Early Cities in The Dawn of Everything: Shoddy Scholarship in Support of Pedestrian Conclusions

Smith, M. Elliot

doi:10.21237/c7clio0057262

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Political Scientist Michael Taylor (1982) reviews evidence from anthropology and sociology on the mechanisms that maintain social order in small-scale societies (that is, societies without state polities), and discusses problems that arise for social order in states, where settlements are much larger. David Graeber and David Wengrow (2021) pick up this theme in The Dawn of Everything, but their claim that the kinds of freedoms and social order that characterize smallscale societies can work the same way in large cities and states is contradicted by a massive literature on the social effects of population size and density (Smith, 2022, Stanish, 2023. More helpful for cities is the work of Colin Ward, an anarchist architect and urban scholar (Ward, 1973, Ward, 2002; see also White (2007).…”

Section: The Problem Of Urban Ordermentioning

confidence: 99%

Institutions, Generative Processes, and Urban Order in Early Cities

Smith

2024

Preprint

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I address the question of what holds cities—particularly early cities—together. I first discuss the question of urban order, or social order in cities. Archaeologists are starting to come around to the standard answer to that question in the social sciences: urban order is created and maintained by the operation of two types of social forces: institutions (top-down forces) and generative processes (bottom-up forces). I review the changes in archaeological thinking that led from obsolete and inadequate models of social order (statism and agency) to the emerging current understanding. I discuss the concept of institutions, including a new archaeologically-useful definition, and describe five types of early urban institutions (political, economic, political economy, social, and religious). I then present three types of generative process: population/demography, self-governance, and self-coordination. I also urge archaeologists to stop using idiosyncratic definitions of concepts (like institution) that serve to isolate archaeology from wider scholarship in the social and natural sciences.

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Section: The Problem Of Urban Ordermentioning

confidence: 99%