Introduction: European Prehistory and Urban Studies

Abstract

The idea for this special issue arose out of a session on ‘Pre-Roman Urbanism in Eurasia’ at the conference of the European Association of Archaeologists (EAA) in Istanbul in 2014. This was preceded by an international symposium in Vienna in 2012 on proto-urbanization in Western Anatolia and neighbouring areas in the fourth millennium BC, and succeeded by two more conferences on early urbanism with special focus on Eurasia at the universities of Buffalo (April 2016) and Durham (May 2016). This healthy interest reflects an emerging research agenda inspired by exciting new (and not so new) discoveries, some of which form the focus of the following papers. It also brought a skeleton out of the closet, that of the troubled relationship between European prehistory and the emergence of urbanism, a problem with two aspects. The first is the tacit assumption that the first impulses of urban development might be expected to follow the same Asiatic trajectory as the preceding Neolithization of Europe. Thus, the Minoan ‘first-generation secondary states’ (Parkinson and Galaty 2007, p. 118) should be considered the earliest European examples. Despite the well-argued case that the Balkans were an independent centre of innovations (Renfrew 1969)—in the case of copper metallurgy, even preceding Anatolia (Kienlin 2010)—diffusionist models affect research agendas to this day. The second aspect of the problem stems from another deep-rooted prejudice, whereby an essentialized view of the Classical, primarily Mediterranean, town or oppidum denied a fair ‘urban’ hearing to any Iron Age set of evidence that apparently deviated from this norm (Moore et al. 2013; Fernandez-Gotz et al. 2014). One of the aims of this special issue is to question the validity of these long-held views on the basis of new evidence. Simply ignoring this evidence or branding these cases exceptions is no longer sustainable: the new straws have already broken the old camel’s back. The second aim of this special issue is to address the common misconception that, if a given settlement form was not sustained for long enough (and how long that is has not been clearly defined), then it probably did not contribute to the overall urbanism phenomenon. The flaw in this view has been demonstrated by the now well-documented ‘boom and bust’ pattern that existed alongside a more stable pattern during the EBA urbanization in the Fertile Crescent (Wilkinson et al. 2014). Other patterns of urbanization may involve cycles of centralization and decentralization (Fernandez-Gotz et al. 2014). Permanently occupied, long-term settlements were but one part of the urban narrative, albeit an important part. Looking at the wider context should reveal different trajectories of living together, even if some of these ended up in evolutionary culs-de-sac.