Urban Life Readings in the Anthropology of the City Fourth Edition

For 99 percent of the history of humans on earth, there were no cities. Our ancestors lived for thousands of years in temporary campsites or small villages. These communities were well suited to the small-scale, simple societies of ancient times, and most people who lived in them probably could not have imagined what a city was. During the past five thousand years, however, cities have become important parts of the social landscape in many parts of the world. Once complex societies evolved in a region, the appearance of cities was inevitable. The emergence of state-level societies out of the simple farming societies known as tribes and chiefdoms was one of the most fundamental and far-reaching social transformations of the human path, and the rise of the earliest cities was a crucial part of this process. Tribal society operated on a small scale. Everyone knew one another, and no single family stood out as more wealthy or powerful than the others. The economy was simple and very generalized--each family obtained its own food, built its own house, and made its own tools. Political leaders had no real power, and people had a high degree of freedom to pursue their own interests. Ancient states, on the other hand, were far larger and more com-