The Urban Revolution, now online

V. Gordon Childe at Skara Brae in Orkney

The journal Town Planning Review is making articles from its special 100th Anniversary issues, (the "Centenary papers") available online without charge. Take a look. This journal published V. Gordon Childe's very important and influential paper "The Urban Revolution" in 1950. When I heard they were soliciting papers for this anniversary celebration, I suggested that an update on the Urban Revolution would be appropriate. They agreed, and in 2009 published my paper, "V. Gordon Childe and the Urban Revolution: An Historical Perspective on a Revolution in Urban Studies." Now you can access that paper, and the other centenary papers, for free at the journal. One thing I pointed out in my article was that Childe's 1950 article was one of the most widely-cited papers published by an archaeologist, even though it was in a planning journal rather than an archaeology journal.

Pyramid at Teopanzolco, an early Aztec city

Many people remain confused about just what is meant by the phrase "Urban Revolution." Childe did NOT use the phrase to describe the origins of cities. Rather, he used it as a label for the transition from smaller-scale societies to urban, state-level societies. In other words, the Urban Revolution refers to much larger societal changes, such as the growth of social inequality, the formation of centralized governments, the origins of writing, and the development of specialized economies. And, of course, the rise of the first cities. Childe's point was that the Urban Revolution signaled a series of fundamental and related social changes, and not just the origins of cities.

While Childe's model of the Urban Revolution remains important and influential today, I now tend to see urbanism as a broader phenomenon that just cities in state societies. I think that a number of non-state level societies (many chiefdoms) have urban centers, and that the various characteristics of the "Urban Revolution" in fact developed at different rates in different areas. That is, they did not come as a single package, all developing at the same time. But still, the end result of the transformation from small-scale societies to early urban states  was a radical new kind of society. The Urban Revolution was, in my mind, the single greatest social transformation in the history of our species.

Check some of my former posts on the Urban Revolution, check out Childe's paper, and take a look at mine too:

"Myths of the Urban Revolution"

"Was the Urban Revolution really a revolution"


 Childe, V. Gordon  (1950)  The Urban Revolution. Town Planning Review 21:3-17.

Smith, Michael E.  (2009)  V. Gordon Childe and the Urban Revolution: An Historical Perspective on a Revolution in Urban Studies. Town Planning Review 80:3-29.  You can get this paper on the TPR site, or on my website.

Ur, one of the earliest cities

Violence in ancient times: Hobbes vs. Rousseau

Are humans naturally violent or peaceful? Was life violent or peaceful before the Urban Revolution and states? What about prior to the origins of human society? For centuries these questions have been discussed in reference to the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes. A recent issue of the journal Science has a very interesting theme section on "Human Conflict" (Science, volume 336, no. 6083, 18 May, 2012). There are some excellent journalistic reviews of research (see the Lawler papers cited below), and some interesting technical papers by experts on these topics such as Christopher Boehm and Samuel Bowles.

Andrew Lawler's piece, "The Battle over Violence" reviews some of the ideas in anthropology and archaeology. The subtitle of his paper is "Under the long shadow of Rousseau and Hobbes, scientists debate whether civilization spurred or inhibited warfare--and whether we have the data to know." This is a great article; Lawler says what I have thought for years -- that we don't have enough solid evidence to choose between opposing viewpoints, and that the conclusions of many scholars owe more to their philosophical positions than to the empirical evidence.

Rousseau argued that life before the state was more peaceful and egalitarian, and that states brough inequality, oppression, and fear. Hobbes, on the other hand, argued that life in the 'state of nature" (that is, life before states) was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." States brought order, peace, prosperity, and progress. Liberals tend to look to Rousseau for philosophical inspiration, while conservatives look to Hobbes.

We know there was quite a bit of violence in ancient societies, to judge from skeletons with trauma and other evidence. But just how much violence? Different archaeologists can look at the same data and come to different conclusions. What does this mean? It means that we don't have good enough data, or good enough methods for interpreting those data, to make a solid, scientific conclusions.

