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H. Jöns et al. (eds.), Mobilities of Knowledge, Knowledge and Space 10,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44654-7_7
Chapter 7
Knowledges in Disciplines and Cities:
An Essay on Relations Between Archaeology
and Social Sciences
Peter J. Taylor
Preamble: Knowledges
In this paper I argue that the path dependency of disciplinary knowledges in the
social sciences and archaeology that emerged in the late nineteenth century have led
to a long-standing focus on states for framing knowledge production, thus overlook-
ing the important role of cities for understanding social change. By outlining the
neglect of cities in the social sciences and archaeology, I develop the radical posi-
tion that cities as hubs of practical knowledge production preceded both the emer-
gence of states and agriculture. It is contended that this argument has to be made
outside of established disciplinary frameworks because researchers working within
conventional disciplinary tenets have been too “disciplined” by seemingly estab-
lished truths set about a century ago. The perspective of a geographer seems to be
ideal in this regard because geography never quite fitted into the nineteenth century
disciplinary canon. A geographical perspective is thus well suited for bringing cities
back into disciplinary discourses as well as into debates about the development of
societies.
In the modern world, knowledge comes in two different forms. First, there is the
academic knowledge created in universities and associated institutions. It is here
that research work is done that cumulatively adds to stocks of knowledge called
disciplines. In addition there is a teaching function in this academic knowledge
production that reproduces the disciplines through socializing young adults to
become future cohorts of knowledge creators. This knowledge has essentially an
oligarchic structure of disciplining by peer review (i.e., certifying the created knowl-
edge). Second, there is practical knowledge that is required to make a living outside
universities. In this case the disciplining is by the market. Practical knowledge has
P.J. Taylor (*)
Department of Geography, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
e-mail: crogfam@gmail.com
124
to be useful so that it can be deployed to make money. I realize these two knowl-
edges overlap in many instances (e.g., in corporate research and development
departments, in the professions, in defense department laboratories), but I will keep
them separate for the purposes of this essay. Here I will tell a story about an inter-
section of these two knowledges, with particular emphasis on their contrasting
spatialities.
The spatial mobility of academic knowledge is facilitated by academic networks.
This is concretely represented by researchers bringing new knowledge to seminars,
workshops, and conferences, but the crucial network is the one that records the
cumulative knowledge production. Disciplinary journal articles, research mono-
graphs, and academic books are the nodes where the spatial mobility of knowledge
is represented by the citations. In contrast, practical knowledge has many more loci,
but one stands out as the exceptional place for knowledge production: cities. It is the
hustle and bustle of cities—their inherent busy-ness—that is the major testing
ground for practical knowledge, which is why commercial knowledge constitutes
business. If the knowledge works—you can make money from it—then the knowl-
edge will be reproduced, modified, and extended as necessary. Vibrant cities are the
best places for doing business. The spatial mobility of this practical knowledge
flows within and between cities. This essay is about a specific case study of how the
academic knowledge of disciplines makes sense of practical knowledge practices.
To explore this intersection I will focus on origins, on how cities came about in
association with the beginnings of both agriculture and states. These social changes
are the practical knowledge productions I consider. The academic knowledges then
follow. Archaeology is the discipline that specializes in the study of such origins;
social science is about social change, and since these three origins constitute epochal
changes they are of direct relevance to social science understanding. The hypothesis
is that by shining the spotlight on these critical origins some basic contradictions of
knowledge production in cities and disciplines will be revealed.
The argument proceeds in a rather distinctive way. There will be two introduc-
tions, one for each type of knowledge. And then there will be two indictments, for
social science and for archaeology. In all of this I will be taking a very city-centric
position and this comes to the fore in the substantive section where I bring cities
back in to understand both the creation of states and the development of
agriculture.
