ABSTRACT
One of the questions which has caused great controversy among geographers, archaeologists and anthropologists alike is how to define a town or city, or what constitutes an urban settlement pattern. Definitions vary from threshold population sizes (or relative population sizes) to complex models of a variety of interacting social elements (e.g. Wheatley, 1972). Childe (1950) defined three important stages in the development of urbanism. Progressive growth of the population led to the development of urban populations who were able to carry out nonsubsistence economic activities, which in turn led to the specialization of labour, differential accumulation of wealth and class stratification. One problem with this model is that it fails to indicate why populations became urban simply as a function of growth. A major factor that needs to be explained is why the population growth was not reflected by expansion rather than nucleation. Trigger (1972) emphasized the role of increasing social and economic complexity in answering this question. When an increasingly diverse set of activities need to be carried out, individual activities are often highly localized in order to maintain efficiency in terms of accessibility and transport. He suggested that the steady increase in population associated with sedentary, agricultural lifestyles tend to produce such increases in population and types of activity (see also Chapter 10). Various authors have pointed out, though, that these sets of conditions by no means lead to the development of urban centres in all cases, and that local factors are most important when defining where and when such centres emerged. As will be seen below, their emergence varied very distinctly in space and time.
