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Ten Things 2006: Pr...Graduate seminar open to upper level undergraduates
Spring 2005
Wednesdays 11.00 - 12.50 Building 550-553R
Michael Shanks mshanks@stanford.edu 650 996 8763
How are we to understand early cities? Archaeologists and anthropologists have tended to focus on urban origins, ideas of civilization, looking for reasons for the emergence of social complexity, finding them in social ranking, the control of resources and the organization of production, trade and exchange.
This course surveys such research but then takes a different view and considers the early city as it was perceived, understood, lived. In this the course embodies a critique of most archaeological approaches to the city. It focuses through the lens of the ancient city on some trends in contemporary urban studies, particularly those associated with cultural and human geography. These take a broad interest in the city, setting out from economic and physical fabric and into issues such as personal and group identity, sub-culture in relation to class politics, representation and discourse, and energy flows that incorporate but are by means exhausted by economic relationships. It also means that the classic topic of the state and its relationship to the city is reevaluated in cultural, historical and economic terms.
We will open with a detailed examination of five ancient cities– Catal Hoyuk, an early "megavillage" in Anatolia, Ur in Sumeria, Tell El Amarna in Egypt, Corinth in Greece, and ancient imperial Rome. This will be the basis of an interrogation in the second half of the course of key themes in urbanism -
The major aim of the course is to address the need for an open agenda in urban archaeology, to consider how this might be achieved. Another is to evaluate the relationship of urban archaeology to urban studies, asking how might the archaeology of ancient cities contribute to current debates around the city. This requires a broad view of long-term "big history" that runs counter to much archaeological thinking, yet is implied in the comparative approach taken by many anthropological archaeologists.
Objectives are to gain familiarity with the details of the five ancient cities that are the focus of the course, and to relate the sources, archaeological and textual, to what might be the components of a new agenda in urban archaeology. This will involve taking account of current archaeological theories of urbanization as well as reading within urban studies to establish key themes.
While a conventional paper is possible as a course assignment, class members will also be invited, as a means of assessment, to contribute to a glossary of themes in ancient urbanism, along the lines of Steve Pile's and Nigel Thrift's "City A-Z" (Routledge 2000).
Paper length or contributions to the glossary will be decided according to the simple formula that one unit of credit represents approximately 1500 words of research essay.
Plan and initial proposal to be submitted digitally by 26 April.
Final version to be submitted digitally by 4.00pm 3 June.
Books will be made available for class consultation in the Classics Department Library. Journal papers and book chapters will be distributed as photocopies.
Class members are encouraged to conduct their own research into the shape of urban experience!
Part 1 - cities
Wednesday March 30
1 Urban studies and archaeology - some thoughts from MS to set the scene.
Wednesday April 6
2 Çatal Höyük- urban beginnings?
http://catal.arch.cam.ac.uk/catal/catal.html
Mellaart, J. 1967. Çatal Hüyük; a neolithic town in Anatolia. New York,: McGraw-Hill.
Wednesday April 13
3 Ur- the first major city in Mesopotamia
Van de Mieroop, M. 1997. The ancient Mesopotamian city. New York: Clarendon Press ;Oxford University Press.
Woolley, L. 1954. Ur of the Chaldees; a record of seven years of excavation. London: Penguin Books.
Wednesday April 20
City of heretical pharaoh Akhenaten on the Nile.
Kemp, B.J. 1991. Ancient Egypt : anatomy of a civilization. London ; New York: Routledge.
Wednesday April 27
5 Corinth - city state in Greece
Salmon, J. 1984. Wealthy Corinth: a History of the City to 338 BC. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Shanks, M. 1999. Art and the Early Greek State: an Interpretive Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wednesday May 4
Edwards, C. and Woolf, G. 2003. Rome the cosmopolis. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Part 2 - themes
Wednesday May 11
Themes - networks and "megamachinery"; accounting and bureaucracy; food and gastropolitics; buildings and monuments.
Wednesday May 18
8 Cosmos and body politic
Themes - the order of things, including bodies; from architecture to cosmopolis and utopia; class and monarchy; war
Wednesday May 25
9 Urban undecidables - the paradoxes of urban life
Themes - class and demography, spectacle and theater, surveillance and imperialism.
Wednesday June 1
10 Origins - urban revolution?
Examining theories for urban beginnings.
Amin, A. and Thrift, N.J. 2002. Cities : reimagining the urban. Cambridge: Polity.
Atkins, M. and Sinclair, I. 1999. Liquid city. London: Reaktion.
Burgin, V. 1996. Some cities. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Finnegan, R.H. 1998. Tales of the city : a study of narrative and urban life. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Fyfe, N.R. 1998. Images of the street : planning, identity, and control in public space. New York: Routledge.
Gates, C. 2003. Ancient cities : the archaeology of urban life in the ancient Near East and Egypt, Greece, and Rome. New York: Routledge.
Hall, P. 1998. Cities in civilization : culture, innovation, and urban order. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
LeGates, R.T. and Stout, F. 2003. The city reader. London ;: New York : Routledge.
Miles, M., Hall, T. and Borden, I. 2004. The city cultures reader. London ; New York: Routledge.
Mumford, L. 1961. The city in history: its origins, its transformations, and its prospects. New York, Harcourt, Brace & World.
Pile, S. 1996. The body and the city : psychoanalysis, space, and subjectivity. London ; New York: Routledge.
Pile, S. and Thrift, N.J. 2000. City A-Z. London ; New York: Routledge.
Scarre, C. and Fagan, B.M. 2003. Ancient Civilizations. Upper Saddle River NJ: Prentice Hall.
Trigger, B.G. 2003. Understanding early civilizations : a comparative study. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Yoffee, N. 2005. Myths of the archaic state : evolution of the earliest cities, states and civilizations. Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press.
