Birch - From Prehistoric Villages to Cities

Archaeologists have focused a great deal of attention on explaining the evolution of village societies and the transition to a Neolithic way of life. Considerable interest has also concentrated on urbanism and the rise of the earliest cities. Between these two landmarks in human cultural development lies a critical stage in social and political evolution. Throughout the world, at various points in time, people living in small, dispersed village communities have come together into larger and more complex social formations. These community aggregates were, essentially, middle range; situated between the earliest villages and emergent chiefdoms and states. This volume explores the social processes involved in the creation and maintenance of aggregated communities and how they brought about revolutionary transformations that affected virtually every aspect of a society and its culture.

Although a number of studies have addressed coalescence from a regional perspective, less is understood about how aggregated communities functioned internally. The key premise explored in this volume is that large-scale, long-term cultural transformations were ultimately enacted in the context of daily practices, interactions, and what might be otherwise considered the mundane aspects of everyday life. How did these processes play out in diverse and historically contingent settings? What are the strategies and mechanisms that people adopt to facilitate living in larger social formations? What changes in social relations occur when people come together? This volume employs a broadly cross-cultural approach to interrogating these questions, employing case studies that span four continents and more than 10,000 years of human history.

Jennifer Birch is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Georgia, USA.

An Archaeology of Materials
Substantial Transformations in Early Prehistoric Europe
Chantal Conneller

Roman Urban Street Networks
Streets and the Organization of Space in Four Cities
Alan Kaiser

Tracing Prehistoric Social Networks through Technology
A Diachronic Perspective on the Aegean
Edited by Ann Brysbaert

Hadrian's Wall and the End of Empire
The Roman Frontier in the 4th and 5th Centuries
Rob Collins

U.S. Cultural Diplomacy and Archaeology
Soft Power, Hard Heritage
Christina Luke and Morag M. Kersel

The Prehistory of Iberia
Debating Early Social Stratification and the State
Edited by Maria Cruz Berrocal, Leonardo Garca Sanjun, and Antonio Gilman

Materiality and Consumption in the Bronze Age Mediterranean
Louise Steel

Archaeology in Environment and Technology
Intersections and Transformations
Edited by David Frankel, Jennifer M. Webb and Susan Lawrence

An Archaeology of Land Ownership
Edited by Maria Relaki and Despina Catapoti

From Prehistoric Villages to Cities
Settlement Aggregation and Community Transformation
Edited by Jennifer Birch

From Prehistoric Villages to Cities

Settlement Aggregation and Community Transformation

Edited by Jennifer Birch

First published 2013
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Simultaneously published in the UK
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2013 Taylor & Francis

The right of the editors to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

From prehistoric villages to cities: settlement aggregation and community.
pages cm. (Routledge studies in archaeology)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Land settlement patterns, Prehistoric. 2. Land settlement patternsHistory. 3. Cities and towns, AncientHistory. 4. Civilization, Ancient. I. Birch, Jennifer.
GN799.S43F76 2013
930dc23
2012049471

ISBN: 978-0-415-83661-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-45826-6 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC

JENNIFER BIRCH

BLEDA S. DRING

PAUL R. DUFFY, WILLIAM A. PARKINSON, ATTILA GYUCHA, AND RICHARD W. YERKES

DONALD C. HAGGIS

ROBIN A. BECK, JR.

ALISON E. RAUTMAN

HENRY D. WALLACE AND MICHAEL W. LINDEMAN

JENNIFER BIRCH AND RONALD F. WILLIAMSON

CHRISTOPHER B. RODNING

STEPHEN A. KOWALEWSKI

This volume began as a symposium organized for the 2011 Society for American Archaeology (SAA) meetings in Sacramento, California. That session was entitled Come Together: Regional Perspectives on Settlement Aggregation. Our stated aim was to explore the social processes involved in the formation and maintenance of aggregated settlements cross-culturally through multiple spatial and temporal scales of analysis. The participants were invited based on work they had conducted on sites and regions that demonstrated evidence for settlement aggregation at regional and local scales and that had produced large data sets that permitted insights into community-level transformations. Following the session, there was a fair amount of discussion among the participants and audience, who agreed that important themes had emerged that linked the papers together and that could be fruitfully explored in greater depth.

My interest in processes of settlement aggregation stems from my work on the coalescence of ancestral Wendat communities. In the early stages of my dissertation research, my supervisor, Aubrey Cannon, gave me a copy of Stephen Kowalewski's paper Coalescent Societies, which is referenced in . Steve's formulation of coalescent societies provided me with a conceptual framework for exploring processes of aggregation among the precontact Northern Iroquoian communities that were the subject of my dissertation. My aim for the SAA session was to once again take Steve's formulation of coalescent societies down an order of magnitude and explore how these processes played out in communities situated in different temporal, geographic, and cultural contexts.

Half of the chapters in this volume began as papers in that session (Haggis; Beck; Rautman; Birch and Williamson; and Kowalewski as discussant), and half were solicited based on their fi t with the themes and aims of the volume (Dring; Duffy, Parkinson, Gyutcha, and Yerkes; Wallace and Lindeman; and Rodning). Although the geographic scope of the chapters is not exhaustive, they span four continents and cover diverse regions and time periods where settlement aggregation resulted in dramatic processes of social, political, and economic change. As such, they directly address the processes of cultural change that are at the heart of archaeological inquiry.