Introductions
The Times and Spaces of Academic Social Knowledges
The academic knowledge of today is ultimately derived from the nineteenth century
reorganization of German-speaking universities to emphasis the research function
and thereby privilege specialization. It is from the university chairs established to
organize the new intensive research work that modern disciplines have evolved. Of
P. J. Tay lo r
125
the four original faculties—theology, law, medicine, and philosophy—it was in the
latter two that research specialization occurred, and especially in philosophy (the high-
est research degree is still a PhD) (Ben-David & Zloczower, 1962). One key feature
of this process was a bifurcation into sciences and arts that commonly resulted in divi-
sion into two separate faculties housing very different disciplines (lower research
degrees are still called MSc or MA). The differences existed in both research sub-
ject matter (non-human–human) and research practices (nomothetic–idiographic).
It was the immense dominance of Germany in academic science knowledge in the
second half of the nineteenth century (Taylor, Hoyler, & Evans, 2008) that stimulated
emulation in many other countries to create the modern university.
The social sciences began to emerge in the late nineteenth century as a sort of
in-between research category combining the research subject matter of the arts with
the research methods of the sciences. This process was largely consolidated in U.S.
universities in the first half of the twentieth century to create a tripartite division for
studying social change, the new disciplines of economics, political science, and
sociology (Wallerstein et al., 1996). By about 1950, it was commonplace for this
disciplinary trinity to be established as departments in most universities. This three-
way division of knowledge broadly followed the reform movements that dominated
late nineteenth century politics. The goals of these movements were articulated as
demands for economic reforms, political reforms, and social reforms. Thus there
came about a general view of human behavior being divided into economic, politi-
cal, and social activities taking place in the economy, the state, and (civil) society as
separate institutional worlds. The new social science disciplines reflected this view
and set about devising separate research agendas along these lines.
There are three key points that arise from this construction of social science
(Wallerstein et al., 1996).
1. The basic units of analysis were defined by state territories—empirically the
abstract concepts of economy, state, and society were all nationalized, as in
British economy, French state, and American society, to produce a one-scale
mosaic social science of multiple countries.
2. The knowledge produced by the three disciplines covered all modern human
behaviors—this was a knowledge monopoly position. The power of this monop-
oly can be seen in other surviving disciplines eventually having to create trilogy
subdisciplines as they adjusted to demands of being modern: for instance, eco-
nomic anthropology, political geography, and social history.
3. This was nomothetic knowledge of modern, rational behavior and therefore it
initially only applied to modern, rational economies, states, and societies in
advanced regions of the world where the modern universities were located. It
was a social knowledge of modern us, with the un-modern them initially
excluded. The exclusions were in both time and space and, being un-modern,
they could only be studied idiographically (i.e., outside social science). In time a
new discipline of history studied the un-modern past of modern nations. In space
there were two un-moderns, for old civilizations Orientalism emerged to
understand why they stagnated, and for smaller societies, anthropology was con-
structed to understand why they never progressed in the first place.
7 Knowledges in Disciplines and Cities
126
Note that geography does not feature in this academic knowledge framework; strad-
dling the science–arts boundary and initially eschewing specialization (favoring
synthesis over analysis), it is an odd-ball survivor only adapting to social science as
human geography in the second half of the twentieth century with the victory of
systematic geographies (specialist trinity subdisciplines) over regional geography
(the art of synthesis). I make this point to reveal my personal intellectual positional-
ity as a geographer: I am a social scientist outsider.
This neat academic knowledge arrangement began to change in the second half
of the twentieth century (Wallerstein et al., 1996). Most importantly the world
changed with decolonization so that development (a property of states) replaced
progress (a property of modern civilization only). This meant that the whole world
was opened up to social science study with new research agendas on economic
development (toward affluence), political development (toward democracy), and
social development (toward modernization). In addition disciplinary boundaries
became increasingly porous, resulting in new research areas, such as cultural stud-
ies, area studies, and feminist studies, refusing to be contained by the old disci-
plines. Even more important these areas of study have undermined, or really
sidestepped, the simple nomothetic–ideographic distinction so that, especially
through cultural studies, the methodological wall between the trinity and the
humanities (arts) has crumbled. Thus in the early twenty-first century the academic
knowledge organization in the social sciences and humanities is quite complex. Old
disciplines remain institutionally powerful within universities as departments
(awarding PhDs) and with their traditional prestigious research journals; while at
the same time there is a plethora of new interdisciplinary (or multidisciplinary or
transdisciplinary) journals with their own networks of researchers and
conferences.
