Preindustrial Urbanism

Smith, Michael E.
n.d. How Can Archaeologists Identify Early Cities: Definitions, Types, and Attributes. In Eurasia at the Dawn of History: Individualization, Urbanization and Social Differentiation, edited by Manuel Fernández-Götz and Dirk Krausse. Cambridge University Press, New York (in press).  PROOFS

В монографии на максимально широкой и многообразной источниковой базе, с привлечением большого массива отечественной и зарубежной (в том числе африканской) научной литературы реконструирован ход политической истории Бенина и прослежен процесс сложения и эволюции социально-политического строя бенинского общества на протяжении нескольких тысячелетий – с III–II тыс. до н.э. до конца XV в. н.э., с периода этногенеза и социогенеза бини и до момента сложения империи. Осуществлена переоценка устоявшегося в науке взгляда на Бенин как на раннее государство: показано, что бенинское общество не являлось государственным, а воплощало в себе особый тип социально-политической организации, тем не менее, сопоставимый с ранним государством по уровню сложности.

Recent applications of Foucauldian categories in geography, spatial history and the history of town planning have opened up interesting new perspectives, with respect to both the evolution of spatial knowledge and the genealogy of territorial techniques and their relation to larger socio-political projects, that would be enriched if combined with other discursive traditions. This article proposes to conceptualise English parliamentary enclosureea favourite episode for Marxist historiography, frequently read in a strictly materialist fashioneas a precedent of a new form of sociospatial governmentality, a political technology that inaugurates a strategic manipulation of territory for social change on the threshold between feudal and capitalist spatial rationalities. I analyse the sociospatial dimensions of parliamentary enclosure’s technical and legal innovations and compare them to the forms of communal self-regulation of land use customs and everyday regionalisations that preceded it. Through a systematic, replicable mechanism of reterritorialisation, enclosure acts normalised spatial regulations, blurred regional differences in the social organisation of agriculture and erased the modes of autonomous social reproduction linked to common land. Their exercise of dispossession of material resources, social capital and community representations is interpreted therefore as an inaugural logic that would pervade the emergent spatial rationality later known as planning.
Keywords: Spatial governmentality; Territoriality; Parliamentary enclosure; Commons; Planning history; Michel Foucault

This paper examines the patterns of urbanization in Planaltina, one of a number of towns founded during the economic slump in central Brazil in the nineteenth century. Laid out on a rough grid sometime after 1811, this town belies several key concepts of the “canonical” Portuguese-Brazilian city, such as site selection, lot proportion, and density: it was built by a valley, with wide and shallow lots having ample side yards, and its houses are often misaligned. These features are compared with preceding and contemporary towns in central Brazil, highlighting general changes in urban patterns during the pre-industrial nineteenth century throughout the region. Changes in regional highway networks, the introduction of the automobile and of the aeroplane predictably influenced the growth of the town. Starting in the early twentieth century, infill began to occur, with lots being subdivided either lengthwise or breadth wise. Changes in the historic centre came about as well, brought on more recently by the demographic and economic effects of planned extensions to the city.

The aim of this paper is to re-examine the charter
which the Bosnian king Stephen Ostoja issued in
1399 to the Commune of Dubrovnik (Ragusa).
This donation concerned a narrow strip of coastal
area connecting the isthmus of Ston (Punta
Stagno, Pelješac) and Astarea. This was soon
followed by a detailed survey of Terre Nove (Primorje)
conducted by the Ragusan commission.
The paper reconsiders the perceptions, attitudes
and values of Nature, natural environment and
resources in both societies based on these and
other available documents, questioning the
origin of the observed differences, according
to the modern environmental history narratives.

I wrote this paper in part to put the apartment compounds of Teotihuacan into a comparative framework. Rene Millon used to say that the apartment compounds were a unique form of housing, but I felt the need to establish that fact empirically (which is partially accomplished in this paper).

В монографии выявляется и описывается социоантропологическая модель функционирования древнебенинского общества, раскрывается механизм соотнесения, взаиморегуляции и взаимопроникновения миров социальной и мифологической реальности. Анализируются основные подсистемы бенинского социума: ментальная, социально-экономическая и управленческая. Исследуются природа, динамика и особенности становления надобщинных социальных и управленческих институтов и структур. Показывается место древнего Бенина как самобытной части цивилизации Тропической Африки в мировом историческом процессе. Монография написана в достаточно новом жанре исторической антропологии: в работе предпринята попытка синтезирования теоретических основ и методов истории, этнологии и культурологии.

