer) in this great 1900 photograph (from the 3rd edition of my book, The Aztecs) is using a flat-bottom canoe of the type used by his Aztec ancestors. Today, the Lake Xochimilco chinampas are a tourist attraction. You can ride in a larger version of these canoes and see the fields up close, and you can even be serenaded by a mariachi band in a boat (for a fee). For tourists, the chinampas are called "floating gardens." These fields obviously do not float. That label probably comes from the practice of using floating rafts for germinating the plants, which are then transplanted into the chinampa surface.

Urban fields in Zinacantepec, 1579

The chinampas of Tenochtitlan are one of the more spectacular examples of ancient urban agriculture, but they are far from unique in the Aztec world. An early colonial map from Zinacantepec ("place [or hill] of the bat"), shows fields and houses in and around the town. Zinacantepec, located near Toluca and Calixtlahuaca, was a city-state prior to the Spanish conquest. This early map probably preserves much of the ancient settlement pattern (with the addition of a Christian church). Look closely at the nine houses surrounding the church. This was the downtown area of the town, and the artist had painted much of the area between the houses in green, indicating cultivated fields (the green is faint, but clearly present in this part of the map).

Medieval urban herb garden

A search of ancient and premodern cities in other parts of the world would no doubt turn up many other examples of urban agriculture. Just this morning I just found a great color illustration of a Medieval urban herb garden from a 15th century French manuscript.

When writers today call urban agriculture a "new movement," they are in error. But I am less interested in correcting such errors than in bringing to light a whole world of urban possibilities that existed in past times. The more we know about the past, the better we will be able to plan for the future. Look at the quotation from Winston Churchill in the top right corner of this blog: "The farther back we look, the farther ahead we can see." Or, in the words, of former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, “It’s very hard to know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been.”

Here are some sources on the Aztec chinampas. The first complete and scholarly book on the city of Tenochtitlan to be published in English is now in press (Rojas 2012); it has much good information on chinampas and other features of the island city.

Ávila López, Raúl
1991    Chinampas de Iztapalapa, D.F. Colección Científica, vol. 225. Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City.

Calnek, Edward E.
1973    The Localization of the Sixteenth Century Map Called the Maguey Plan. American Antiquity 38:190-195.

2003    Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco: The Natural History of a City / Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco: La Historia Natural de una Ciudad. In El urbanismo en mesoamérica / Urbanism in Mesoamerica, edited by William T. Sanders, Alba Guadalupe Mastache, and Robert H. Cobean, pp. 149-202. Proyecto Urbanismo dn Mesoamérica / The Mesoamerican Urbanism Project, vol. 1. Pennsylvania State University and Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, University Park and Mexico City.

Rojas, José Luis de
2012    Tenochtitlan: Capital City of the Aztec Empire. University Press of Florida, Gainesville. In press,

Smith, Michael E.
2012    The Aztecs. 3rd ed. Blackwell Publishers, Oxford.

For more context on urban agriculture see:

Boone, Christopher G. and Ali Modarres
2006    City and Environment. Temple University Press, Philadelphia.

Isendahl, Christian
2010    Greening the Ancient City: The Agro-Urban Landscapes of the Pre-Hispanic Maya. In The Urban Mind: Cultural and Environmental Dynamics, edited by Paul Sinclair, Gullög Nordquist, Frands Herschend, and Christian Isendahl, pp. 527-552. Studies in Global Archaeology, vol. 15. Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala University, Uppsala.

Ljungkvist, John, Stephan Barthel, Göran Finnveden, and Sverker Sörlin
2010    The Urban Anthropocene: Lessons for Sustainability From the Environmental History of Constantinople. In The Urban Mind: Cultural and Environmental Dynamics, edited by Paul Sinclair, Gullög Nordquist, Frands Herschend, and Christian Isendahl, pp. 367-390. Studies in Global Archaeology, vol. 15. Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala University, Uppsala.

Arcosanti: Paolo Soleri's futuristic vision of urbanism

Fig. 1 - view of Arcosanti

The other day my wife and I visited Arcosanti, the futuristic urban development in the desert an hour north of Phoenix (fig. 1). This is the brianchild, and life's work, of visionary architect Paolo Soleri. In the 1960s Soleri developed ideas about sustainable and livable cities for the future. At first glance, his idealized drawings and plans (figure 2) seem like unrealistic fantasies, disconnected from reality. But Arcosanti, still very much a work in progress, shows how Soleri's vision is starting to be expressed on the landscape. "Arcology" is Soleri's term for his cities (from ARChitecture and eCOLOGY).