Practical Knowledges in, Through, and Out of Cities
Practical knowledge is constituted by the everyday constructs and information peo-
ple use to live their lives. I focus on the practical knowledge that is necessary for
making a living. Such knowledge depends on quality and quantity of contacts and
intensity of communications with those contacts. In this situation one particular
class of settlements, cities, has been found to be exceptionally important. One can
go as far as to say that there is a qualitative difference between city life and life
elsewhere in terms of the nature and salience of knowledge for work. This idea of
cities as special knowledge-rich milieus is to be found in a wide range of scientific
studies (Batty, 2013; Brenner, 2014; Glaeser, 2011; LeGates & Stout, 2015; Neal,
2013; Scott, 2012; Storper, 2013; Taylor, 2013).
Recent resurgences in urban economics and economic geography have focused
on the advantages of cities for economic development. Two main processes have
been postulated. First, localization refers to the knowledge-related benefits of firms
P. J. Tay lo r
127
from the same industry clustered together. This relates to industry-specific opportu-
nities thus stimulating creativity and innovation. In particular tacit knowledge
within an industry is said to require immersion in localized industrial culture. This
is important in both product development and skilled labor availability. Classic his-
torical examples are the New York advertising cluster on Madison Avenue and the
London newspaper cluster on Fleet Street. In these cases cost-cutting opportunities
elsewhere eventually made the two clusters uneconomic but they had by then pro-
vided untraded advantages to their cluster of firms for several generations. And after
the cluster breakup proximity remained important as clustering re-emerged in new
locations (Faulconbridge, Beaverstock, Nativel, & Taylor, 2010).
Second, there are agglomeration effects of multiple firms from a wide range of
industries co-locating in a city or region. There are collective advantages in terms of
infrastructure and other common services. But a key advantage is to be near to cli-
ents. For instance, in Sassen’s (2001) classic work, the global city is simultaneously
the main producer of advanced business services and the main market for such ser-
vices. And in such work, close and regular contact with clients is found to be neces-
sary, especially face-to-face meetings. Agglomeration also constitutes an ecology of
skills that facilitates project work involving producers from different specialties
combining to create unique products for particular clients. This is specifically
important for user-led innovation where observation and interaction in cities are
indispensable. In an empirical test for the efficacy of clusters and agglomeration
Glaeser, Kalial, Scheinkman, and Schleifer (1992) found the latter to be more asso-
ciated with economic growth.
The above advantages are place or territorial (internal) assets and it is now widely
recognized that they are complemented by network (external) assets. As Sassen
(2001) recognizes, cities are strategic places within myriad flows of materials, peo-
ple, and information. Contemporary cities in globalization have been modeled as a
world city network generated through knowledge-based work: professional, finan-
cial, and creative servicing of global capital (Taylor, 2004). Intensity of integration
into this network (city connectivity) is a measure of a city’s global external assets
through globalization. This has been conceptualized in several ways, such as global
pipelines (Bathelt, Malmberg, & Maskell, 2004) and global communities of practice
(Amin & Thrift, 1992).
Outside this specifically economic consideration of contemporary cities and their
networks, there are other studies that emphasize the generic importance of cities
across history. For example, the world city network model has been interpreted
generically as central flow theory, a general description of cities in networks. The
key substantive examples are Hall (1998) with his description of leading cities as
centers of creativity, Soja’s (2000, 2010) concepts of synekism and regionality of
cityspace in urban revolutions, McNeill and McNeill (2003) with their references to
cities in the human web of world history, Algaze’s (2005a, 2005b) work on internal
and external relations in Sumerian cities, and LaBianca and Scham’s (2006) appli-
cations of Castells’s (1996) space of flows to antiquity. These are all discursive
harnessings of evidence to support the critical importance of practical knowledge
production in and through cities for historical social change.
