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!!!!

Inequality - the 99% in ancient times

The level of social inequality is on the rise in modern society, and we increasingly hear about the "One percent" and the "Ninety-nine percent." What were the patterns of inequality in ancient cities and their societies? This is a big topic, and I will just touch on a few aspects here. As with many urban topics, I believe that a better understanding of ancient forms of inequality can only improve our understanding of modern patterns. In this post I will make three points: (1) inequality was greater in ancient states than it is today; (2) ancient states had two social classes; and (3) inequality was regarded as the normal condition of the world.

1. Inequality was greater in ancient states than it is today.

 Although it is difficult to make precise quantitative comparisons, most scholars agree that the level of inequality in wealth and power was much greater in premodern states than it is today. The best study of inequality through history is still Gerhard Lenski's book, Power and Privilege (1966). Lenski shows that the level of inequality varied greatly through prehistory and history (see the chart above). He proposes a theory that the level of inequality is determined by two major factors: the size of the available surplus (determined by resources, technology, and social organization), and the level of concentration of power. The powerful kings of ancient states ruled over societies with high levels of inequality. The diagram is from Collins (1988, p.156), and a nice brief discussion of Lenski's theory is found in Collins (2004).

In the diagram, the highest levels of inequality (and concentration of power) came in what Lenski calls agrarian societies: these are ancient states plus more recent states prior to the Industrial Revolution. In modern times, the overall level of inequality has dropped, and that decline actually started in Roman times. Since the Roman Empire, the amount of economic surplus has risen greatly, but inequality has declined, largely because of the rise of more democratic governments. (This diagram only shows the broad outlines of history, and it is not meant to be accurate on a detailed scale, such as for the recent past).

2. Ancient states had two social classes -- elite and commoner.

Although there was much variation in the expression of inequality and patterns of social stratification among ancient states, one generalization stands out: most of these societies were divided into two social classes. (see my prior post on whether ancient cities had a middle class or not).Sometimes there was mobility between classes, and sometimes class boundaries were fixed by law and custom. The caste system of India was a particularly closed system of stratification, whereas mobility was easier in Roman society.  For more information see Trigger (2003) or Sjoberg (1960).

3. Severe inequality was regarded as the normal condition of the world.

Medieval peasants paying their taxes

In the words of Bruce Trigger, “inequality [in early states] was regarded as a normal condition and injustice as a personal misfortune or even as an individual’s just deserts rather than as a social evil.” (p.142). And, “The general pervasiveness of inequality ensured that its legitimacy went unquestioned.” (142). The medieval peasants in the above woodcut (from 1488) may not have been happy about paying taxes to their lord, but they rarely questioned the legitimacy of his position. For more discussion of this, see M.G. Smith (1966) or works by Charles Tilly (1998, 2001). Tilly has developed (in my opinion)  the best general theory for how inequality works in society. Most of his examples are from modern society, but his theory applies to the ancient world as well.

I don't have any grand conclusion to offer about ancient inequality. It is important not to draw simplistic implications from this kind of information. For example, the fact that inequality today is lower than it was in ancient Egypt or Rome does not mean that we should diminish the importance of rising inequality. In modern society, high levels of inequality generate many social (and moral) problems (Wilkinson and  Pickett 2009). A better knowledge about how inequality worked in the past, however, can help us understand modern inequality, and may even suggest some possible solutions

References

Collins, Randall
1988    Theoretical Sociology. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Hew York.

2004    Lenski's Power Theory of Economic Inequality: A Central Neglected Question in Stratification Research. Sociological Theory 22(2):219-228.

Lenski, Gerhard E.
1966    Power and Privilege: A Theory of Social Stratification. Edited by New York, McGraw-Hill.

Sjoberg, Gideon
1960    The Preindustrial City: Past and Present. The Free Press, New York.

Smith, M. G.
1966    Pre-Industrial Stratification Systems. In Social Structure and Mobility in Economic Development, edited by Neil J. Smelser and Seymour M. Lipset, pp. 141-176. Aldine, Chicago.

Tilly, Charles
1998    Durable Inequality. University of California Press, Berkeley.

2001    Relational Origins of Inequality. Anthropological Theory 1(3):355-372.

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

Wilkinson, Richard G. and Kate Pickett
2009    The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. Bloomsbury Press, New York.

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.

Archaeology as a social science

Excavated house at Calixtlahuaca

I haven't been posting very often lately because I have been on sabbatical leave, working hard to finish a book manuscript: Aztec Communities and Households: Archaeologists Discover a Sustainable Way of Life. I have gotten a draft finished, and now I am looking for a literary agent so that I can attract a publisher to provide a broad, nonspecialist, readership.

Today this paper was posted online by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

Smith, Michael E., Gary M. Feinman, Robert D. Drennan, Timothy Earle, and Ian Morris
    2012    Archaeology as a Social Science. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109:(published online).