Fig. 2 - One of Soleri's plans for a future city

Soleri advocates recycling of materials, waste reduction, energy conservation, and renewable energy sources. Cities should be dense, not sprawling. Expansion, through construction, should move upward, not outward (fig. 2), in order to reduce the impact on the landscape and keep people close together. Surrounding areas should remain as green or natural landscapes. People should be able to live, work, and shop within a relatively small area, without need for cars. Some of these ideas were later taken up by the new urbanism.

In 1961 Soleri worked out an interesting construction technique called "earth casting" for the production of dome roofs. In one variant, sand and silt are piled up into a mound, and cement is poured on top to make a dome. Spaces are left on the sides for doors and windows. Then the dirt is dug out, leaving the dome roof in place. In other variants, wood frames are used instead of earth mounds.Figure 1 shows some of the cement dome roofs at Arcosanti.

Fig. 3 - The extent of Arcosanti today

The construction of Arcosanti has been in process for four decades, and it falls far short of Soleri's original plan. Instead of the planned 5,000 residents, there are fewer than 100 people living there today. Figure 3 shows its extent today. In addition to the urban site, there is considerable land surrounding it, with gardens and orchards. Soleri refuses to take corporate donations, instead financing work through the sale of bronze and ceramic wind bells. These bells are quite nice, visually attractive with very nice sound (figure 4); we have two in our patio, where they tell us the strength of the wind. The bells are forged on site, using a casting method similar to earth casting, but on a much smaller scale. Bells are also made in Cosanti, Soleri's residence/workshop/foundry/shop in Paradise Valley (much closer to Phoenix). Much of the labor to construct Arcosanti is done by volunteers who attend month-long workshops to learn Soleri's construction methods by apprenticeship.

Fig. 4 - Bronze bells forged at Arcosanti

Arcosanti is a kind of utopian community. It is staffed by true believers in Soleri's vision. There are periodic workshops were students and volunteers contribute labor and learn to build using Soleri's methods and materials. The tour guide, clearly a follower of his ideas, told us that living space is apportioned on the basis of need: large families get larger quarters and smaller families get smaller lodgings. I asked what would happen if someone wanted a bigger apartment just to have a big place; I was told that things did not work that way in Arcosanti.

Fig. 5 - Small evaporative cooling pool.

My wife and I found Arcosanti to be a pleasant and very livable place. There are trees and vegetation and the construction is aesthetically pleasing. Soleri's positive construction methods are clearly in evidence, including passive solar heating methods for the winter, and evaporative cooling ponds (fig. 5) for the summer. But Arcosanti is not a city yet, and perhaps it will never be one. At the current construction rate, it will take decades, perhaps centuries, to complete.

Ultimately I was frustrated from the tour - I want to see a city with people, not a pleasant construction site with  some finished buildings. Can Soleri's ideas work in practice? What would life be like in such a settlement? I am fascinated by his vision and by the parts of Arcosanti that have already been built, but even after four decades it seems too soon to get an idea of what an "arcology" would be like.

Arcosanti has a nice website with lots of information about its history, construction, ideals, as well as volunteer opportunities, tours, and the like. Paolo Soleri has a number of books that explain his ideas and work; several are listed below. David Grierson has done a study of Arcosanti and has several papers available on the Internet. His work, like most things available on Arcosanti, are strongly positive and supportive of Soleri's vision. I did find one negative scholarly voice, however. In an interesting and insightful article in the University of Michigan journal Agora, urban planner Catherine Gaines Sanders states,

"Arcosanti, like many experiments in sustainable living, has been successful; however, it is not a city. ... These numbers [100 residents, not the planned 5,000] do not constitute the 'urban effect'. As an urban experiment, Arcosanti is a failure." (Sanders 2008:21)

While that sounds like a harsh judgment, I must agree with it. Soleri's ideas and vision are positive and inspiring, but they have yet to be put into practice. While I respect his insistence on independence from commercial or corporate funding, the result is an unfinished settlement in the desert. Perhaps he has valuable advice for the future of urbanism, but until someone builds an "arcology", the jury is still out.

REFERENCES

Grierson, David
2001    The Architecture of Communal Living: Lessons from Arcosanti in Arizona. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Communal Studies Conference: Communal Living on the threshold of a New Millennium: Lessons and Perspectives, pp. 215-228. International Communal Studies Association, Israel.

2003    Arcology and Arcosanti: Towards a Sustainable Built Environment. Electronic Green Journal 18:(published online).  .

2003    Arcosanti. In Encyclopedia of Community: From the Village to the Virtual World, edited by Karen Christensen and David Levinson, pp. (published online). Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA. 


Sanders, Catherine Gaines
    2008    Paolo Soleri: Another Urban Utopian. Agora 2:18-22.

Soleri, Paolo
1973    Arcology : the city in the image of man. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.

1987    Arcosanti : an urban laboratory? 2nd ed. VTI Press, Santa Monica, CA.

Were ancient cities sustainable ?