The history of the former Kingdom of Benin is a fascinating subject which aroused the interest of many scholars during more than one hundred years. However, today, when Africa unfortunately attracts much less public and professional interest than in the times of de-colonisation and subsequent cold war «struggle for the continent» between the socialist and capitalist blocs, only a few specialists outside Nigeria are undertaking Benin researches and, therefore, the authors felt the need to make a new attempt for writing a history of this remarkable kingdom, including newest results of researches. Besides the general public, the book is destined for graduate and undergraduate students, as well as lecturers on African studies. To make easier reading for the general public, the book contains some elements of what may be called «popular history».

The urbanization process of the Early Bronze Age (EB) has been discussed extensively, usually at the general/regional level. This paper utilizes the detailed information from Qiryat Ata—an EB IB−II (late 4th−early 3rd millennium BCE) settlement located on Israel’s northern Coastal Plain—to conduct a more detailed analysis, at the site level, in order to examine the transformations experienced by a single community over time. The excavations revealed social and economic changes in practically every aspect of the site's material culture during the period of its existence. The site was founded as a village during the EB IB and rapidly grew in size as the economy became market-oriented. The leaders of the settlement may have taken control of surpluses, while economic conditions for the remainder of the population deteriorated.

The general outlines of Benin City have not changed during past centuries until the beginning of the 1970s. The town is divided into two parts, i.e. to the north Orenokhua and to the south Ogbe. Orenokhua once housed the quarters of the ordinary citizens, craftsmen, various specialist groups and many chiefs. The palace quarter Ogbe, once separated from Orenokhua by a broad avenue, contained (and still contains) the royal palace, the harem, mausoleums for deceased rulers and the quarters of the once numerous court retainers with different functions who worked for the royal household. The town is completely surrounded by a wall- and ditch system made of earth. Joining this innermost system to the north-west is another similar rampart enclosing, however, a much larger area. It contains the residences of important chiefs and their retainers. Those residences could even be quite large villages. The reflections of both traditional and sosial system and philosophy of life of the Bini in th...

The general outlines of Benin City have not changed during past centuries until the beginning of the 1970s. The town is divided into two parts, i.e. to the north Orenokhua and to the south Ogbe. Orenokhua once housed the quarters of the ordinary citizens, craftsmen, various specialist groups and many chiefs. The palace quarter Ogbe, once separated from Orenokhua by a broad avenue, contained (and still contains) the royal palace, the harem, mausoleums for deceased rulers and the quarters of the once numerous court retainers with different functions who worked for the royal household. The town is completely surrounded by a wall- and ditch system made of earth. Joining this innermost system to the north-west is another similar rampart enclosing, however, a much larger area. It contains the residences of important chiefs and their retainers. Those residences could even be quite large villages. The reflections of both traditional and sosial system and philosophy of life of the Bini in their capital city's planning and layout are also traced in the present article.

The research aimed at bringing new data to the study of inequality in the distribution of wealth in the long run using the fiscal documentation available to many communities of the Marches region over a period covering the late Middle Ages and the full modern age. The political-administrative history of this territory, progressively incorporated into the Papal State, was reflected in an evolution of the methodologies for assessing wealth for tax purposes. Their characteristics have been carefully taken into account and criticized in order to ensure compatibility in time and space. Land registers, “estimi”, "libre", as well as books of “collette”, will be used to describe the fiscal capacity of taxpayers enrolled in these registers and to estimate the dynamics of economic inequality.

The general outlines of Benin City have not changed during past centuries until the beginning of the 1970s. The town is divided into two parts, i.e. to the north Orenokhua and to the south Ogbe. Orenokhua once housed the quarters of the ordinary citizens, craftsmen, various specialist groups and many chiefs. The palace quarter Ogbe, once separated from Orenokhua by a broad avenue, contained (and still contains) the royal palace, the harem, mausoleums for deceased rulers and the quarters of the once numerous court retainers with different functions who worked for the royal household. The town is completely surrounded by a wall- and ditch system made of earth. Joining this innermost system to the north-west is another similar rampart enclosing, however, a much larger area. It contains the residences of important chiefs and their retainers. Those residences could even be quite large villages. The reflections of both traditional and sosial system and philosophy of life of the Bini in th...

A madeira era um recurso natural indispensável ao metabolismo dos centros urbanos pré-industriais, tanto como material construtivo quanto como fonte energética. Em razão da baixa relação valor/volume dos produtos madeireiros, a espacialidade desse setor econômico era largamente determinada pelo custo de transporte. Deste modo, um arcabouço teórico que pode ser importante para a compreensão do fenômeno do abastecimento madeireiro das cidades pré-industriais é a clássica teoria de von Thünen sobre o efeito da distância do mercado sobre a estrutura da produção agrária. O artigo tem como objetivo discutir as potencialidades e limitações desta abordagem. Inicialmente, é apresentada a teoria do "Estado Isolado" e revisam-se os estudos históricos que a utilizaram, tanto como alicerce interpretativo quanto como teoria empírica. Em seguida, é formulado um modelo teórico-conceitual em que a atividade madeireira responde às variações da intensidade agrícola, procurando mostrar a utilidade desse esquema na interpretação do caso da cidade do Rio de Janeiro, no final do período colonial.

