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CityReads│Who first coined the term “Urban Revolution” ?
Childe, v. g. (1950), The Urban Revolution, Town Planning Review, 21, 3–17. Smith, M.E. (2009) V. Gordon Childe and the urban revolution: an historical perspective on a revolution in urban studies. Town Planning Review 80.1, 3–29.
V. Gordon Childe (1892–1957) was the most influential archaeologist of the twentieth century. His early fieldwork and research in the 1920s overturned archaeological models of European prehistory. He then turned to theory and synthesis and for the first time applied social models to archaeological data concerning the major transformations in the evolution of human society. His synthetic work was disseminated widely through two scholarly yet accessible books: Man Makes Himself (1936) and What Happened in History(1942). Childe was a Marxist, and in these and other works he employed two key concepts to organise his discussion: the Neolithic Revolution and the Urban Revolution. Childe’s models for these revolutions largely created the modern scholarly understanding of two of the most fundamental and far-reaching transformations in the human past. Childe’s paper ‘The Urban Revolution’ – first published in Town Planning Review (Childe, 1950) – is one of the most widely cited papers ever published by an archaeologist. V.Gordon Child at Skara Brae in Orkney
Source:http://wideurbanworld.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-urban-revolution-now-online.html
This paper reviews Childe’s contributions to the archaeological research on the origins of cities and states. His concept of the Urban Revolution continues to have relevance today, both within and beyond archaeological study. One of his most important contributions to archaeological theory was to challenge the old nineteenth-century view of ancient human history -- stone age/bronze age/iron age, which were typically labeled ‘savagery’,‘barbarism,’and ‘civilization’ -- with a more rigorous historiography of cultural development. Childe theorized four main eras -- paleolithic, neolithic,urban, and industrial punctuated by three “revolutions” or fundamental shifts in cultural development. According to Childe, the first revolution – from old Stone Age hunter-gatherer cultures to settled agriculture –was the Neolithic Revolution. The second – the movement from neolithic agriculture to complex, hierarchical systems of manufacturing and trade that began during the fourth and third millennia BCE– was the Urban Revolution. And the third major shift in the record of human cultural and historical development – the only truly new development since the rise of cities – was the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Gordon Childe chose the phrase ‘revolution’ deliberately in order to compare the major social transformations of prehistory to the Industrial Revolution. Childe started using the word in the 1920s, and then cemented his usage in Man Makes Himself, in which there are chapters entitled ‘The Neolithic Revolution’ and ‘The Urban Revolution’. To Childe, these periods of changes were ‘real revolutions that affected all departments of human life’ . The Neolithic Revolution describes the transition from hunting and gathering to farming. This process, which relied on the domestication of wild plants and animals, occurred independently in seven or eight parts of the world. The shift from a total reliance on wild resources to the use of domesticated foods led to a number of fundamental and far-reaching changes in human society. Most human groups gave up a mobile lifestyle and adopted year-round sedentism, which was accompanied by a major surge in population. Families expanded, villages grew, and the agricultural way of life spread widely around the globe. These changes set the scene for a more complex division of labour and the development of social inequalities. Childe was one of the first to observe that this was truly a ‘real revolution’. Whereas the Neolithic Revolution combined technological breakthroughs with social transformations, the Urban Revolution was almost entirely a transformation of social institutions and practices. Kings with real power emerged for the first time, accompanied by institutions of government and social stratification. Economic activity of all sorts expanded greatly, and the first cities were built. Childe used the phrase ‘Urban Revolution’ to refer to this interconnected series of changes; he did not limit the term to the development of cities. For him, cities were just one component of the overall process by which complex, state-level societies came into being. Locations of the six areas where the Urban Revolution happened independently
“The Urban Revolution” synthesized Childe’s thinking about the similarities and contrasts in urban development in Mesopotamia (especially the Sumerianempire) compared with Egypt, the Indus Valley, and the Maya of the Yucatan peninsula. For Childe, urbanization was not simply about density or numbers of people; the city is “the resultant and symbol of a ‘revolution’ that initiated a new economic stage in the evolution of society.” Childe’s model is not so much about cities or urbanism per se as it is about the series of interrelated social, economic, political, and cultural changes that led to the earliest states and cities. After reviewing societies before the Urban Revolution, Childe presents his famous list of ten criteria for early states: ‘Ten rather abstract criteria, all deducible from archaeological data, serve to distinguish even the earliest cities from any older or contemporary village’ . His ten traits are as follows:
Clay account tablets from Erech showing the oldest Mesopotamian writing
Frieze of horse from the cave of Lascaux(Dordogne) showing naturalist art of Palaeolithic hunters Craftsmen engaged in rope making, wood working and casting bronze, from Tomb of Rekh-me-Re,15th century B.C. Five of Childe’s traits describe social processes and institutions that are still widely recognized as key developments in the rise of early complex societies. All of these traits have received major attention from archaeologists over the past half century, and they are all the target of considerable research today. Trait 1 says, in effect, that the early states were urban societies; they had large, dense settlements, or cities . The close link between urbanism and early state dynamics has been a consistent theme of research into early complex societies. Trait 2 notes the more complex division of labor in early states, and says that many specialists lived and worked in cities. Craft specialization and its relationship to early social complexity and change continues to be a heavily researched topic in archaeology, and