I have posted the paper here.  ||  There is some ASU publicity about the paper here.

We argue that because of recent fieldwork and methodological advances, archaeology is now starting to contribute knowledge to the social sciences beyond anthropology. We illustrate this point with several examples:

• Early village society
• Cities and urban planning
• States and markets in deep history
• Standards of living.

 These are topics covered to some extent by various social sciences (economics, political science, historical sociology, urban studies), and for each, archaeologists now have data that relate to current concerns in those fields.

 A brief section on urban planning includes the figure shown above to illustrate the point that cities with unplanned neighborhoods (e.g., the Yoruba city Ado Ekiti) were much more common in the ancient past than fully-planned orthogonal cities (e.g., the Greek city Priene), despite the common assumption that ancient cities were mostly like the Greek example.

This is a topic I've blogged about before, for example:

Spatial order, visual order, and urban planning

Are shantytowns a normal form of urban residence?

If you want a copy of the PNAS paper, CLICK HERE.

Did ancient cities have a middle class?

The middle clas

Last night I watched a National Geographic Special on PBS, "Quest for the Lost Maya," Like most of these shows, it combined interesting research material, first-hand images of fieldwork, overly dramatic music and prose, and silly media-speak. Here I want to explore briefly one aspect of the show, the claim that archaeologists (George Bey and William Ringle) have now identified the Maya "middle class." As quoted from the show's website (link above), "Could this be evidence of the Americas' first ever middle class, emerging a full a millennium before 1776?" My answer is "no."

The Maya middle class ??

This is not the first time that Maya archaeologists have claimed to find the Maya middle class; Arlen and Diane Chase made this claim (in print) for the Classic period city of Caracol some time ago (Chase and Chase 1992; 1996).

I am deeply skeptical of such claims, for two reasons. First, comparative analysis of early cities and states by many scholars has shown that in nearly all cases, these societies had a two-class system. Classes are categories of people who have a specific common relationship to wealth, power, and resources (or, in Karl Marx's terms, a specific relationship to the means of production). In ancient urban societies, the elites who controlled wealth and power typically made up somewhere between 5% and 10% of the overall population, and everyone else were commoners. Each of the two social classes contained variation in wealth and power, of course (e.g., slaves, serfs, free commoners, wealthy merchants among the commoner class). Here are some of the authors who provide the data and theoretical concepts to support the two-class model Trigger (2003), Sjoberg (1960), Williamson (2010).

My second objection to the "Maya middle class" argument is that the concept of "middle class" has a specific meaning in comparative social history. This is a class that arose in the context of medieval cities as an urban, commercial class differentiated from the peasants and the nobility by the creation of a new category of wealth: income from commerce. These men were the burghers, and the new commercial middle class was (and is) called the bourgeoisie. As stated by the great historian Henri Pirenne,

·      “Never before had there existed, it seems, a class of men so specifically and strictly urban as was the medieval bourgeoisie.”(Pirenne 1925:132). (see also Kocka 1995).

I doubt any of the Maya experts would claim that their "Maya middle class" was an urban commercial class, equivalent to the medieval Burghers. No one ever claimed for a Maya city that "city air makes one free" (an expression for medieval cities). Medieval European cities represented a radical break with other pre-modern cities in their commercial role, their legal independence from the king, and growing power of a new social class (the bourgeoisie). In these and other traits, the medieval European city  is not a good model for other ancient or premodern cities around the world, such as the Maya.

The Maya archaeologists base their claims for a middle class on evidence that some commoners were better off economically than others. The Chases use burial data (some tombs have fancier offerings than others, but they do not seem to be elite burials), and Bey and Ringle use evidence from houses and architecture at the site of Kiuic. I agree completely with them that uncovering evidence for prosperous commoners much earlier than anyone had expected (ca. 500 BC) is an exciting find. But this is not an example of the "middle class" as typically used by scholars outside the realm of Maya archaeology.

So, why claim to have found a Maya "middle class" - why not just say that some Maya commoners were prosperous, or that the commoner social class contained a lot of variation in wealth? (this is the way I see the evidence). I offer three possible explanations:

1. Perhaps the archaeologists want to link their findings to modern society. That is, they want to show that the ancient Maya had similar institutions to modern society, or that they are relevant to modern concerns. Any reader of this blog knows that I sympathize with this urge, but I don't think it justifies misusing a standard social science concept.
2. Perhaps the archaeologists find their new evidence incongruous with traditional models of the Maya and other ancient societies in which commoners are seen as exploited, downtrodden, and miserable, with no wealth or freedom. If you separate out a group of prosperous commoners as a new category, a "middle class," this can preserve the downtrodden commoners view for the rest of the commoners. I am sure that none of the archaeologists would admit to this motive, but the downtrodden commoners view is quite strong for many ancient societies.
3. Perhaps the archaeologists are unfamiliar that the concept "middle class" has a specific usage in social history and social science that does not match the ancient Maya.
4. Perhaps they really think they have identified a new social class, something not present in most other ancient civilizations. That would be an exciting finding, but it would require an explicit theoretical and comparative argument, backed up by considerable data. No one has done this yet, and I don't think it is feasible.

