ABSTRACT
Writers on the general topic of urban origins have not usually given much consideration to the Chinese experience. With very few exceptions they have confined their attention to the climacteric events that took place at various times in Lower Mesopotamia, Egypt and Nuclear America.l Some, while acknowledging the essentially independent character of the earliest Chinese urban configurations, have excluded them from consideration on the grounds that the available evidence is both exiguous and unrepresentative. I t is true that, in comparison with the archeological evidence that has accumulated over the span of a century or so in relation to the cities of Sumer, or over a somewhat shorter period in relation to those ofMesoamerica, the Chinese materials are meager in quantity. They are also fragmented and both spatially and temporally discontinuous, while the stages immediately prior to the emergence of urban forms are but poorly elucidated. However, only a small proportion of the total finds from Sumer and Mesoamerica bear directly on urban generation, so that the abundance of archeological materials should not be taken to imply vast resources for the study of city origins. Moreover, as has frequently been pointed out, excavation has been confined almost exclusively to the environs of monumental complexes at the expense of the territory which supported them, as well as to the levels of the monumental complexes at the expense of the antecedent formative phases in their development.