7 Knowledges in Disciplines and Cities
128
Indictments
All institutions are created at some point in time to satisfy a need. Subsequently
needs change and relevance of an institution is naturally eroded. As noted previ-
ously, today’s disciplines are about a century old and they still retain many vestiges
of their creation. In fact by the twenty-first century they appear not to have worn
particularly well (Wallerstein, 1991). Here I indict social science (in general) and
archaeology.
Of Mainstream Social Science
As previously shown, contemporary social science consists of a mixture of old dis-
ciplines and various new areas of study. The latter can seem to be opportunist, per-
haps transient, compared to the deep knowledge of the disciplines. Thus researchers
in the studies sector are commonly certified by their PhD in one of the disciplines,
and there is always a tendency to revert to trinity thinking as in politico-cultural
studies, economic area studies, and feminist sociology. In other words, social sci-
ence is currently strewn with ambiguities. These are reflected in Wallerstein’s
(2004) prognosis. On the one hand he argues that “the social construction of the
disciplines as intellectual arenas that was made in the nineteenth century has out-
lived its usefulness and is today a major obstacle to serious intellectual work”
(pp. 169–170). But at the same time he suggests that “there is richness in each of the
disciplinary cultures that should be harvested, stripped off its chaff, and combined
(or at least used) in a reconstruction of the social sciences” (pp. 169–170).
Of course, the debate will be about identifying the “chaff” (Wallerstein, 2004)!
In his contribution to this reconstruction, world-systems analysis, he transcends
states and I agree this to be an essential stripping.
Cities have not been well served by the trinity and not just because the national-
ization of social knowledge downgraded them to, literally, a bit part in the overall
scheme of things. With the focus on the scale of the state, the exceptional nature of
cities in relation to enhanced knowledge potentials has been severely neglected. In
Wallerstein’s stripping off the state-centric chaff he moves focus from national
economies to world-economy; I will follow Jacobs (1969, 1984) and move from
national economies to city economies. I highlighted profound economic contribu-
tions being made at this scale above, but it is still the case that urban economics (or
regional economics or spatial economics) remains a Cinderella area of study in the
discipline of economics, where status remains wedded to national econometric
models. Geography has been the other discipline contributing to the rediscovery of
the importance of cities described previously. But the main legacy of research here
has been in studying cities in hierarchies within countries modeled as national urban
systems. In this approach the world consists of circa 200 (the number of countries
P. J. Tay lo r
129
varies with world political processes) national urban systems (i.e., one per country).
This is mosaic social science at its very worse. Cities abhor boundaries. Their raison
d’être is being strategically connected within complex spaces of flows, which is
antithetical to being neatly ordered within state territories.
The ridiculousness of this academic knowledge can be easily illustrated using the
examples of London and New York, both interpreted as being top of the hierarchy in
their respective national urban systems. At first glance this seems obvious but in fact
it grossly underestimates the importance of both cities. Both of these great cities
have long been leading ports in the world-economy but this very tangible property
could be kept from social science academic knowledge because the study of trade
through trade theory was nationalized, it was deemed a property of states not cities.
Thus this major city function was largely ignored in national urban systems analy-
ses, seemingly unmindful that New York cannot be understood as just part of the
United States, and London cannot be understood as just part of the United Kingdom.
Perhaps because of such limitations, national urban systems research largely disap-
peared in the 1980s and was replaced by research on studies of cities in globaliza-
tion, originally conceived hierarchically, following the mosaic habit, but latterly
seen as world city network (Taylor, 2004, 2009). It might have been thought that the
coming of globalization would have advanced the importance of cities in social sci-
ence. Certainly an impressive world and global city literature has emerged (Brenner
& Keil, 2006) that locates cities as critical to globalization processes. However, the
study of cities sits uncomfortably in reader compilations from the globalization lit-
erature where cities are largely neglected (Lechner & Boli, 2000). This is because
the trinity has survived the huge social changes wrought by globalization, as
reflected by the labels economic globalization, political globalization, and social (or
cultural) globalization. This is not surprising when the key text, Held, McGrew,
Goldblatt, and Perraton’s (1999) Global Transformation, is actually about transforma-
tion of the state in economic, political, and social realms of activity (Taylor, 2000).
