Shining Stars and Black Holes: Urbanism,Comparison,and Comparability

Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt , Chinese Imperial City Planning (Honolulu, 1990).

Ofer Bar-Yosef , "The Walls of Jericho: An Alternative Interpretation ," Current Anthropology 27 ( 1986): 157-62. The Biblically famous site of Jericho in Jordan near the Dead Sea was excavated by Kathleen Kenyon in the 1950s. She showed that the mound of Jericho had a history dating back to the ninth millennium BCE. To her and everyone else’s surprise, she located a large masonry wall and a masonry-built tower in one excavation into the lower levels of the mound, leading her to anoint the Pre-Pottery-Neolithic-A (PPNA) level as "urban." Bar-Yosef reappraised the tower as a means of water control. The curious problem that the tower is inside the wall and is located at the lowest point adjacent to the occupation mound that predated it suggests that the function of the tower might not have been quite what city dwellers would expect. The PPNA level also had a predominantly hunter-gatherer economy with some early cultivars.

Çatalhöyük is a fifteen-hectare mound in the Konya Plain on the Anatolian Plateau of Turkey. It was first excavated by James Mellaart in the 1960s who discovered a seventh-millennium-BCE settlement with an agglutinated residence pattern of juxtaposed mudbrick and timber houses, with a remarkable repertoire of painted and plastered art. With nearby PPNA Jericho already a town/city, according to Kenyon, it was hardly likely that Çatalhöyük would not be similarly promoted. In the 1990s Ian Hodder began a new program of research at the site that has substantially clarified our understanding of the settlement plan, its mixed agrarian-hunting economy, and the environment of the site. An overview and a perspective developed from the most recent excavations are presented in Ian Hodder, Çatalhöyük : The Leopard’s Tale, Revealing the Mysteries of Turkey’s Ancient "Town" (London , 2006). Note the qualified term "town."

For example, V. Gordon Childe, "The Urban Revolution," Town Planning Review 21 (1950): 3-17.

Robert Sharer , The Ancient Maya, 6th ed. (Stanford, 2005); Robin Coningham et al., "The State of Theocracy: Defining an Early Medieval Hinterland in Sri Lanka," Antiquity 81 ( 2007): 699-719; John Miksic , "Heterogenetic Cities in Premodern Southeast Asia," World Archaeology 32 (2000): 106-20; Roland J. Fletcher and Christophe Pottier , "The Gossamer City-A New Enquiry," Museum International 54, nos. 1/2 (2002): 23-27; Damian Evans et al., "A New Archaeological Map of the World’s Largest Preindustrial Settlement Complex at Angkor, Cambodia," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104 (2007): 14277-82.

George Cowgill , "Origins and Development of Urbanism: Archaeological Perspectives," Annual Review of Anthropology 33 (2004): 525-49.

William T. Sanders and David Webster , "The Mesoamerican Urban Tradition," American Anthropologist 90 (1988 ): 521-56; Michael E. Smith , "Cities, Towns, and Urbanism: Comment on Sanders and Webster," American Anthropologist 91 (1989 ): 454-61.

Jean Gottmann , Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States ( New York, 1961); Jeremy Sabloff , The New Archaeology and the Ancient Maya (New York, 1990 ), 68; Sharer , The Ancient Maya.

For example, see Mike Davis , Planet of Slums (London, 2006).

Roland J. Fletcher , The Limits of Settlement Growth: A Theoretical Outline ( Cambridge, 1995).

Joyce Marcus , "Where is Lowland Maya Archaeology Headed?" Journal of Archaeological Research 3, no. 1 (1995): 3-53.

For example, see Robert E. Lang and Jennifer B. LeFurgy , "Edgeless Cities: Examining the Noncentered Metropolis," Housing Policy Debate 14 (2003): 427-60.

Richard Morrill , "Classic Map Revisited: The Growth of Megalopolis," The Professional Geographer 58, no. 2 (2006): 157.

Peter S. Wells , Farms, Villages, and Cities: Commerce and Urban Origins in Late Prehistoric Europe (Ithaca, 1984).

R. Gwinn Vivian and Bruce Hilpert , Chaco Handbook: An Encyclopedic Guide (Salt Lake City, 2002); Biloine Whiting Young and Melvin L. Fowler, Cahokia, the Great Native American Metropolis (Urbana, 1999).

Carla M. Sinopoli , "Monumentality and Mobility in Mughal Capitals," in "Landscapes of Power," ed. K. D. Morrison, special issue, Asian Perspectives 33 (1994): 293-308.

Roland J. Fletcher , "Very Large Mobile Communities: Interaction Stress and Residential Dispersal," in C. S. Gamble and W. A. Boismer , eds., Ethnoarchaeological Approaches to Mobile Campsites: Hunter-Gatherer and Pastoralist Case Studies (Ann Arbor, 1991), 395-420.

Coningham et al., "The State of Theocracy"; J. Stephen Lansing , Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali (Princeton , 1991, 2007).