As an archaeologist, I have a very different view of sustainability than most scholars who study the contemporary world. For sustainability today, one of the standard definitions is that of Gro Harlem Bruntland: “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” There is much debate and discussion about this definition and its usefulness, but the dual components of current practices and potential future outcomes are fundamental for most writers.

Archaeology deals with human society over long time spans—centuries and even millennia. For me, a sustainable society is one that lasts for a long time. In central Mexico, Teotihuacan society flourished for five centuries or more, while many of the societies that came later were only around for a couple of centuries before collapsing. Teotihuacan was far more sustainable. People sometimes wonder why Classic Maya civilization collapsed, assuming that their society and practices must have been defective. But the Maya cities lasted even longer than Teotihuacan. My own society in the USA has lasted less than half as long as the Classic Maya, so perhaps the Maya had a more sustainable society than we have today.

As for urban sustainability, consider these three definitions:

• “a sustainable city is one in which the community has agreed on a set of sustainability principles and has further agreed to pursue their development” (Munier 2007:17).
• “For cities, I have defined sustainability as reducing Ecological Footprint (energy, water, land materials, waste) while simultaneously improving quality of life (health, housing, employment, community) within the capacity constraints of the city” (Newman 2006).
• “when we talk about urban sustainability, we should consider several issues: survival of the settlement through time, environmental impacts on landscapes, and quality of life for inhabitants” (Grant 2004:24).

The first definition cannot be applied to ancient cities. Even if people in ancient Babylon, say, had agreed on sustainability principles (a laughable idea), we would not have any evidence of this today. The second definition at least makes sense to an archaeologist. But only the third definition (by Jill Grant) is really applicable to ancient cities.

The study of modern urban sustainability does not ask whether cities will fail or not, but whether a given quality of urban life can continue into the future. One reason for this neglect of what seems an obvious question to an archaeologist is the fact that, in the words of Thomas Campanella (2006:142), “the modern city is virtually indestructible.” Research on the effects of natural disasters on contemporary and recent cities shows that modern cities (from Beirut to New Orleans) nearly always survive just about anything that nature or people can throw at them.

The reasons for the resiliency of modern cities in the face of physical disaster are listed by Campanella (2006:142):

1. modern nation states have a vested interest in the well-being of their cities.
2. private property laws ensure the continuing organization of urban space, even after physical destruction.
3. the modern insurance industry lessens economic impacts of disasters.
4. urban infrastructure is complex and multilayered, and is rarely destroyed totally.

These conditions do not hold for most preindustrial cities, making it difficult to compare ancient urban sustainability (how long did cities survive?) with modern sustainability (can present lifestyles continue into the future?). Campanella (2006:141) goes on to suggest that the situation was only slightly different in the past. He asserts that after A.D. 1100 very few cities were destroyed or abandoned. Now any archaeologist who has undertaken a landscape survey knows this is not the case; landscapes all over the world are littered with destroyed and abandoned urban sites. Many ancient cities failed, but should we consider them sustainable or not? This is a topic that needs much more research by archaeologists. The current infatuation with societal collapse (e.g., Diamond 2004) takes our perspective away from sustainability and gives a biased picture of ancient societies. Instead of claiming that the Classic Maya were deficient because their cities collapsed, perhaps we should call them wildly successful for forging a vibrant civilization in a harsh environment that lasted for many hundreds of years.

I find it remarkable that even in the absence of the kind of modern urban safety net described by Campanella, many ancient cities managed to survive for many centuries, and some lasted for millennia (think of Rome or Babylon or Jerusalem). This sure sounds like sustainability to me.

This post is based on some of the themes in Smith (2010).


REFERENCES:

Campanella, Thomas J.
2006 Urban Resilience and the Recovery of New Orleans. Journal of the American Planning Association 72:141-146.

Diamond, Jared
2004 Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Viking, New York.

Grant, Jill
2004 Sustainable Urbanism in Historical Perspective. In Towards Sustainable Cities: East Asian, North American and European Perspectives on Managing Urban Regions, edited by André Sorensen, Peter J. Marcutullio, and Jill Grant, pp. 24-37. Ashgate, Burlington, VT.

Munier, Nolberto
2007 Introduction. In Handbook on Urban Sustainability, edited by Nolberto Munier, pp. 17-88. Springer, Dordrecht.

Newman, Peter
2006 The Environmental Impact of Cities. Environment and Urbanization 18:275-295.

Smith, Michael E.
2010 Sprawl, Squatters, and Sustainable Cities: Can Archaeological Data Shed Light on Modern Urban Issues? Cambridge Archaeological Journal 20:229-253.

Smith, M. (2010). Sprawl, Squatters and Sustainable Cities: Can Archaeological Data Shed Light on Modern Urban Issues? Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 20 (02), 229-253 DOI: 10.1017/S0959774310000259