Research on cities in social science has come to be labeled urban studies (which
aspires to combine urban economics, urban political science, urban sociology plus
urban geography and urban history); that is to say, it is one of the many areas of
study that have grown to facilitate subject matter that transcends trinity divisions as
indicated earlier. There is an excellent reader representing this literature (LeGates &
Stout, 2015) but one part of its composition reveals the extant shallowness of this
example of an area of study. When it comes to including chapters on the origins of
cities there is actually just one paper, a classic written in 1950 by Gordon Childe,
who appears in archaeological textbooks as a founding father, one of Renfrew and
Bahn’s (2008) early “searchers” (p. 36). Presumably this means that the compilers
of the urban studies reader cannot find a later, social science, contribution on the
question of city origins. What an indictment of social science for neglecting the
study of city origins. But using such an old archaeology paper is also strange; does
it suggest cities have been similarly neglected in this discipline?
7 Knowledges in Disciplines and Cities
130
Of Mainstream Archaeology
Archaeology is the discipline that we might be expected to go to for research on the
origins of cities. Childe’s (1950; Smith, 2009) classic paper located the first cities in
late fourth millennium BC Mesopotamia and this remains the consensus within the
discipline. There have been other suggestions, as I will relate later in this essay, but
these have been largely dismissed as not providing credible evidence for the exis-
tence of earlier cities. But, more importantly, this question has been of peripheral
concern in archaeological research. This can be shown by reference to the latest
edition of the best-selling introductory textbook on archaeology (Renfrew & Bahn,
2008). Textbooks are the basic means of socializing new generations into a disci-
pline; thus they provide the current understanding of the key questions, methods,
and theories that constitute that discipline (Taylor, 2015). Renfrew and Bahn (2008)
include no discussion at all about city origins. Why might this be?
In my introductory discussion of social science above there was no mention of
archaeology. The discipline’s obvious locale would be as a time discipline alongside
history with ancient history. However its formal location in universities is mostly
with anthropology. This makes some sense to the degree that anthropology treats
hunter-gatherer and early agricultural societies, and such societies dominate the pre-
history that archaeology investigates. This is to locate archaeology in the outer
reaches of comparative anthropology with an inevitable neglect of concern for cit-
ies. Thus in their text of over six hundred pages, Renfrew and Bahn’s (2008) index
includes no reference for city or cities.
Whereas national spatiality has dominated social science scholarship, in archae-
ology it is evolutionary temporality that features strongly in this scholarship.
Evolution theory, related to nineteenth century obsession with progress, survives
more in archaeology than elsewhere in social science. Darwin has his own box fea-
ture in Renfrew and Bahn (2008, p. 27) entitled “Evolution: Darwin’s Great Idea.”
Basically, evolution has been used to understand increasing complexity of society
but without any recognition of the exceptional complexity of cities.
Recently, some archaeologists have provided very strong critiques of traditional
evolutionary models of social change (Gamble, 2007, pp. 10–32; Yoffee, 2005,
pp. 8–15). Yoffee (2005, p. 34), in particular, is a trenchant critic of what he calls the
current “neo-evolutionary” approach in archaeology.
What neo-evolutionalism never was, was a theory of social change. Rather, it was a theory
of classification, of identification of ideal types in the material record. … In a vague sort of
way, mainly by talking about different adaptations as if they were somehow like genetic
differences, neo-evolutionists drew on the prestige of Darwin’s theory and often proclaimed
they had created a new science of social evolution. However, neo-evolutionists could not
explain change other than in holistic terms and were content to identify as evolutionary
mechanisms. . . climatic change or/and population growth. (pp. 31–32)
For Gamble (2007) “change takes the form of future-creep” so that “differences are
expected to happen eventually and can be explained simply by the passage of
enough time, a commodity with which human prehistory is abundantly blessed”
(p. 23).
P. J. Tay lo r
131
For both scholars there is not enough emphasis on process: Who are the agents
and why do their activities generate social change? Such questions lead to social
science.
