When news about Tenochtitlan (nowadays Mexico City), the capital of the Aztec Empire, started to reach Europe around the time of the conquest by the Spanish Conquistadors led by Hernán Cortés, the city was soon labelled the ‘Venice of the New World’.
Most CWA readers will have visited some ruined cities for one reason or another; the majority of us will have let ourselves be fascinated by imagining how life in the past might have been, and how much or how little it would have resembled the modern equivalent, with its venues for leisure and work; for sleep and entertainment; for labour and exploitation; for aesthetically pleasing and artistic expressions
Ritual practices have been part of human life for almost as long as we can trace archaeological remains. The supernatural and inexplicable attract, excite, and worry people, with religion and its associated rituals being one of the main ways through which humans try to make sense of the world, create structure, and seek support
The narrative about the rise and fall of civilisations and their infrastructures is still omnipresent in scholarship about past cities. It is a story that sells well.
A little urbanism can be a dangerous thing. Sometimes all it takes is a patch. In the modern world, for all its cities, there are still many places where one does not need to travel far to meet landscapes of villages, fields, and farm animals.
If you happen to be among the many people who are born and raised in the countryside, chances are that you have found yourself at some point in your life quarrelling about city people who seemed to imagine themselves to be naturally more innovative and progressive than the rest of humankind, your good self included.
A well-worn joke goes that archaeologists find their careers in ruins. This is sometimes literally true: at least since the 1970s, and in cities on all inhabited continents, crises sparked by deindustrialisation, decay, and dereliction have been an assured portent of large-scale excavations. It is not just that when business goes down, archaeology goes in.
If you want to know how liveable a city is, you can ask the rats. The cosmopolitan rodents will know exactly how resource-rich and wasteful in nutrients their human co-habitants are.
Spring is upon us in the northern hemisphere and people are venturing out into the open again: into their gardens, onto their balconies, into urban parks or the countryside to enjoy the miracle of spring and the verdant, flowering flora that accompanies it.
‘The unknown town now had a name… All that day “Naukratis” rang in my mind, and I sprang over the mounds with that splendid exultation of a new discovery, long wished for and well found.’ The prospect of discovering ancient cities, lost for centuries in the depths of jungles or deserts, was part of the original lure (and original sin) of archaeology.
Few experiences seem to bring us closer to people in the past than literally following in their footsteps on the streets of abandoned ancient cities, among the ruins of what they once called home. The effect can be dampened, though, when we reflect that these remains only exist because at some point the population left their houses, temples, palaces, and plazas for better or – more likely – worse.
Ancient city culture was inescapable in the societies where it prevailed. It suffused life to encompass almost everyone. Even the dead.
Archaeologists, like most people, have an urge to grasp the world through something tangible or, even better, countable. There can be a great comfort in numbers, and numbers also convince; many have been the attempts to define cities by countable characteristics: an area of at least 10ha, 10,000 inhabitants, a certain number of public meeting places, a particular thickness of city walls in metres.
Rubina Raja & Søren M Sindbæk on archives and urban archaeology
Rubina Raja & Søren M Sindbæk on managing ressources in urban African societies.
Rubina Raja & Søren M Sindbæk on the complexities of communal living.
Rubina Raja & Søren M Sindbæk on cognitive technologies
Rubina Raja & Søren M Sindbæk on heterogeneity.
Rubina Raja and Søren M Sindbæk on low-density urbanism at ancient sites