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16. Factoring the Countryside into Urban Populations
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How do we characterize urban populations? Population study is more than simply a consideration of size. The character of a population is described as well by various components: its ethnic and economic makeup, its internal economic, social, and political articulation, and its religious organization, just to name some of the more obvious. In an urban environment many factors can affect these population characteristics. These factors range from subsistence systems to endemic diseases. But for this chapter, I would like to narrow the issue to looking at how city/rural relations affect the size and composition of urban populations. My interest is in beginning an investigation that should be able to facilitate our understanding of the effect that the relationship between urban and rural societies has not only on the size but also on the economic, political, and religious structure of archaeological urban populations. My topic is not new. The issue of the impact of the countryside on urban populations has been one of concern both for archaeologists and for economic historians for several years. For the latter, mainly those working in Classical history , the question of the functional relationship between city and country has been polarized between advocates of a limited view of urban economics (Finley 1973; Hasebroek 1933; Hopkins 1978b; Jongman 1988; Polyani 1944; Weber 1958; Whittaker 1990) and those who view the city as more commercially advanced (Engels 1990; Hicks 1969; Laurence 1995). Advocates of a limited model of economics argue that the preindustrial city was essentially a consumer city, living off the agricultural produce of its hinterland. In a consumer city the population basically lives off agriculture. The population consisted of either farmers who lived in the city but traveled out to farm family holdings or nonfarmers who basically lived off of agricultural taxes from the countryside. Those who disagree with this view deny that the city was basically a nucleus of people who focused on the consumption of agricultural products, advocating instead that the population of cities was engaged in manufacturing or supplying services to the territory that it controlled. 16 Factoring the Countryside into Urban Populations David B. Small In short, these differences in interpretation would have the city inhabited primarily either by nonspecialized agriculturalists or by specialized craftspeople. Each scenario is closely tied to the relationship that is seen between the city and its countryside. Archaeology has not been so polemic. As archaeologists, we recognize that several factors of urban populations (size, complexity, hierarchy, and so on) are dependent on the nature of the ®ow of subsistence and other goods between cities and the countryside. In fact, the analysis of many urban sites is now often accompanied by the requisite rural survey (for example, Nicholas 1989). But even so, it is not easy to ascertain where archaeology stands on the effect of the hinterland on urban populations. For example, the importance of the relationship between the city and the countryside has been highlighted by Yoffee (1995:284) in considering social change in Mesopotamia: “The countryside in early states, with its villages connected to cities and with its own specialized institutions of production and consumption , is utterly different than the countryside of prestate times.” Few would object to this obvious conclusion. But it brings us no closer to understanding the relationship between urban and rural. What is the connection that would determine the nature of both the rural and urban populations? Although archaeologists have been quick to recognize the important relationship between city and country, that thinking has been only partially conceptualized. The dominant paradigms used in analyzing urban/rural relations have revolved around an assumed dominance of urban forces over rural populations. The reason for this lack of development, I believe, is that our concepts of urban/rural connections have come to us from human geography. For the last 40 years archaeology has borrowed settlement concepts from geography—central place analysis, rank-size analysis, and others—where the centrality or hierarchical dominance of cities serves as an armature for urban/rural analysis (see overview in Ashmore and Knapp 1999). These concepts have formed the theoretical assumptions in most settlement survey research, such as Johnson’s (1980) extremely in®uential Mesopotamian survey that framed the issue of urban/rural connections in archaeological landscapes in such terms as secondary and tertiary centers. This implied that urban sites themselves are not only politically but also economically dominant on a landscape. This assumption has been so ingrained in archaeology that it features prominently in basic texts as well...