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CityReads│ Agriculture and City, Which Comes First?
Smith,M.E. , Ur,J. and Feinman, G.M. 2014. Jane Jacobs’ ‘Cities First’ Model and Archaeological Reality, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38(4): 1525–1535.
Source: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-2427.12138/abstract
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In the opening chapter of The Economy of Cities, Jacobs (1969) proposed that cities preceded farming. She offered no empirical findings in support of this assertion, and she failed to cite the relevant archaeological literature. Jacobs was a passionate and charismatic observer of cities, and 7 years after her death she remains a renowned planning and urban studies scholar. Her work is held in almost universal regard, and it appears that subsequent authors have adopted her erroneous ‘cities first’ model in part because of her reputation as an original thinker.
Jacobs’ model is so completely contrary to archaeological data, while this model is not only featured in a number of urban textbooks but has also found expression in a major scholarly journal. As people who have spent decades conducting fieldwork on early urban settlements in the Near East, Mesoamerica (southern Mexico and northern Central America) and China, the authors believe that a response is required.
This essay firstly reviewed the intellectual context of Jacobs’ original model and its appearances through the decades, then summarized the relevant archaeological evidence for the Near East and quickly reviewed other parts of the world. For the most part, the author concentrated on the narrow question: whether the earliest agriculture preceded or post-dated the earliest cities within individual world regions.
The opening chapter of The Economy of Cities is titled ‘Cities First — Rural Development Later’. It begins as follows: ‘This book is an outcome of my curiosity about why some cities grow and why others stagnate and decay’ .Jacobs goes on to claim that ‘our understanding of cities, and also of economic development generally, has been distorted by the dogma of agricultural primacy’. This ‘dogma’ refers to the notion that people domesticated plants and began practicing agriculture long before the first cities developed. Jacobs cites a few examples of agricultural innovations that originated in cities in modern and medieval times and then asserts: ‘The logical inference is that in prehistoric times, also, agriculture and animal husbandry arose in cities. But if this is so, then cities must have preceded agriculture’.
Jacobs developed her claim of ‘cities first’ through a lengthy fictionalized vignette of the development of an early pre-agricultural city she called New Obsidian. In New Obsidian, hunting peoples congregated to pursue craft production, and two economic processes — the export multiplier effect and the import replacement effect — generated urban growth prior to agriculture. Jacobs goes on to discuss James Mellaart’s (1967) then-recent excavations at Çatalhöyük, of which she claims erroneously: ‘Çatalhöyük is both the earliest city yet found, and the earliest known settlement of any kind to possess agriculture’ .
Jacobs provides no empirical evidence for her ‘cities first’ claim beyond a brief description of Çatalhöyük. However, what she called the ‘dogma’ of agricultural primacy was instead an empirically supported archaeological model. Instead of citing the relevant literature, Jacobs makes the following claim:
In an interview two years before her death, Jacobs seemed almost ready to recant her ‘cities first’ claim: ‘She seemed to be open to the possibility that such stories [new archaeological research in the Near East] might disprove her controversial hypothesis.
The 1970s and 1980s saw an explosion of archaeological research around the world, and the precedence of agriculture over urbanism was strengthened by overwhelming empirical support. Several archaeologists applied aspects of Jacobs’ urban economics model, ignoring the ‘cities first’ claim, and some historians refuted the claim. Economic historian Paul Bairoch found Jacobs’ argument ‘extremely unconvincing’, he went on to claim that ‘the margin of uncertainty around that period is such that the hypothesis cannot be rejected outright’.
Starting in the 1990s, the ‘cities first’ claim was resuscitated by urban scholars. Some textbooks accepted Jacobs’ faulty claim as fact. A number of more technical works in urban studies explicitly accepted Jacobs’ ‘cities first’ claim. The most extensive discussion is that of Edward Soja (2000) in his book Postmetropolis and several articles. Soja was clearly inspired both by Jacobs’ ‘cities first’ claim and by the more recent excavations at Çatalhöyük directed by Ian Hodder. Soja (2000: 42) looked at the data and realized that Jacobs’ assertion did not stand up, but that did not stop him from promoting the idea:
Whereas Jacobs seems to have been genuinely unaware of the relevant archaeological evidence, Soja elects to discount it. Peter Taylor follows this same line of thought although he is less explicit about how he draws on archaeological evidence. His view of archaeological evidence is expressed as follows: ‘In such situations of knowledge uncertainty, it is the plausibility of theoretical positions that matter’.
Although there is still much to be learned about humanity’s deep past, the basic outlines of agriculture and cities in prehistory have been known since the early twentieth century. Gordon Childe (1936) coined the terms ‘Neolithic Revolution’ and ‘Urban Revolution’ to describe the two most far-reaching changes in prehistory: the domestication of crops and the advent of state-level societies.
Today, the direct radiocarbon dating of early domesticates from archaeological contexts in conjunction with the genetic fingerprinting of their wild progenitors has yielded an unprecedented level of precision that documents the timing and earliest locations of agricultural origins in at least three widespread settings: the Near East, East Asia and Mesoamerica. The authors focus most concertedly on the Near East, since that area figures most directly and heavily in the arguments of Jacobs, Soja and Taylor.