Childe’s legacy for craft production studies is broadly acknowledged. Trait 3, the production of a social surplus by commoners to pay for government and the division of labor, gets to the heart of the economic and political transformations that brought about early complex societies. The social and economic means by which agriculture was intensified to produce a surplus is the subject of a huge literature. Archaeologists have both borrowed models from economic history and contributed their own data and models on early intensive agriculture and its relationship to political and economic change. Trait 5 is the formation of social classes, seen as perhaps the greatest change in people’s lives that can be attributed to the Urban Revolution .The origins and operation of inequality and social stratification in early states, again, are still major themes of archaeological research Trait 10 describes the political organization of society: the state. Much research has focused on exploring the variation in the forms of ancient states, from city-states to empires, and on the dynamics of power. Four of Childe’s traits describe features important to our understanding of early cities and states, but whose role in the dynamics of the Urban Revolution was of lesser significance than the five traits outlined above. Trait 4 describes monumental public buildings. Nearly all ancient complex societies built some form of monumental architecture, but so did much earlier societies, such as the Neolithic groups that built Stonehenge. Trait 6, writing, is often dismissed as a universal criterion of complex societies based on the absence of writing in the Inka and earlier Andean states. If we broaden Childe’s concept to formal record-keeping, however, then this was an important and universal characteristic of early states.Trait 7, the development of practical sciences, is a trait not limited to states; calendars and mathematics originated long before the early states. Nevertheless, major advances in the sciences and mathematics occurred with early states.Trait 9, regular foreign trade, parallels trait 7 in significance. Trade began with the earliest Paleolithic human societies, but with the first states trade expanded tremendously. The organization of trade systems in ancient states continues to be a major topic of research among archaeologists. Trait 8, ‘conceptualised and sophisticated [art] styles’, is the least useful and relevant trait for understanding the early states.
Today, the social transformations associated with the Urban Revolution remain major topics in fieldwork and publication by archaeologists. The labels are different today; instead of talking about the Urban Revolution, archaeologists talk about the ‘origin of states’ or ‘primary state formation. Although methods and concepts have advanced considerably, Childe’s basic model can be discerned within most contemporary accounts of the evolution of the earliest states and cities. The conceptual approaches used by archaeologists to explain the Urban Revolution have also evolved greatly since Childe’s day, but many of his traits and his general materialist perspective retain importance in contemporary models and theories. From the late 1950s through the 1960s, the major topic of debate was the role of irrigation in the formation of early states. This line of research expanded to embrace other types of intensive agriculture (such as terracing) and a more sophisticated understanding of how agricultural practices relate to demography and other social dynamics,a line of research that continues today. In the 1960s, functionalist explanations of early states were popular. These models posited that larger and more complex societies required organization and coordination, so leaders altruistically stepped forward to take on these tasks for the benefit of everyone; these early managers were posited as the ones who formed the first governments and the first elite social classes. This simplistic approach was replaced in the 1980s by ‘political’ models that placed more emphasis on the self-serving nature of elite activities: elites were portrayed as looking after their own interests first, leading to exploitation and inequality rather than the consensual social integration of earlier models. This trend of theorizing has continued to evolve through an emphasis on different types of power and studies of how ancient rulers and governments used space, cities and other resources to create, expand and legitimize their power. A major avenue of current theorizing on early states emphasizes their complexity and variation. One version of this approach looks at human–environmental interaction as a complex systemic process through time, and another version employs simulation models from work in the ‘science of complexity’ as pursued at the Santa Fe Institute. A third variant of this approach emphasizes the scale and complexity of economic activity in the earliest states and cities. One conclusion from this work is that the earliest states and cities were not stable, longlasting institutions. Instead, ‘early state societies must have been for the most part risky, transitory constructs’. A final development of note is the great expansion in archaeological studies of people and their daily activities and social conditions. Many archaeologists excavating in ancient cities have turned from the temples, palaces and tombs of the elite to the houses and workshops of commoners. By studying households and neighbourhoods, archaeologists can now reconstruct many aspects of daily life, social identity and the roles of commoners in society. New comparative political models, employing collective action theory, explore the variation in ancient governments, which ranged from autocratic and despotic regimes to more democratic forms in which commoners had a greater say in governance.
I have tried to show the importance of V. Gordon Childe’s ten-point model of the Urban Revolution in two realms: 1) As the first substantial social synthesis of archaeological data on the earliest states and cities, this model marked a major advance in scholarship in the mid-twentieth century; 2) Childe’s model forms the basis for almost all subsequent theorising on the development and operation of the earliest states and cities. Childe’s work continues to figure prominently in ongoing debates about when, where, and why the first cities arose and in the antecedent debate about what a city is. The time is ripe for a rapprochement between diverse traditions of research on urbanism. Scholars of modern cities may find useful information in the archaeological record of ancient urbanism, just as archaeologists will benefit from increased attention to the work of modern planners and urbanists.