It is very relevant that the archaeologists I have drawn on to critique city-state
and evolution—Gamble, Smith and Yoffee—are familiar with social science litera-
ture (including rediscovery of cities) and bring these disciplines into their own
work. But they are not necessarily very typical. Renfrew and Bahn (2008, pp. 12–13)
introduce archaeology by relating it to other disciplines: they identify only three:
anthropology, history, and science (for techniques). There is no specified relation to
social science and this is reflected in subsequent substantive chapters. Chapter 5
“How Were Societies Organized: Social Archaeology” (pp. 177–230) makes no ref-
erence to sociology literature, and chapter 9 “What Contact Did They Have: Trade
and Exchange” makes no reference to economics literature (pp. 357–390). Despite
this distain for social science, archaeology has shared the latter’s propensity to
neglect cities. Unfortunately the archaeologists I have identified above as knowing
recent cities literature do not contribute to the question of city origins. Strangely,
Renfrew and Bahn (2008, pp. 46–47) do have a two-page box feature on Çatalhöyük,
the key settlement in the city origins debate (Jacobs, 1969; Soja, 2000; Taylor, 2012,
2013), but they use it to illustrate changing approaches to the practices of archaeol-
ogy, with no mention of the controversies over interpreting the urban nature of the
settlement. There can be no clearer example of denial of the city origins question in
contemporary archaeology.
Debates Generated by Bringing Cities Back In
Although both social science and archaeology have early classic studies of cities, my
two indictments show that both have developed traditional structures of knowledge
that have underestimated the importance of cities for understanding social change.
But I have also shown that cities will win out; there is development of a city- centric
social science and this is being introduced into archaeology and interpretation of
ancient history. The most explicit example is the work of Algaze (2005a, 2005b). In
this substantive section I deploy the city-centric social science to challenge existing
ideas on first, the relation between cities and states and second, the relation between
cities and agriculture. In both cases I will argue that cities came first.
Unlike studies of contemporary cities, for historical cities it is not possible, of
course, to directly study the processes that make cities so exceptional. With very
early cities, agency in particular is a problem. Researchers do not know the agents—
merchants, priests, soldiers, textile producers, scribes—researchers only know of
their presence from the artifacts they have left to be discovered. Thus researchers
have to investigate the potency of a city through its knowledge-rich internal and
external assets in an indirect way. Fortunately there is a relevant variable, population
size, for which there are general estimates that will serve as a surrogate for cities as
potential creative centers. I call this the communication model of city-ness because
7 Knowledges in Disciplines and Cities
132
population size is a measure of potential communication capacity (Taylor, 2012,
2013, pp. 98–102). This is a network measure derived for internal links first and
then doubled to account for equally important external links. From such analyses
we find that Çatalhöyük, a possible early city, has a potential communication capac-
ity much more than a thousand times that of a hunter-gatherer band, whereas First
Dynasty Uruk, the first great city, had a capacity of more than half a million times
said band. These quantitative results indicate the huge qualitative social difference
that cities create and constitute the prime reason for city-centric study in archaeol-
ogy. This generates two related debates.
Cities and the Creation of States
The first debate is about two processes being conflated into one. I reported above to
there being no index references for cities in Renfrew and Bahn’s (2008) textbook;
however, there are nine references to city-states. It would seem understanding early
cities is subsumed into the study of early states (Charlton & Nichols, 1997). But
city-making and state-making are two very different processes, each requiring their
own process analysis. This position is held by some social scientists (e.g., Soja,
2010, p. 364) and by a few archaeologists familiar with social science writings on
cities. Monica Smith (2003) is a good example of the latter group. She is explicit on
the importance of recognizing that “cities do not require a state level of authority to
exist and thrive” (p. 12). Therefore:
it is … time for the understanding of cities to be uncoupled from the necessary presence of
states. By breaking this pairing of cities and states, we allow cities to be understood on their
own terms as centers of political, economic, and social organization that may be consider-
ably more complex than the territories and regions in which they are located. (p. 13)
She traces the conflation of cities with states back to Childe (1950, p. 12), who
created a framework in which “theorizing about urbanism has often really been
about states rather than cities.” This key point had been made much earlier by
Price (1978):
The relation between urbanism and the state, however, has been the cause of profound
confusion for a variety of reasons, both scholarly and ideological. Childe’s Mesopotamian
data combined urbanism and the state in a single sequence and permitted the uncritical
evaluation of this particular association. (p. 175)
Monica Smith (2003) indicts Robert Adams, the great chronicler of Mesopotamian
urbanism; she points out that, paradoxically, in his 1966 classic The Evolution of
Urban Society, despite the book’s title, his “central concern is the growth of the
state” (quoted in Smith, 2003, p. 12). But Smith (p. 15) argues that “cities in the
premodern world did not require a state level of organization”. This important point
seems not to have (yet?) percolated into the archaeological mainstream as repre-
sented by Renfrew and Bahn (2008).