A related question is ethnographic, not archaeological. Is there more or less violence in egalitarian (non-state) human societies compared to states? Again, there are lots of low- and medium-quality data, a dearth of good methods, and a diversity of opinions on the matter. A recent paper by a criminologist (Amy Nivette) has assembled most of the information and taken a good hard look. She points out the problems of making inferences from the data; not surprisingly, the !Kung or Shoshone hunter/gatherers don't keep modern crime statistics. Nivette shows that the nature of violence and conflict is much more complicated and culturally-influenced than one would like.

Carcassone

These same points apply to city walls in the past. In some urban traditions all cities were walled for defensive reasons. But in other cases, some cities were walled and others not. The Hobbesian (or materialist) interpretation is that the presence of city walls means that war and attack were the reasons the walls were built. But some scholars (the Rousseau-ians, or idealists) have asserted that walls were often built for symbolic reasons - to have a container for the town that symbolizes its cohesion, or else as a symbol of the power of the ruler or the authorities. So how can we choose between these alternative explanation? I don't know. We need better methods, better models, better ways of testing alternative ideas like this.

The special section in the journal Science is well worth looking at. Lots of good ideas, even if there is not as much hard evidence as we might like. But that is part of science. It is better to acknowledge the difficulty of interpreting scanty or faulty data than to rush ahead and make arguments as strongly as one can for one position or another. (I have discussed this problem of theoretical preconceptions getting in the way of interpreting data in my other blog Publishing Archaeology )

Looking over what I wrote above, I'm not sure I like how I equated Hobbes with materialism and Rousseau with idealism. I am a thorough and hard-core materialist, yet I think that Rousseau was closer to the mark on the advent of inequality and oppression after the Urban Revolution. People had it much better before states (see my "Myths of the urban revolution"). But then I'm not much good with philosophy. Give me data and theory and I'll try to figure out what happened in the past. But don't ask me about the grand meaning of it all.


Lawler, Andrew
2012    The Battle Over Violence. Science 336:829-830.

2012    Civilization's Double-Edged Sword. Science 336:832-833.

Nivette, Amy E.
2011    Violence in Non-State Societies. British Journal of Criminology 51:578-598.

Final note: Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, my favorite novel when I was in college, has a law firm with the name "Saliteri, Poore, Nast, deBrutish, and Short."  Maybe they represent the estate of Thomas Hobbes. Pynchon also has a great argument between two people on whether Beethoven or Rossini was the greater composer. Rossini wins!!!!

Was the "urban revolution" really a revolution ?

Ur, a city from the Urban Revolution

I recent issue of the journal Science features a news article titled, "New Light on Revolutions that Weren't" (by Michael Balter, Science vol 336, 4-May-2012, pages 530-531). The article points out that several cultural transformations in human history that had been called "revolutions" in fact took far longer than had been thought (and, therefore, should not be called revolutions). One is sometimes called the "creative explosion" that signaled the final transition from early hominids to modern human creative cultural behavior (things such as complex tool making and creative aesthetic expressions). It turns out that several of the supposedly modern human traits actually developed closer to 300,000 years ago rather than the 50,000 year age of the supposed "creative explosion." The article goes on to suggest that some traits commonly gathered together under the label "Neolithic Revolution" (e.g., sedentism and plant domestication) actually started several thousand years earlier than had been previously thought.

So what about the "Urban Revolution"  Will that become the next member of the group of "Revolutions that Weren't"?? I'm not holding my breath. For the earlier transitions, these changes just reflect the normal course of the advancement of archaeological knowledge. For any given social transformation, at first we have few sites, little information, and not very good dating. As more fieldwork is done and sites are dated more precisely, changes that had looked sudden start to look more drawn-out. As I have talked about here in several posts (and in some scholarly articles; Smith 2009), the "urban revolution" refers not just to the origins of cities, but to the origins of complex, state-level societies. Urban origins was just one of a number of social transformations that were generally bundled together in different parts of the world. The other big changes were the rise of centralized state polities that could project true social power, the institutionalization of inequality into social classes, and the expansion of economic specialization and activity.

The term revolution, when applied beyond the limited domain of major political upheavals and transformations, generally has two components: A fundamental or major transformation; and a rapid transformation. Just as with the earlier revolutions, archaeologists are finding that inequality did not originate with the earliest states, and that cities can exist in chiefdom societies (previously thought to be pre-urban). So it is not surprising that the Urban Revolution may have taken longer to happen than previously thought. But what has NOT changed is the fact that the Urban Revolution was the single most far-reaching social transformation in the human past. Life in early urban state societies (in, say, Egypt or Mesoamerica) was radically different from life in the Neolithic (tribal farming) societies that preceded them.

