Jane Jacobs' ‘Cities First’ Model and Archaeological Reality

In The Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs conjectured that the world's first cities preceded the origins of agriculture, a proposition that was most recently revived by Peter Taylor in the pages of this journal. Jacobs' idea was out of line with extant archaeological findings when first advanced decades ago, and it remains firmly contradicted by a much fuller corpus of data today. After a review of how and why Jacobs formulated her ‘cities first’ model, we review current archaeological knowledge from the Near East, China and Mesoamerica to document the temporal precedence of agriculture before urbanism in each of these regions. Contrary to the opinions of Jacobs and Taylor, archaeological data are in fact sufficiently robust to reconstruct patterns of diet, settlement and social organization in the past, and to assign dates to the relevant sites. Our response illustrates how generations of archaeological discoveries have yielded solid empirical foundations for the evaluation of wider social scientific debates.Anthropolog

Communication, computation, and governance: a multiscalar vantage on the prehispanic Mesoamerican world

Writing has often been put forth as one indicator of civilization. This correspondence dovetails with the even broader cross-species expectation that the degrees of social complexity and levels of computational communication should closely correlate. Although in a general sense across human cooperative arrangements, a basic relationship between these variables undoubtedly exists, more detailed and fine-grained analyses indicate important axes of variability. Here, our focus is on prehispanic Mesoamerica and the means of computation and communication employed over more than three millennia (ca. 1500 BCE-1520 CE). We take a multiscalar and diachronic analytical frame, in which we look at 30 central places, six macroregions, and Mesoamerica as whole. By unraveling elements of “social complexity”, and decoupling computation from communication, we illustrate that institutional differences in governance had a marked effect on the specific modes and technologies through which prehispanic Mesoamerican peoples communicated across time and space. Demographic and spatial scale, though relevant, do not alone determine time/space diversity in media of computational communication. This article is part of the theme issue “Evolution of Collective Computational Abilities of (Pre)Historic Societies”.Published versio

New views on price-making markets and the capitalist impulse: beyond Polanyi

Anthropologists have persistently diminished the importance of the market and marketplace exchange in premodern, preindustrial times. This strident anti-market mentality, derived largely from the writings of Karl Polanyi, underpins an ideological and politicized argument that neither sets useful guideposts to advance anthropological research, nor does it yield the necessary insights or empirically valid foundations to comprehend the deep historical origins of modern economies or polities. In fact, by envisioning the past that is categorically caged from the modern, the school of thought crystalized through Polanyi's perspectives circumvents the role of diachronic processes that are at the heart of a truly historical social science. Although it is not our principal aim to relitigate the vast literature pertaining to the rise and fall of Polanyian thought, our approach expands on prior arguments about his project both by highlighting critical perspectives on capitalism that long predated Polanyian thought and by identifying a veritable bounty of new evidence and theory concerning premodern and contemporary marketplace economies that enable us to transcend these now-entrenched claims. The scheme we present that distinguishes between open and competitive marketplaces, on the one hand, and the capitalist impulse, on the other, we believe, adds depth and breadth to the analysis of price-making markets and their divergent social and economic outcomes across time and space

Mesoamerican urbanism: indigenous institutions, infrastructure, and resilience

Mesoamerica was the most urbanised landscape of the precolonial Western Hemisphere, and urban dwellers there shared many cultural commonalities. They also varied significantly regarding what social institutions they emphasised, what forms of urban infrastructure they created, their fiscal financing and systems of governance, as well as how they managed ecological resources and risk. In this paper, we provide a comparative analysis of Mesoamerican cities using a database of archaeological indices of Indigenous urban characteristics. We report positive correlations between the longevity of cities in our sample and more collective institutions of governance, higher population densities, and more shared and equitably distributed forms of urban infrastructure. The study draws on Indigenous knowledge and practices to assist the target-based approach of the UN Sustainable Development Goals and New Urban Agenda and provides insights into how certain urban institutions and infrastructure can foster greater resilience and equity in the face of ecological and cultural-historical perturbations.Accepted manuscrip

Mesoamerican urbanism revisited: Environmental change, adaptation, resilience, persistence, and collapse