P. J. Tay lo r
133
Traditionally, states have been interpreted as the outcome of increasingly com-
plex governance processes, consequent upon class formation and widening material
inequalities. This model is stripped bare to its essentials in Fig. 7.1a as a sequence
of governance types representing evolutionary stages as criticized by Yoffee (2005,
p. 34). Enhanced complexity is represented spatially by central place hierarchies
with three settlement tiers indicating the key complex chiefdoms that generate states
in civilizations (in which the number of tiers increases to four). An alternative model
is shown in Fig. 7.1b based upon Jacobs (1969) and Soja (2000). The starting point
is settlements in a trading network that morphs into a city network via the Jacobs
process of import replacement. The more successful this network becomes, the
more cosmopolitan are the cities. It is this unprecedented social complexity with
consequent intergroup conflicts that generates a demand for new stronger gover-
nance structures. This is best illustrated in Childe’s (1950) original case study: his
“urban revolution” in early Mesopotamia (Taylor, 2012, 2013, pp. 115–118). Here
we find two important sequences. First, accountancy—the language of commerce—
is invented before writing—the language of state bureaucracy (Nissen, Damerow, &
Englund, 1993). Second, in the new literature, there are myths—collective stories—
that describe times before the era of epics, heroic tales of individuals who become
kings (i.e., they centralize governance into states). This relates to a change from
transient governance in the form of a league of cities towards a region of city-states
in military competition (Jacobsen, 1970). The change is marked by huge labor
investments in city walls. Thus are city networks converted into competitive city-
states. In Mesopotamia this transition took about 700 years.
The vast majority of archaeologists continue to support narratives related to
Fig. 7.1a, whereas the alternative narrative based upon Fig. 7.1b is much more
(a) STATES OUT OF CHIEFDOMS
Hunter-gatherer bands
Big-man systems
(No settlement hierarchy)
Simple chiefdom
(Two-tier system)
Complex chiefdom
(Three-tier system)
Territorial state
(Four-tier system)
Disintegration
(City-state)
INCREASING SETTLEMENT HIERARCHY
(b) CITY- STATE INVENTION
Hunter-gatherer temporary trading post
(Part of temporary trading network)
Hunter-gather trading & production place
(Permanent trading network)
Complex city City-state
(Walls, competition)
Territorial state
(Provinces, empire)
(City network)
INCREASING GOVERNANCE EXPANSION
ll
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Fig. 7.1 Alternative origins of states. Pivotal stages or steps are in bold. ll indicates ending of
increase (Design by author)
7 Knowledges in Disciplines and Cities
134
pleasing to social scientists (including archaeologists who identify as social scientists).
It all comes down to whether you think chiefdoms can become complex enough to
invent states; I think not. Social complexity in and through cities occurs at a whole
new level; surely this is what is needed to generate such an important invention as
states.
Cities and the Development of Agriculture
The second debate is about one process being divided into two. These are Childe’s
(1950) ancient historical framework of two revolutions seemingly several millennia
apart. First there is the agricultural revolution that ushers in the Neolithic followed,
second, by the urban revolution ushering in the Bronze Age civilization. Since this
temporal sequencing was created, new evidence for origins of agriculture has
pushed back the first revolution by several millennia, while the second revolution
has proven to be much more temporally stable in mainstream thinking: hence a
widening gap between them. Despite this divergence there is a social science inter-
vention here that subsumes the development of agriculture into the process of initial
city development.
