Bronze Age – Robert Jurmain reference book processed under copper and bronze age
Critical Thinking Questions
- 1. List some of the basic differences between the lifeways of ancient village farmers and the residents of early cities. What are the social, economic, and political implications of city life?
- 2. Why were major river valleys the primary setting for so many early civilizations?
- 3. In what ways did Old World and New World civilizations develop along similar lines? In what ways were they fundamentally different? Most importantly, how can we explain these similarities and differences?
- ▶ Explain the differences between cities, states, and civilizations.
- ▶ Compare the fundamental processes that led to the development of the earliest civilizations.
- ▶ Assess the role that cities played in these developments.
- ▶ Examine and identify the extent to which the concept of the state, viewed as a political organization, was essential to the emergence of all early civilizations
The ruins of the city of Vijayanagara lie strewn along the banks of the Tungabhadra River in South India . As you walk south from the river, you’re seldom out of sight of broken granite pillars and the shattered foundations of palaces, temples, and courtyards in fertile valleys surrounded by hills that look like great jumbles of boulders. Founded in the early fourteenth century and destroyed about two centuries later, Vijayanagara had a fairly short life as cities go, but by all accounts, it was an extraordinary place (Fritz and Michell, 2003). With a sixteenthcentury population estimated at 500,000 (or about 2½ times the estimated population of London in 1600), the city covered roughly 10 square miles. It was the capital of an empire that included other states, both large and small, across South India. Following the defeat of its armies in a.d. 1565, Vijayanagara was destroyed, its buildings burned, blown apart, or pulled down with the aid of elephants; its citizens were scattered, its riches looted. The remnants of the empire limped along for another century or so, but it never recovered its former strength (Stein, 1994). The Vijayanagara ruins are now a UNESCO World Heritage site. Where once there were picturesque buildings, crowded markets, busy city streets, royal pageantry, and the fragrance of roses, there are now tour buses, shepherds, security guards, thorn bushes, and the occasional leopard that snatches puppies for late-night snacks. Vijayanagara lives mostly in stories told to small children in villages across South India about such rulers as Krishnadevaraya and their dynasties, their might, and the great events they caused. Vijayanagara exemplifies three interrelated concepts that are central to this chapter—cities, states, and civilizations, the earliest instances of which can be identified in the archaeological record after the emergence of true agriculture thousands of years ago. Such developments also marked the beginning of history in many parts of the world and laid the foundation for the modern era. By about 5,500 ya, some Old and New Worlds societies were independently transforming themselves into states and civilizations.
Civilizations in Perspective
The term civilization is not, as many people think, just another word for culture or society, nor is it the same thing as a city or a state. In this section, we’ll clarify our use of the terms city, state, and civilization before discussing theoretical perspectives on their origins and describing some archaeological examples.
Cities
Most of us take cities for granted. It just seems natural that they exist, that they’re big, and that they’re the social, political, and economic centers we often turn to. We even treat some cities, such as London, Paris, and New York, as icons for entire civilizations. But 7,000 ya, the complete absence of cities seemed just as natural to our ancestors. Most settled communities were hamlets, villages, or towns, and that’s the way communities had been for thousands of years. Cities, when they developed in prehistory, were often at the center of ancient states. Commonly, one or more prominent cities dominated smaller dependent towns and villages in a region that also supported farming hamlets. Cities are also characterized by social complexity, formal (nonkin) organization, and diverse craft and administrative specialists (Redman, 1978). The city is the nucleus where production, trade, religion, and administrative activities converge (Cowgill, 2004). These central places usually proclaimed their own importance in prehistory by erecting prominent structures for ceremonial or other civic purposes. The roots of cities or urbanism are currently best known archaeologically in the Near East, where settled communities existed in some regions before the beginning of the Neolithic and true agriculture.For example, we saw that Natufians or their contemporaries in the lower Jordan River valley had established a permanent community of dome-shaped dwellings at Jericho centuries before its residents became fully reliant on farming (Kenyon, 1981). Although it never attained the size or status of a true city, early Jericho anticipated some of the characteristics of later urban centers, including evidence of social complexity. Before 10,000 ya, Jericho traders also participated in the regional exchange of such commodities as salt, sulfur, shells, obsidian, and turquoise. Some of these products ended up as offerings in the graves of individuals buried at Jericho. More impressive were Jericho’s remarkable construction features, clearly the products of organized communal effort. A massive stone wall 6 feet thick, incorporating a 28-foot stone tower with interior stairs, enclosed the settlement of several hundred modest houses. A deep trench, cut into the bedrock beyond the wall, afforded even greater security, but against whom or what is unknown. Viewed initially as fortifications, Jericho’s wall and ditch may have been intended instead to divert mud flows brought on by severe erosion due to deforestation and poor farming practices in the vicinity (Bar-Yosef, 1986). The tower could have functioned either for defense or as a community shrine. Çatalhöyük, a 32-acre town in southcentral Turkey, was both larger and somewhat later than Jericho (Hodder, 1996; Balter, 2005). It served as a trade and religious center some 9,000 ya, during early Neolithic times. Catalhoyuk’s timber and mud-brick houses had only rooftop entrances; their painted plaster interiors included living and storage space, sleeping platforms, and hearths. The community’s several thousand inhabitants farmed outside the town walls or engaged in craft production within. Some residents exploited nearby sources of obsidian or volcanic glass to make beads, mirrors, and blades to be exported in exchange for raw materials and finished goods. The wealth that this trade generated may have supported religious activities in the elaborately decorated shrines uncovered at this site. Many of these shrines held representations of cattle, then only recently domesticated, as focal points for worshipers. Trade and religious activities promoted the development of Jericho and Catalhoyuk into relatively large and complex Neolithic communities. Even so, they were not true cities, nor were they part of any larger cultural entity that could be described as a state. The earliest true city yet discovered is Uruk, in southern Iraq. Associated with the Sumerian civilization of the southern Tigris-Euphrates Valley, Uruk boasts remnants of massive mud-brick temples and residential areas that housed tens of thousands of people after 5,500 ya.