Figure 1 showed current knowledge of the beginnings of domestication. The overall picture is clear. In the Near East, unequivocal cereal domestication (identified on the basis of morphological changes resulting in reproductive reliance on humans) is clearly attested between 8400 and 7500 BCE for various plant species. Long before some plants showed the physical traces of domestication, human communities were managing (i.e. cultivating) morphologically wild plants via tilling, seeding, tending, harvesting and storing. As early as 10000–8700 BCE, several signs point to such management: increased presence of weeds that prefer cultivated terrain and an overall increase in the exploitation of cereals generally.
One Neolithic site in particular — Çatalhöyük (7500–6000 BCE) — is critical to the arguments of Jacobs, Soja and Taylor that urbanism preceded agriculture. Çatalhöyük’s current excavator, Ian Hodder notes: There is none of the functional differentiation that we normally associate with the term “town”. ‘In a modern town we would expect to identify different functional areas and buildings such as the industrial and residential zones, the church or mosque or temples, and the cemetery. At Çatalhöyük all these separate functions occur in one place, the house’.
Çatalhöyük does not meet the criteria of either of the major definitions of urbanism used in archaeology and history. Louis Wirth’s (1938) influential demographic definition of urbanism requires a high population size and density, coupled with social heterogeneity. As a relatively homogeneous village of 15 hectares, Çatalhöyük does not come close to qualifying as urban. The alternative functional definition requires settlements to have activities and institutions — whether economic, political or religious — that affect a hinterland. Lacking such urban functions, Çatalhöyük does not match this definition either. Even if Çatalhöyük conforms to some vague and archaeologically unusable ‘cityness’ criteria, it still post-dates the initial stages of cultivation and early morphological domestication by a millennium or more.
The conventional understanding of urban origins places the first Mesopotamian city at Uruk. Through a century of meticulous excavation, German archaeologists uncovered a series of enormous and ornately decorated buildings. Besides, the artifacts recovered suggest new forms of social complexity: representational art forms, ceramics and other goods produced at a supra-household scale, and novel record-keeping technologies such as cylinder seals and pictographic tablets. The tablets describe the administration of land, animals, agricultural products and people in vast numbers and the iconography of the seal impressions depict elite individuals. Uruk of the late fourth millennium BCE was a large city, covering some 250 hectares. It subsequently grew to approximately 400 hectares by the early third millennium BCE.
Conventional understanding has generally been that the idea of the city then spread, first to the rest of the Sumerian plain, then half a millennium later to northern Mesopotamia and adjacent parts of Iran, Syria, and Turkey. This understanding has been complicated in recent years by two sites in northern Mesopotamia, presently in northeast Syria. Excavations at Tell Brak have recovered all the indicators of urban social complexity found at Uruk. Radiocarbon dating places these indicators at approximately 3900–3400 BCE. The settlement consisted of a central nucleus of about 55 hectares, with discrete small ‘suburbs’ surrounding it at a distance of 400–500 meters. With time, these outer settled areas expanded and grew together with the central nucleus to form a continuous settlement of around 130 hectares.
This new picture of urban origins in extensive but low-density settlement finds further support from a second site, Khirbat al-Fakhar. Ceramic material dating to 4400–3900 BCE is scattered over an area of 300 hectares. This combination of urban traits (demographic concentration, economic specialization) and characteristics not associated with Near Eastern cities (low density, apparent intra-settlement egalitarianism) led archaeologists to call the site ‘proto-urban’.
Thus the first cities in the Near East arose in both southern and northern Mesopotamia over the course of the fourth millennium BCE. These proto- and early urban sites still post-date the establishment of agricultural economies by millennia.
To summarize,cities in the Near East emerged over more than a millennium, with initial proto-urban agglomerations around 4400–3900 BCE, unequivocal cities in northern and southern Mesopotamia around 3900–3100 BCE. At the start of this sequence, human communities were using an integrated agricultural economy that was already three millennia old.
Other regions are equally lacking in empirical support for Jacobs’ ‘cities first’ model. Recent findings from south China , where the process of rice domestication began almost as early as the domestication of grains in the Near East, likewise clearly place these shifts well before the advent of cities or even large communities. Along the lower Yangtze, indisputable evidence for domesticated rice, which dates back at least 7000 years, precedes China’s earliest cities by several millennia. In north China, the domestication of millets may be even earlier than that of rice, so that the gap between the first domesticates and the earliest cities may even be longer. In Mesoamerica, domesticated maize and squash predate even the first sedentary villages by up to six millennia, and urban settlements arose still later in time.
In not one of the recognized global hearths for the origins of agriculture can we make a credible and empirically underpinned case that this process was initiated in an urban context. The repeated consistency of the documented temporal timeline in which agriculture preceded urbanism is clear in disproving Jacobs’ hypothesis.
Agriculture preceded urbanism. They did not, however, evolve independently. Settlement and agriculture developed in tandem. Past social phenomena are rarely so simple, and we should suppose that a complex and difficult-to-model set of non-linear processes underlie them.
The authors reiterate that this commentary is not intended to challenge the holistic contributions of Jane Jacobs’ scholarship on cities, but rather to indicate that Jacobs’ proposal that plant and animal domestication occurred first in urban contexts was inconsistent with all the available data at the time that she first advanced the claim, and her proposition is even more strongly contradicted by the much larger and more precise corpus of knowledge that we have today. It is a disservice to Jacobs’ outstanding contributions to perpetuate a strikingly incorrect assertion when evidence to the contrary is readily to hand.