Here I develop the controversial idea of Jacobs (1969) on agriculture being
invented in cities. I know of no archaeologist who supports her thesis. Her argument
involves pushing back the timing of the first cities. She focuses upon Çatalhöyük in
southern Anatolia where a settlement of between four thousand and ten thousand
people has been excavated to show a complex division of labor. The problem for
archaeologists is that it appears about four thousand years before the rise of cities in
Mesopotamia, traditionally viewed as the very first cities (i.e., Childe’s urban revo-
lution). Their reaction has been to dismiss it as a city; their preferred label is large
village to emphasize its rurality. But Çatalhöyük is not alone as a relatively large
settlement existing before Mesopotamian cities. Soja (2000) has augmented Jacobs’s
interpretation by showing a large network of such settlements at this time within the
Fertile Crescent, birthplace of agriculture.
Figure 7.2a shows the traditional interpretation of the rise of cities: a simple
sequencing of settlements by size culminating in cities. In this argument the latter
first occur in Mesopotamia because improvements in agriculture (irrigation)
increased production, thereby generating a food surplus large enough to feed cities.
But this is a naive supply model; why should farmers work harder to generate large
surpluses and create cities? Surely increased production potential is an opportunity
for more leisure time? The alternative model is shown in Fig. 7.2b in which it is
existing cities that provide a demand for more food. For Jacobs (1969) this is a
classic case of import replacement. Hunter–gatherer–traders were exchanging food
products within new trade networks but found it hard to keep up supply as city
networks emerged. In this situation people in cities invented agriculture to replace
and enhance the hunter–gatherer–trader food supply. Thus hinterlands were cre-
ated around cities in which to produce food. As cities grew larger, more food
P. J. Tay lo r
135
technologies were invented, including irrigation in Mesopotamia, which fed new
large cities such as Uruk.
This is more like a stand-off than a debate, with the minority position again based
upon the qualitative social difference that cities make. The stark differences have
been recently exposed in the debate between Smith, Ur, and Feinman (2014) and
Taylor (2012, 2015). The former’s only reference to social science is a very early
paper from about the same time as Childe’s work (Wirth, 1938), the link being made
previously by Gates (2011, pp. 2–3).
Conclusion: The Limiting Case of Uncertainty of Knowledge
My conclusion is that understanding origins is a limiting case of Wallerstein’s
(2004) uncertainty of knowledge thesis. Wallerstein (2004) has argued that there is
an inherent uncertainty of knowledge due to the positionality of researchers/practi-
tioners interacting with ever-changing subject matters. Archaeological knowledge,
especially on origins lost in the mist of time, is a limiting case of this uncertainty
because empirical evidence derives from serendipity, based upon immensely low
probabilities of survival and discovery. Strong opinions are therefore due to either
entrenched paradigmatic thinking (my take on archaeology’s reluctance to shake off
nineteenth century ideas) or plausible process theory that makes sense of what little
evidence we have (my view of what social science can be). It is on this basis that I
think hunter–gatherer–traders created city networks and thereby released knowl-
edge potentials for the invention of such epoch-making institutions as agriculture
and states.
(a) BASIC EVOLUTIONARY THINKING
Hunter-gatherer
temporary
camp
Shifting agriculture camp Agricultural village Market town Large city
(Urban revolution)
(Agricultural revolution)
INCREASING AGRICULTURAL SURPLUS
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
_
___________________________
(b) BASIC COMMUNICATION ALTERNATIVE
Hunter-gatherer
temporary
trading
post
(Part
of
a
temporary
trading
network)
Hunter-gather trading & production places
(Permanent trading network)
Complex cities
(City network)
Agricultural villages
(Hinterland)
Dependent towns
(Hierarchy)
INCREASING ECONOMIC EXPANSION
Fig. 7.2 Two settlement development sequences. Starting points of developmental phases are in
italics; pivotal stages are in bold (Design by author)
7 Knowledges in Disciplines and Cities
136
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7 Knowledges in Disciplines and Cities