States
The state is a complex form of political organization characterized by true social classes, the concept of citizenship, administrative bureaucracies, and a monopoly in the use of force (for example, armies), as well as other governing and administrative institutions typical of the societies in which most of us live today. Other types of political organization also exist, and while researchers disagree about how to define and apply them, they provide the much needed handles by which we can group together politically similar societies and study them. One common view is that of Morton Fried (1967), who describes the simplest, or least complex, societies as egalitarian. As the name implies, there’s no social differentiation in egalitarian societies; leadership is informal, and “the best idea leads.” Examples are most Paleolithic hunter-gatherer bands. Ranked societies are more complicated, particularly because some forms of social differentiation are present; a few people are “chiefs,” but most are “Indians.” These socially differentiated statuses and roles can be inherited, but there are no true social classes. Examples include Neolithic farming villages in the Near East and Mississippian chiefdoms in eastern North America. In stratified societies, significant social differentiation is present and true classes exist. An example is the Natchez, a Native American group of west-central Mississippi, whose society was rigidly hierarchical by comparison with other documented Mississippian chiefdoms. Finally, we have the state, the complex form of political organization described at the beginning of this section. The main disadvantage of pigeonholing ancient societies into such categories as egalitarian, ranked, and so on, is that it implies an evolutionary progression of past political institutions— even where there’s little or no empirical evidence that such a view is warranted. In Fried’s typology, for example, ranked societies follow egalitarian societies and precede stratified societies, and so on. Through frequent application in research, the built-in sequence of cultural evolutionary stages represented by Fried’s scheme and others like it can begin to seem both real and discoverable. Over the years, researchers have found that it’s important to understand both the similarities and the differences between ancient societies as part of the larger task of explaining the development of the earliest states (Trigger, 2003, p. 42). The result is still an evolutionary picture of the development of cities, states, and civilizations, but one that examines cultural changes within a web of possibilities rather than as the outcome of a succession of stages. For our purposes, the state is a governmental entity that persists by politically controlling a territory and “by acting through a generalized structure of authority, making certain decisions in disputes between members of different groups, maintaining the central symbols of society, and undertaking the defense and expansion of the society”(Yoffee, 2005, p. 17). Examples include most modern nations. With the emergence of the earliest states in antiquity, we also find archaeological evidence of other important changes, among them social stratification, typically in the form of true social classes (recalling Fried, 1967). This is so consistent a feature of states that in his recent comparative analysis of early civilizations, archaeologist Bruce Trigger (2003) describes them categorically as “class-based” societies. In ancient states, most people worked the land, while a smaller number performed essential specialized tasks of craft production, military service, trade, and religion. At the top of this social heap were a few elite individuals who closely controlled access to goods and services produced by others, information, the means of force, and symbols of valued status; these individuals also made most essential decisions that affected the working of society—usually with the proclaimed sanction of gods and the assistance of a bureaucracy of lesser officials. Such decisions covered many critical functions, including the capacity to create and enforce laws, levy and collect taxes, store and redistribute food and other basic goods, and defend or expand the state’s boundaries. The development of true social classes implies another important aspect of states: Their main social institutions are commonly organized on the basis of criteria other than that of kinship. This doesn’t mean that families and kinship cease to be important at every level of society, from the greatest of rulers to the person who hauls out the garbage at the end of the day. What changes is that some of the roles and duties that were once handled by your kin are now decided by the state. For example, states tend to appropriate the right to decide which acts of murder committed by its citizens will be punished as crimes and which will be rewarded with medals and marching bands. They also may take over the authority to pass judgment on local civil disputes, such as village squabbles over property boundaries, contract breaches, and the like. In nonstates , these decisions were usually decided in kin-centered institutions such as families and lineages.
Civilizations
Civilizations comprise “the larger social order and set of shared values in which states are culturally embedded” (Yoffee, 2005, p. 17). And while cities and states are building blocks of civilizations, the civilizations of which they are a part may show considerable diversity. Unlike what archaeologists believed half a century ago, we can’t trace a simple developmental sequence in the archaeological record from villages to cities and then to states. For example, the Vijayanagara empire (roughly a.d. 1300–1650) appears to have been more unified and more urban than Maya civilization during the Classic period (a.d. 250–900). To understand why, we must consider differences of culture, technology, history, external relations, and even terrain, because they all played important roles, as shown in the archaeological records of these regions.
Summary of Main Topics
▶ The earliest civilizations developed independently in several world regions directly after people achieved sustainable food production.
▶ Environmental and cultural factors are insufficient by themselves to explain the rise of the earliest civilizations.
▶ The earliest civilizations found only a limited number of ways to create new decision-making institutions and the distribution of power and authority.
▶ Broad similarities exist between the earliest Old and New World civilizations, but there are also important differences.
▶ New World civilizations emerged in more ecologically diverse locations than those of the Old World.
▶ New World civilizations also relied less than their Old World counterparts on domesticated animals, wheels, or metal for technological purposes. In “What’s Important,” you’ll find a useful summary of the most important archaeological sites discussed in this chapter. And in the final chapter of the book, we’ll consider some of the important points to be derived from the story of human biocultural evolution