With the Urban Revolution, former freedoms and independence (of individuals, households, and communities) were replaced by servitude, taxes, rules and regulations. Society and human life would never be the same again. Two of the clearest descriptions of this process were written by anthropologist Marvin Harris. One is a chapter in his book, Cannibals and Kings called "The Origins of Pristine States" (1977, Vintage books). The other is an essay called "Life without Chiefs," which is posted online. An excellent early scholarly treatment of the archaeological evidence for the Urban Revolution in Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica is Robert McC. Adams' book The Evolution of Urban Society (1966, Aldine Press). For a review of recent thinking on the topic, see my paper on V. Gordon Childe and the Urban Revolution.

So the Urban Revolution is not going to become a "revolution that wasn't" any time soon. Social life was changed far more drastically than during the earlier creative explosions or Neolithic Revolution, or in the later Industrial Revolution. We should not give in to attempts by evolutionary psychologists and some other evolutionary thinkers to pretend that the Urban Revolution never happened. They assert that human society went from tribal ancestors directly to the present, without much of a change in organization or complexity. See my post Deep history vs. the urban revolution on this.

The Urban Revolution was a very big deal in the human past.

 Smith, Michael E.    2009    V. Gordon Childe and the Urban Revolution: An Historical Perspective on a Revolution in Urban Studies. Town Planning Review 80:3-29.

Deep History vs. the Urban Revolution: Which was more important?

Deep History

The deep history of our species — our origins and early development — has seen an explosion of research in the past decade. Knowledge of our hominid ancestors has increased greatly with new fossil finds and new models. A major strand of research right now is the development of modern human capabilities. When did our brains reach their modern size? When did our ancestors begin using modern-like language? What is the earliest evidence for the use of fire, for symbolic behavior, for trade? A hot topic now is the origins of cooperation. Humans engage is cooperative behavior much more frequently and intensively than any other species. How did this come about, and how did it relate to the biological and cultural innovations that made us human? (see Mithen 2006, Richerson & Boyd 2004, Bowles & Gintis 2011).

While I don't want to downplay the importance of this research on human deep history, some caution is required. Authors sometimes suggest that an understanding of deep history  and human biology can explain modern human society (e.g., Pinker 2002). But in tracing out the social development of human society, such authors often ignore a crucial middle territory — the Urban Revolution — that created many of the important features of recent and modern society. This is the conclusion of an outstanding book review by Colin Renfrew (the leading archaeologist today) in the latest issue of American Scientist. Renfrew reviews the book, Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (Shryock and Smail, eds, 2011). I am a big fan of good academic book reviews. The best book reviews are gems: short essays that not only say what the book is about and whether it is good or bad, but also set the book into its intellectual context. Renfrew's review fits in this category.

I own the book, Deep History, which is an admirable attempt by historians to extend our understanding of "history" back into the distant human past. Most chapters are jointly written by various combinations of excellent scholars (archaeologists, anthropologists, historians). But in skimming and reading through it I thought the individual chapters are very good but the sum total is not satisfying. Renfrew's book review explains the basis for my dissatisfaction. Renfrew notes,

The Urban Revolution

"By stressing the very remote past of the hunter-gatherers of the Paleolithic era and then leaping to the modernity of today's world, without much emphasis on the intervening ancient world of Greece and Rome or the earlier civilization of Sumer and Egypt (or indeed of the Incas and the Aztecs), do the authors risk recreating the Noble Savage? By underplaying the ancient civilizations, from Shang China to the Olmec of Mesoamerica, are they perhaps jumping from savagery to modernity without having sufficiently considered the mediating effects of barbarism or of early civilization?" (p. 68).

