Anthropology 2220: Archaeology of Ancient Cities

This seminar delves into the world’s earliest cities: their origins, their operations, and their collapses.  It considers how we define this term, and why every settlement doesn’t grow into a city.  The course will investigate the earliest experiments with settlement nucleation globally, and then reviews scholarship on urban centers in North and South America, the Middle East, China, Africa, and the Mediterranean.  Topics will include urban structure, feeding of city populations, urban institutions, planning and self-organization, and cosmology.