ABSTRACT
For purposes of understanding the Urban Revolution, however, differences in the onset of food production between the Old and the New World are of little consequence, except insofar as they reflect cumulative differences in subsistence potentialities. This chapter considers the nature of agricultural "surpluses" insofar as they may have been a precondition for the Urban Revolution in Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica. Emphasis on gross surplus rather than per capita surplus serves other functions as well. It suggests, for example, that an increase in the gross size of population and territorial unit may offer at least as strong a stimulus to the Urban Revolution as putative increases in "efficiency". The physical manifestations of urban settlement in Mesopotamia and central Mexico are less central to theme than the ecological setting in which they arose and, in any case, were too complex and extensive to receive detailed discussion.