In other words, the contributors to the book Deep History ignore the Urban Revolution. Starting with the first formulation of this concept by V. Gordon Childe in the 1930s archaeologists have shown how most of the key institutions of modern society (kingship, government, social classes, laws, urbanization, writing, complex economies) originated in the early states around the world, from Mesopotamia to Egypt to China to Mesoamerica. Granted, none of these innovations could have occurred without the development of human cognitive and cooperative abilities. And neither could they have occurred had societies not previously worked out crop domestication and agriculture (the so-called Neolithic Revolution, also a term that originated with Childe). But while the Neolithic Revolution led to some important changes in demography and settlement, the Urban Revolution brought about much more radical and far-reaching changes in the organization of human society.

For more information about the Urban Revolution, see my previous post on this. Better still check out Childe's highly influential article, "The Urban Revolution" (Childe 1950) and my recent commentary on the historical status of that paper (Smith 2009).

The opposition posed above— Deep History vs. the Urban Revolution — is artificial, of course. It is not possible to determine rationally which of these was "more important." But without the Urban Revolution, the innovations of Deep History would never have led to modern society, and we might still be living a tribal life in campsites and villages, rather than a socially complex life in cities and towns.

REFERENCES:

Bowles, Samuel and Herbert Gintis  (2011)  A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and its Evolution. Princeton University Press, Princeton.

Childe, V. Gordon  (1950)  The Urban Revolution. Town Planning Review 21:3-17.

Mithen, Steven  (2006)  After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20000-5000 BC. Harvard University Press, Cambridge.

Pinker, Steven  (2002)  The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Viking, New York.

Richerson, Peter J. and Robert Boyd  (2004)  Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Shryock, Andrew and Daniel Smail (editors)  (2011)  Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Smith, Michael E.  (2009)  V. Gordon Childe and the Urban Revolution: An Historical Perspective on a Revolution in Urban Studies. Town Planning Review 80:3-29.

Myths of the urban revolution

The phrase “Urban Revolution” was coined in the 1930s by archaeologist V. Gordon Childe to describe the transformation of Neolithic village farming society into the urban states and empires of the Bronze Age. Prior to the Urban Revolution there were no kings, no cities, no writing systems, and no social classes. This was perhaps the most extensive and far-reaching social transformation in human history, with greater implications for life and society than either the Industrial Revolution or the Neolithic Revolution (yes, I know, historical sociologists will not believe that anything was more important than the Industrial Revolution).

Today, archaeologists have quite a bit of information about the Urban Revolution, which happened independently in several parts of the ancient world. For background and discussion, see Childe (1950), Smith (2009), Trigger (2003), or Johnson and Earle (2000). The Urban Revolution is not just about the origin of cities; instead it describes a broader set of social transformations, of which urbanization was only one component. (I realize that other writers and websites have used the phrase “urban revolution” to mean widely divergent things, but Childe’s usage dates to 1936, so archaeology wins out by precedent).

So, what are the myths of the urban revolution? I use this phrase to describe things that many people think are true, when in fact they are errors. Here is the big myth of the urban revolution:

• ·        The urban revolution represented  progress for human life, with things improving for individuals and society.

It turns out that archaeology and anthropology have accumulated quite a bit of evidence showing that this was not a positive transformation for most people in most societies. Here is what happened to life and society after the Urban Revolution:

1.      People had to work harder to make a living.

2.      People had less freedom and self-determination.

3.      Human health went into a nose-dive: people had more diseases and lifespan was lowered.

4.      Violence and chaos increased in many cases.

Points 1-3 are strongly supported by considerable empirical evidence. Indeed, these are the kinds of things that get asked on exams in introductory anthropology classes. Point 4, as phrased here, is more controversial, but it includes an important insight often ignored by political scientists and economists—that social order was typically maintained in pre-state and non-state societies. Let’s review these points a bit:

1.      People had to work harder to make a living. Ethnographers have shown that modern hunter-gatherers spend LESS TIME making a living than farmers, and that tribal (not-state) farmers spend LESS TIME to produce the food they need than their peasant descendants after the Urban Revolution. This may seem counter-intuitive: weren’t hunters living at the edge of starvation until farming made life easy for everyone? Well, ethnographers have timed people as they live their lives, and hunter-gatherers put in less time to feed their families than do farmers. And after the Urban Revolution, people not only had to feed their families, they also had to produce a surplus to pay rent and taxes, which made them work longer hours. Archaeological research supports this model, showing, for example, that time-consuming agricultural features (e.g., irrigation canals, or hillside terraces) were generally built AFTER the Urban Revolution. They weren’t needed before then.

