Discussion of cities and urbanism from a broad historical and comparative perspective. Can ancient cities help us understand modern urban issues? What is universal about cities and what is particular to individual cities or regions or time periods?
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Read 19 hours ago and current, but nothing has been published for 3 years.
This new paper in Science is getting alot of publicity, and people are asking for my views ( Rostain, et al. 2024) The paper presents fascinating new evidence for a complex settlement system in the Upper Amazon. The press releases say how surprising these finds are, but similar systems have been reported for various parts of lowland South America over the past decade. If you doubt this, please…
There is a media story going around this week about the discovery of a new, "hidden Maya city." Here is the story in the NY Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/20/world/americas/maya-city-yucatan-archaeology-ocomtun.html . The site was found, and is being analyzed, by Slovenian archaeologist Ivan Šprajc. The various Mayanists quoted in the NY Times article enthused over the site, calling it…
This is the second of two posts on my fundamental “theses”: the basic principles of my approach to premodern cities and urbanism. See the first post here: (4) Cities and urban life are structured by the interplay between two sets of processes: centralized, or top-down, processes originate with kings, elites, and central institutions, whereas generative, or bottom-up, processes arise from the…
Martin Luther nailed his theses to the door of the church to mark the public expression of his ideas. I believe that scholars should similarly make their fundamental principles public. My book, Urban Life in the Distant Past , is built on a foundation of five “theses,” or fundamental principles. These describe the major outlines of my theoretical and comparative approach to premodern cities. In…
This post consists mostly of a passage from chapter 3 of my book, Urban Life in the Distant Past. The book will be released in February or March, 2023. This passage is my answer to the question posed in the title. Just for fun, I include here a table from that chapter. For the sample of early cities that I use as case studies, the table compares examples in the New World and Old World. Now, this…
My book, Urban Life in the Distant Past: The Prehistory of Energized Crowding , will be published in February/March, 2023, by Cambridge University Press. This provides one reason to re-start this blog. Another reason is to explore some of the issues in early and comparative urbanism that I have been working on for the past few years. The Covid-19 pandemic coincided with a general decline in blogs…
I just finished reading Eric Klinenberg’s excellent new book, Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life (Klinenberg 2018) . The book is about social cohesion and its value for life and society today. Social cohesion refers to solidarity and togetherness within a society or social group. In one definition: “Social…
This tweet came through yesterday, advertising an article in Forbes: Geologists have mapped a secret tunnel and chamber found beneath an Aztec Pyramid: http:// on.forbes.com/6015EBVRt Geophysical prospection work recently uncovered a tunnel/chamber deep underneath the Pyramid of the Moon at Teotihuacan. This is potentially exciting news; the most spectacular finds at Teotihuacan in the past decade…
This post consists of an outline of themes and topics that relate to the art of Teotihuacan. It is focused on the objects in the exhibit, Teotihuacan: City of Water, City of Fire, currently at the Phoenix Art Museum. This is not a guide to the exhibit. Instead, I describe some of the main themes, gods, contexts, media, and rituals, all found in the objects at the exhibit. For more information…
Two factors conspire right now to emphasize to me the importance of ancient Maya urban demography. First, I finished reading David Webster’s new book, The Population of Tikal (Webster 2018) . Second, today I returned from a Working Group of the Social Reactors Project at the Santa Fe Institute , where our focus was on Maya cities and settlements. Needless to say, we talked a lot about population.…
