Understanding the Emergence of Cities

University Of Georgia Research Foundation Inc, Athens GA

Investigators

Abstract

Over fifty percent of the world’s population now live in cities, but scientific understanding of how large, nucleated centers emerged from farmsteads and small villages remains poorly developed. This project will work to fill that gap. Researchers will use the past as a laboratory to model how the earliest large, permanent settlements in human history formed, operated, and eventually, collapsed. Within the framework of this project, their goal is to contribute to building cross-culturally relevant models of resilience and sustainability in nucleated contexts for both the distant past and recent times. Building on the research team’s two decades of teaching, training, and mentoring of undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral scholars, including underrepresented groups, the project is designed to actively promote equity and diversification in archaeology. Community engagement will be ensured by providing public lectures at schools, cultural centers, and museums as well as offering site visits and participation of local students in field work. The research datasets will be available through public lectures, scientific journals, mass media, websites, open-access data repositories, and in a monograph. For modeling cycles of population aggregation and disintegration in prehistory researchers will utilize Resiliency Theory (RT) as a conceptual framework. RT provides a productive framework for modeling social reorganization in prehistoric and historic contexts, with a focus on changes that unfolded over long periods of time. In this project, RT will be used to identify the conditions that were associated with those prehistoric aggregations that were more durable, thus more resilient. Specifically, this research will concentrate on two periods when people left their farmsteads and small settlements to live in large, aggregated villages which were occupied for divergent periods of time. Multiple variables will be explored to understand the process of population aggregation, as well as variation in household and settlement organization in these contexts. The researchers will use the results to compare the evolutionary arcs of these nucleated sites and determine those specific aspects of socioeconomic organization that led to longer-occupied large settlements. By identifying configurations that corresponded to more durable large settlements in the prehistoric past the project will develop cross-cultural and cross-temporal models of nucleation and sustainability that are relevant to present and future societies. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.