ABSTRACT
Introduction Humans have always lived in collectives or villages. Humans are social beings. It was the development of agriculture that drew families away from rudimentary villages in order to work a simple farm. Clearly village-living allowed humans to exploit division of labor in a way that economized on resources used in transportation (there is more on this topic in Chapter 6, dealing with the growth of a community). And of course, collectives of individuals could fend off attackers better than single persons could. Anthropologists have faced the question of the efficient size of these villages in the long period before farming on a private plot was invented. Many take 150 people as the size of a typical “village” in the days before the development of agriculture. Farming provided surpluses that could be traded, typically for town goods and such trade provided for the development of towns, places with more complicated divisions of labor and more complicated social hierarchies. Some groups of individuals organized themselves into rudimentary “firms,” collectives with bosses and underlings. And trading arrangements became more complicated with rural folk showing up regularly to sell their produce to townsfolk. What constrained the size of these early “cities”?