I don't know whether these four suggestions account for why archaeologists want to promote a "Maya middle class." Maya society was fascinating and complex, but there are better ways to describe it.

References:

Chase, Arlen F. and Diane Z. Chase
1996    A Mighty Maya Nation: How Caracol Built an Empire by Cultivating its "Middle Class". Archaeology 49(5):66-72.

Chase, Arlen F. and Diane Z. Chase
1992    Mesoamerican Elites: Assumptions, Definitions, and Models. In Mesoamerican Elites: An Archaeological Assessment, edited by Diane Z. Chase and Arlen F. Chase, pp. 3-17. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.

Kocka, Jürgen
1995    The Middle Classes in Europe. The Journal of Modern History 67(4):783-806.

Pirenne, Henri
1925    Medieval Cities. Princeton University Press, Princeton.

Sjoberg, Gideon
1960    The Preindustrial City: Past and Present. The Free Press, New York.

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

Williamson, Jeffrey G.
2010    Five Centuries of Latin American Income Inequality. Revista de Historia Económica 28(Special Issue 02):227-252.

Archaeology and pink flamingos in Chicago neighborhoods

I just received Robert Sampson's new book on Chicago neighborhoods in the mail, and it got me thinking about some student archaeology projects in Chicago that I supervised years ago. Sampson's book synthesizes many years of research and technical publications, and it looks great. He argues for the importance of urban neighborhoods in understanding cities, poverty, crime, and urban life. Not only is Sampson one of the most prominent urban sociologists, but he also writes well. I'll blog about it here once I've had a chance to read the book. It is published by the University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Chicago is a great city for its distinctive neighborhoods, many based on variation in ethnicity, national origin, wealth, and social class. My first teaching position was at Loyola University of Chicago, and for a couple of years I sent students out to do research on modern material culture in Chicago. The students did the kind of research archaeologists normally do, but addressed at modern Chicago, not at ancient sites.

For example, archaeologists often compare different contexts (neighborhoods, or houses, or settlements) in terms of the kinds of material objects each had. These could be portable artifacts, or buildings or architectural spaces. We use the differences in artifacts between contexts to make inferences about social differences in the past. But do wealthy and poor neighborhoods really differ in their material remains? Archaeologists rely on knowledge of modern and recent contexts to generate analogies (formal comparisons) to interpret the past. We study these issues in modern contexts where we know both the material remains and their social significance, and then we apply that knowledge to the past. While it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that rich and poor neighborhoods look different in their housing, their streets, and innumerable material measures, it is still useful to have firm data about how these relationships between artifacts and society work today, so that we can make better inferences about the distant past.

I wish I had kept better records about the student projects. I recall two projects where students selected an upper middle class neighborhood and a working class neighborhood and compared them systematically. One student was an ardent cyclist, and her project focused on bicycles parked at high schools in the two neighborhoods. Not surprisingly, one could predict the neighborhood on the basis of the types of bikes found at the schools. Another student, interested in gardening, looked at landscaping--the kinds of trees and bushes planted in the two neighborhoods (both in yards, and in public spaces). Again, the differences were clear. Actually, Robert Sampson carried out some generally similar research as part of his studies of Chicago neighborhoods, recording information about building types, trash in public places, graffiti, types of stores, and other observable traits of the urban build environment. He related those data to information on poverty, crime and social dynamics in various neighborhoods. Maybe he should be an archaeologist! If he ever gets tired of sociology, we can find things for him to do......

Another project I recall was done by a student who had a job working in the field house of a large public park. She rented out sports equipment and did other tasks relating to use of the park for sports activities. But in addition to the regular legal use of the park, there were quite a few unofficial, informal, and illegal activities going on. She did an archaeological survey, noting the presence and types of artifacts on the ground surface in different parts of the park (this was a survey WITHOUT artifact pick-up!). It turns out that the various informal activities were divided into separate areas, all out of sight behind vegetation and other features. Lovers used one part of the park (as evidenced by small foil packages), winos were in another area (bottles), and the junkies used a third place (needles). One issue in the use of space (in both modern and ancient cities) is whether activities are separated into specialized places, or whether they share common spaces, perhaps at different times. This project was called something like "Illicit activities in a Chicago city park."