It is the aim of the present paper to examine residential and land use patterns in the ancient Israelite city. These patterns are examined in various Iron Age II cities in the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah in relation to Sjoberg’s influential model of “the pre-industrial city”. The analysis reveals that while some towns conform with the famous model, many other do not. The paper, by observing the changes that took place in residential and land-use patterns in some cities through time, and in light of archaeology’s unique ability to view long-term processes, attempts to explain the differences, and to find the reasons that lie behind these patterns.

We develop a mechanistic representation of land-atmosphere cycling in a global 3-D ocean-atmosphere model of mercury (GEOS-Chem). The resulting land-ocean-atmosphere model is used to construct preindustrial and present biogeochemical cycles of mercury, to examine the legacy of past anthropogenic emissions, to map anthropogenic enrichment factors for deposition, and to attribute mercury deposition in the United States. Land emission in the model includes prompt recycling of recently deposited mercury (600 Mg a-1 for present day), soil volatilization (550 Mg a-1), and evapotranspiration (550 Mg a-1). The spatial distribution of soil concentrations is derived from local steady state between land emission and deposition in the preindustrial simulation, augmented for the present day by a 15% increase in the soil reservoir distributed following the pattern of anthropogenic deposition. Mercury deposition and hence emission are predicted to be highest in the subtropics. Our atmospheric lifetime of mercury against deposition (0.50 year) is shorter than past estimates because of our accounting of Hg(0) dry deposition, but recycling from surface reservoirs results in an effective lifetime of 1.6 years against transfer to long-lived reservoirs in the soil and deep ocean. Present-day anthropogenic enrichment of mercury deposition exceeds a factor of 5 in continental source regions. We estimate that 68% of the deposition over the United States is anthropogenic, including 20% from North American emissions (20% primary and <1% recycled through surface reservoirs), 31% from emissions outside North America (22% primary and 9% recycled), and 16% from the legacy of anthropogenic mercury accumulated in soils and the deep ocean.

Contents:

Chapter 1
Making Ancient Cities:  New Perspectives on the Production of Urban Places 
Kevin D. Fisher (Department of Classical, Near Eastern & Religious Studies, University of British Columbia)
Andrew T. Creekmore III (Department of Anthropology, University of Northern Colorado)

Chapter 2
The social production of space in third millennium cities of Upper Mesopotamia
Andy Creekmore (Department of Anthropology, University of Northern Colorado)

Chapter 3
North Mesopotamian Urban Space at Titriş Höyük in the Third Millennium B.C.
Yoko Nishimura (Department of Anthropology, U. of Pennsylvania)

Chapter 4
Swahili urban spaces of the East African coast
Stephanie Wynne-Jones (Dept. of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol
Jeffrey Fleisher (Dept. of Anthropology, Rice University)

Chapter 5
Urban Identities: Social and Spatial Production at Classic Period Chunchucmil, Yucatán, Mexico
Aline Magnoni (Tulane University)
Traci Arden (University of Miami)
Scott Hutson (University of Kentucky)
Bruce Dahlin (Ancient Maya Environmental Studies Center)

Chapter 6
Making the first cities on Cyprus: urbanism and social change in the Late Bronze Age
Kevin D. Fisher (Classical, Near Eastern & Religious Studies, U. of British Columbia)

Chapter 7
Urbanization and the emergence of the Greek Polis: The case of Azoria, Crete
Rodney Fitzsimons (Dept. of Ancient History and Classics, Trent University)

Chapter 8
The rise of a Neopalatial city and the (re)construction of its hinterlands: A view from Galatas
D. Matthew Buell (Dept. of Classics, SUNY Buffalo)

Chapter 9
Cahokia: The Processes and Principles of Creation of an Early Mississippian City
John Kelly (Dept. of Anthropology, Washington University in St. Louis)
James A. Brown (Dept. of Anthropology, Northwestern University)

Chapter 10
Comparing East and West: Aspects of urban manufacture and retail in the capitals of the Roman and Han Empires
Anna Razeto (University of Copenhagen)

Chapter 11
Ancient Open Space, Gardens, and Parks:  A Comparative Discussion for Mesoamerican Urbanism
Barbara L. Stark (School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University)

Chapter 12
Different Cities
Norman Yoffee (Departments of Anthropology, University of Nevada, Las Vegas and University of New Mexico and Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University)