Low-density Agrarian Cities: A Principle of the Past and the Present

The topic of urbanism constitutes one of the central questions in human evolution. The topic has attracted a massive literature in archaeology (e.g. Mumford, 1961; Blanton, 1976; Fox, 1977; Cowgill, 2004), with no sign of the flow of books and articles being stemmed and no sign of any consensus as to the meaning of the term ‘urbanism’ and the origins of the process of urbanization (Gaydarska, in press). In this chapter, we shall be examining early examples of the emergence of what we call ‘Big Weird Sites’ ¹ –settlements that are unusually large for their local and regional cultural context and which pose questions about the evolutionary model of settlement growth (e.g. Birch, 2013).