My favorite student project on Chicago material culture was a test of the hypothesis that lawn ornaments were associated with ethnicity. If you asked people in Chicago about who tended to have lots of lawn ornaments -- pink flamingos, blue balls, jockeys holding lanterns, upturned bathtubs with shrines -- the most common answer was that the Polish people had lots of ornaments. But the Poles said that the Italians or Mexicans were the ones with lots of junk on their lawns. The basic local story was that lawn ornamentation was associated with ethnicity. The student had seen a neighborhood where lots of houses had lots of lawn ornaments, so she set out to see if these were associated with a particular ethnic group. She got a list of names and addresses in this neighborhood (from a Democratic party worker), and used surname as a measure of ethnicity for each household. This was obviously a rough measure, but good enough for a student term paper. She also counted the lawn ornaments on each lawn, and made a map of the neighborhood showing the distribution of the numbers of ornaments (this student went on go get a Ph.D. in archaeology).

It turns out that the number of ornaments had nothing to do with ethnicity (in this neighborhood, at least). There was a hot spot on one street -- two houses, diagonally across from one another, had far more ornaments than anybody else. These two homeowners were in competition with one another, and they both went bonkers with more than 100 things in their front yards. But they clearly had an effect on their neighbors, because most yards on that one street had far more ornaments than elsewhere in the area. In fact, the map showed a steady decline in the frequency of ornaments as one moved away from the two top houses (a nice distance decay distribution, to be technical). So, in this one Chicago neighborhood, ethnicity had nothing to do with the frequency (or type) of lawn ornaments. Instead, two homeowners went nuts competing with one another for the gaudiest yard, and their neighbors joined in and put lots of things in their yards too.


So in this case, archaeological methods of studying the spatial and quantitative distributions of artifacts yielded information about modern society in Chicago. While archaeologists more commonly use insights from modern cities to interpret ancient cities, in this case archaeological methods from ancient cities contributed to our knowledge of modern cities. Research on past and present cities can be a two-way street.

Cahokia: "America's Lost City"

"America's Lost City" is the title of a very nice article on Cahokia in the NewsFocus section of Science Magazine (23 Dec, 2012). The article, by science writer Andrew Lawler, describes current archaeological research at Cahokia and related sites, and he interviews many of the relevant archaeologists(Lawler 2011). This is a great supplement and follow-up to my earlier post, "Cahokia: Native American Urban Center on the Mississippi." The experts interviewed by Lawler seem to agree that Cahokia was clearly an urban settlement. The fact that they make a big deal out of this issue suggests that there must still be those who doubt such a classification.

John Clark, a Mesoamericanist, notes, "If you found this [Cahokia] in the Mayan lowlands, there would be no doubt that this was a city. It would be in the top 10 of all Mesoamerican cities."  That is a good way to describe the situation. We know the Mayas and Aztecs built cities, and no one would question the urban status of this site if it were located in Mesoamerica. But since it is in North America, where ancient native societies have generally been viewed as "less complex" than their cousins to the south, people need more convincing that Cahokia was, indeed, a city.

One interesting topic discussed by Lawler is population size. There are debates between archaeologists about whether Cahokia should be considered a single settlement within a larger area of many settlements, or whether the entire zone (east and west of the Mississippi River) should be considered a single dispersed settlement. To me, this is not a productive argument. How one classifies settlements depends on one's goals, and there is no absolute right or wrong answer here. For some purposes it is most useful to view Cahokia as a single settlement, and for other purposes it makes sense to consider the distribution of settlement over the entire area. But in discussing the issue, Lawler paraphrases Timothy Schilling as noting that Cahokia or the region "did not have the concentrated density of European of Mayan cities" (p.1622). I think he is wrong here, and that Cahokia probably had a higher population density than Maya cities.

Now I don't know the demographic data for Cahokia and its hinterland, but I think the population density within the Cahokia urban center was probably HIGHER than within Maya cities, but the population density of the "Greater Cahokia" region was most likely lower than that of the Maya lowlands.

Maya cities had very low URBAN population densities (even compared to a sprawling modern city like Phoenix):

• Tikal (Maya):    600 persons per square kilometer
• New York City:  9,400
• Phoenix:    1,900

But the Maya lowlands had a very high  REGIONAL population densities:

• Maya lowlands:  180 persons per sq. km
• New York State:   150
• Illinois:   80
• Arizona:  17

The high density of Maya regional populations (how many people lived on the landscape, whether in large or small settlements) is one of the remarkable features of ancient Maya society. I'd be interested to see how Cahokia fits in comparison with these figures. But in any case, there is no doubt that Cahokia was an urban settlement.

For more discussion of some of the issues of how archaeologists (and others) define cities, see some of my prior posts, What is a City? Definitions of the Urban, or Defining Cities and Urbanism (again).

Reference:

Lawler, Andrew  (2011)  America's Lost City. Science 334:1618-1623.