2.      People had less freedom. People in tribal societies had considerable freedom to live their lives as they saw fit.  In tribal society there are no leaders with coercive power, no laws or written regulations, no police force. If a family is dissatisfied with life in their group, they can leave and move elsewhere.

3.      Human health went into a nose-dive: people had more diseases and lifespan was lowered. Archaeologists can monitor ancient health and nutritional status by studies of the human skeleton from burials (this field is called bioarchaeology, or human osteology). Populations after the Urban Revolution had higher incidences of many diseases, they had more skeletal markers for childhood deficiencies of protein and other nutrients, and the average age at death went down. There are several reasons for this: diets were less varied, life in cities increased the level of communicable diseases (from dense and unsanitary conditions), and poverty increased. For discussion of points 1-3, see Johnson and Earle (2000), or a textbook such as Harris (1983), or Trigger (2003).

4.      Violence and chaos increased in many cases. This is the only one of my four points that is at all controversial. The extent, nature, and implications of ancient and non-western warfare are currently the subject of extensive debates. These debates draw on archaeological data, ethnographic observations, history, and theoretical models from ecology and economics. My own reading of the evidence is that warfare increased after the Urban Revolution (because states find more reasons to go to war, and their wars are larger scale and more deadly than tribal warfare).

But whether or not I am correct about levels of warfare, one aspect of point #4 is not controversial at all: non-state peoples maintained social order. Life was not chaotic or violent prior to states, and Thomas Hobbes was just plain wrong in calling life in the state of nature (i.e., outside of states) “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Now I realize that some prominent modern scholars have claimed that pre-state life was chaotic and violent. Nobel Prize winner Dougas North and his colleagues, for example, have built a model for social change that posits chaos before the state (North et al. 2009a, b). Life was so chaotic and violent that nothing was accomplished (in their terms, there was little economic growth). So elites had to step in and establish laws and private property and formal government to reduce the endemic violence that Hobbes had described. I’m sorry, but this is just plain incorrect.

My suggestion for anyone who wants to believe in the violence of non-state society is to read some ethnography. This is pretty basic, low-level stuff in the field of anthropology; any student in an introductory cultural anthropology class can probably rattle off the ethnographic evidence for social order and control in tribal society, and the social mechanisms by which order is maintained. If you don’t want to take an intro anthropology class, then try a few of these works: (Harris 1983, 1989; Roberts 1979; Taylor 1982). Or check out Sillitoe and Kuwimb’s (2010) critique of one of Jared Diamond’s recent controversial papers.

So, if the social changes of the Urban Revolution were the opposite of progress (“De-evolution”?? Devo?), then why did it happen at all? Why aren’t we all still hunter-gatherers, or tribal farmers? Good questions. I’m out of space now, so I’ll duck this one for the moment. Let me just say that this is a big research question in modern archaeology.

References:

Childe, V. Gordon

1950    The Urban Revolution. Town Planning Review 21:3-17.

Harris, Marvin

1983    Cultural Anthropology. Harper and Row, New York.

1989    Life Without Chiefs. New Age Journal Nov/Dec: 42-45, 205-209.

Johnson, Allen W. and Timothy K. Earle

2000    The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State. 2nd ed. Stanford University Press, Stanford.

North, Douglass C., John J. Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast

2009a  Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge University Press, New York.

2009b  Violence, Natural States, and Open Access Orders. Journal of Democracy 20(1):55-68.

Roberts, Simon

1979    Order and Dispute: An Introduction to Legal Anthropology. St. Martin's Press, New York.

Sillitoe, Paul and Mako John Kuwimb

2010    Rebutting Jared Diamond's Savage Portrait: What Tribal Societies Can Tell us About Justice and Liberty. StinkyJournalism .Org website:published online.  http://www.stinkyjournalism.org/latest-journalism-news-updates-170.php.

Smith, Michael E.

2009    V. Gordon Childe and the Urban Revolution: An Historical Perspective on a Revolution in Urban Studies. Town Planning Review 80:3-29.

Taylor, Michael

1982    Community, Anarchy and Liberty. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Trigger, Bruce G.

2003    Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study. Cambridge University Press, New York.