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Annual Review of Anthropology

Volume 53, 2024

The Archaeology of Early Cities: “What Is the City but the People?”

  • Manuel Fernández-Götz1 and Michael E. Smith2
  • 1School of History, Classics, and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom; email: [email protected] 2School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, USA
  • Vol. 53:231-247 (Volume publication date October 2024)
  • First published as a Review in Advance on July 22, 2024
  • Copyright © 2024 by the author(s).
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information.

Abstract

The archaeology of early urbanism is a growing and dynamic field of research, which has benefited in recent years from numerous advances at both a theoretical and a methodological level. Scholars are increasingly acknowledging that premodern urbanization was a much more diverse phenomenon than traditionally thought, with alternative forms of urbanism now identified in numerous parts of the world. In this article, we review recent developments, focusing on the following main themes: () what cities are (including questions of definitions); () what cities do (with an emphasis on the concentration of people, institutions, and activities in space); () methodological advances (from LiDAR to bioarchaeology); () the rise and fall of cities (through a focus on persistence); and () challenges and opportunities for urban archaeology moving forward. Our approach places people—with their activities and networks—at the center of analysis, as epitomized by the quotation from Shakespeare used as the subtitle of our article.

Keyword(s): comparative approaches, methodological revolution, premodern cities, settlement persistence, urban heterogeneity
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