Urban adaptation to climate change is a global challenge requiring a broad response that can be informed by how urban societies in the past responded to environmental shocks. Yet, interdisciplinary efforts to leverage insights from the urban past have been stymied by disciplinary silos and entrenched misconceptions regarding the nature and diversity of premodern human settlements and institutions, especially in the case of prehispanic Mesoamerica. Long recognized as a distinct cultural region, prehispanic Mesoamerica was the setting for one of the world’s original urbanization episodes despite the impediments to communication and resource extraction due to the lack of beasts of burden and wheeled transport, and the limited and relatively late use of metal implements. Our knowledge of prehispanic urbanism in Mesoamerica has been significantly enhanced over the past two decades due to significant advances in excavating, analyzing, and contextualizing archaeological materials. We now understand that Mesoamerican urbanism was as much a story about resilience and adaptation to environmental change as it was about collapse. Here we call for a dialogue among Mesoamerican urban archaeologists, sustainability scientists, and researchers interested in urban adaptation to climate change through a synthetic perspective on the organizational diversity of urbanism. Such a dialogue, seeking insights into what facilitates and hinders urban adaptation to environmental change, can be animated by shifting the long-held emphasis on failure and collapse to a more empirically grounded account of resilience and the factors that fostered adaptation and sustainability

The scale, governance, and sustainability of central places in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica

Examinations of the variation and relative successes or failures of past large-scale societies have long involved attempts to reconcile efforts at generalization and the identification of specific factors with explanatory value for regional trajectories. Although historical particulars are critical to understanding individual cases, there are both scholarly and policy rationales for drawing broader implications regarding the growing corpus of cross-cultural data germane to understanding variability in the constitution of human societies, past and present. Archaeologists have recently highlighted how successes and failures in communal-resource management can be studied over the long term through the material record to both engage and enhance transdisciplinary research on cooperation and collective action. In this article we consider frameworks that have been traditionally employed in studies of the rise, diversity, and fall of preindustrial urban aggregations. We suggest that a comparative theoretical perspective that foregrounds collective-action problems, unaligned individual and group interests, and the social mechanisms that promote or hamper cooperation advances our understanding of variability in these early cooperative arrangements. We apply such a perspective to an examination of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican urban centers to demonstrate tendencies for more collective systems to be larger and longer lasting than less collective ones, likely reflecting greater sustainability in the face of the ecological and cultural perturbations specific to the region and era.Accepted manuscrip

Re-visioning Classic Maya Polities

This essay reviews the following works: Ancient Maya Pottery: Classification, Analysis, and Interpretation. Edited by James John Aimers. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013. Pp. vii + 293. $79.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780813042367. The Huasteca: Culture, History, and Interregional Exchange. Edited by Katherine A. Faust and Kim N. Richter. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015. Pp. vii + 241.$55.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780806147048. Excavations in Residential Areas of Tikal: Group 7F-1. By William A. Haviland. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2015. Pp. xi + 133. $65.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781934536810. Politics of the Maya Court: Hierarchy and Change in the Late Classic Period. By Sarah E. Jackson. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. Pp. ix + 248.$29.95 hardback. ISBN: 9780806143415. The Ancient Maya Marketplace: The Archaeology of Transient Space. Edited by Eleanor M. King. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015. Pp. vii + 325. $60.54 cloth. ISBN: 9780816500413. The Spectacle of the Late Maya Court: Reflections on the Murals of Bonampak. By Mary Miller and Claudia Brittenham. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013. Pp. xi + 285.$54.05 cloth. ISBN: 9780292744363. Maya Lords and Lordship: The Formation of Colonial Society in Yucatán, 1350–1600. By Sergio Quezada. Translated by Terry Rugeley. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014. Pp. ix + 248. $34.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780806144221. Place and Identity in Classic Maya Narratives. By Alexandre Tokovinine. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection/Harvard University Press, 2015. Pp. vii + 180.$39.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780884023920

Reframing Comparative Perspectives on Long-Term Change: A Review of Social Complexity and Complex Systems in Archaeology by Dries Daems (Routledge, 2021)

A review of Social Complexity and Complex Systems in Archaeology by Dries Daems (Routledge, 2021