The world’s first cities emerged on the plains of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria) in the fourth millennium BC. Attempts to understand this settlement process have assumed revolutionary social change, the disappearance of kinship as a structuring principle, and the appearance of a rational bureaucracy. Most assume cities and state-level social organization were deliberate functional adaptati...

The world’s first cities emerged on the plains of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria) in the fourth millennium BC. Attempts to understand this settlement process have assumed revolutionary social change, the disappearance of kinship as a structuring principle, and the appearance of a rational bureaucracy. Most assume cities and state-level social organization were deliberate functional adaptati...

The chapter includes identification of the need for reconceptualization of architectural and urbanistic discourse in higher education and the definition of the transdisciplinary methodology for a sustainable development of the living environment. Architecture and urbanism as complex disciplines that start from the existential social needs and reach to the most complex challenges and aspirations...

The world’s first cities emerged on the plains of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria) in the fourth millennium BC. Attempts to understand this settlement process have assumed revolutionary social change, the disappearance of kinship as a structuring principle, and the appearance of a rational bureaucracy. Most assume cities and state-level social organization were deliberate functional adaptati...

The archaeology of pre-Columbian polities in the Amazon River basin forces a reconsideration of early urbanism and long-term change in tropical forest landscapes. We describe settlement and land-use patterns of complex societies on the eve of European contact (after 1492) in the Upper Xingu region of the Brazilian Amazon. These societies were organized in articulated clusters, representing smal...

The world’s first cities emerged on the plains of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria) in the fourth millennium BC. Attempts to understand this settlement process have assumed revolutionary social change, the disappearance of kinship as a structuring principle, and the appearance of a rational bureaucracy. Most assume cities and state-level social organization were deliberate functional adaptati...

The world’s first cities emerged on the plains of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria) in the fourth millennium BC. Attempts to understand this settlement process have assumed revolutionary social change, the disappearance of kinship as a structuring principle, and the appearance of a rational bureaucracy. Most assume cities and state-level social organization were deliberate functional adaptati...

This paper proposes a novel global harmony search algorithm (NGHS) to solve 0–1 knapsack problems. Theproposed algorithm includes two important operations: positionupdating andgeneticmutationwith a small probability. The former enables the worst harmony of harmony memory to move to the global best harmony rapidly in each iteration, and the latter can effectively prevent theNGHS from trapping in...

Moro is a Kordofanian language spoken in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan. It has a vowel height harmony system that presents an intriguing challenge due to the dual nature of the central schwa vowel. Schwas in some morphemes can trigger vowel harmony, while schwas in other morphemes do not. In addition, schwas can appear with both sets of harmonic vowels within morphemes, raising the issue of wheth...