01 Chapter 1325 30/8/05 10:46 am Page 1

1
Urban Sprawl: What is Urbanization and
Why does it Matter?
Mortimer Wheeler Lecture

ROBIN OSBORNE

Introduction: Urbanization in Archaeology

URBANIZATION HAS BECOME A SOMEWHAT UNFASHIONABLE TOPIC among
archaeologists. Many general books on archaeology published in the 1990s
afford it not even a passing glance. To judge from the absence of urban,
urbanization, city and town from the indices to Ian Hodders 1992 collection Theory and Practice in Archaeology and Chris Gosdens 1998 Anthropology and Archaeology: A Changing Relationship, urbanization is a topic which
has no part in archaeological theory or practice and to the understanding of
which anthropology has no contribution to make.
The brief or short introductions to archaeology by Fagan (1997) and
Bahn (1996) offer rather similar brief definitions of urban or city, but show
almost no interest in the circumstances in which cities are created. Fagan
writes: Urban: city-dwelling. Archaeologists have argued for years how to
define a city. In general, cities have more than 5,000 inhabitants and are far
more complex entities than villages or towns, especially in their social organization and nonagricultural activities (Fagan 1997, 27 n. 2). Fagan devotes
almost no space to villages and towns, neither of which terms appear in his
index, preferring in general to use the term communities, a term with a
social rather than a material referent. Bahns version is Archaeologically, one
can identify an urban settlement pattern, with cities playing a prominent
roletypically a large population centre with more than 5,000 inhabitants,
and containing big public buildings and temples. One can often perceive a
settlement hierarchy, with the capital at the heart of a network of subsidiary
centres and small villages (Bahn 1996, 57; compare Renfrew and Bahn 1996,
168). Here again, the town is notable for its elision: we move from small villages to cities via subsidiary centres, and the city is notable for its
assumption of an implicit political role as the capital.
Proceedings of the British Academy 126, 116. The British Academy 2005.

01 Chapter 1325 30/8/05 10:46 am Page 2

Robin Osborne

The elision of the town has become standard (compare Pendery 1996),
but it remains extremely surprising. As Peter Wells pointed out (1984, 16), A
distinction between towns and cities is arbitrary; both exemplify the phenomenon of urbanism. But the tendency of archaeologists to attempt to
limit the use of the term urban to only the largest of settlements is as problematic as it is widespread. As Smith has pointed out, in commenting on the
work of Wanders and Webster on Mesoamerica, the higher the size and density threshold for an urban community is set, the greater the conflict between
such demographic definitions of the urban community and definitions based
on function (Smith 1989); for archaeologists it has to be function that is the
important question.
Arguably the problems with urbanization, both with the way in which
it is regularly defined and at the root of its current unfashionableness, lie
in its having become bound up with questions of state formation. Many
discussions of urbanization in the 1950s to 1970s occurred explicitly in the
context of discussion of state-formation, and as recently as 1999 the
Companion Encyclopaedia of Archaeology (edited by Graeme Barker) discussed urbanization (only) in a chapter, by Simon Stoddart, entitled Urbanization and state formation. Archaeologists regularly set out a hierarchy of
socio-political organizations (bands, segmentary societies, chiefdoms,
states) and classified the town as the mark of the state (see e.g. the chart
at Renfrew and Bahn 1996, 167). Doubts about such evolutionary schemes
have come from both ends. On the one hand there has been growing concern that the single term state is being used to cover an unhelpfully wide
range of different types of social and political organization that there are
good reasons for keeping distinct. On the other, anthropologists have
attacked attempts to explain state-formation in terms of material factors
when ethnography shows the importance of non-material factors such as
kinship structures, religious ideas, and even speech forms (cf. Roscoe 1993).
In the face of this latter denial of the primacy of material factors, urbanization is relegated from its leading analytical position in studies of political evolution. But worse still, in the face of the former doubts about the
value of the very notion of state, urbanization has been deprived of the
very framework which gave its analysis a rationale. Attention has turned
from the large scale to the small scale, to the study of individuals (as in
cognitive archaeology) and of the dynamics of social groups (as in social
archaeology).
In retrospect, subordinating discussion of urbanization to discussion of
state formation never made good sense. The formation of urban communities neither requires nor produces the state. State formation depends both
upon material and social factors, and although a certain population density
and degree of nucleation are clearly prerequisites of complex social and polit-

01 Chapter 1325 30/8/05 10:46 am Page 3

WHAT IS URBANIZATION?

ical organization, it is clear that both density and nucleation are independent
of any particular form of political organization.
There is no reason, however, why separating off discussion of urbanization from discussion of state formation should put an end to studies of
urbanization. On the contrary, it should liberate the study of the town. As
Gordon Childe saw, in his talk of an urban revolution, the formation of
towns is as much about the economy as it is about politics. It is in that vein
that Andrew Sherratt has recently suggested that Childes urban revolution
continues to provide the most sensible framework in which to discuss what
has been called the secondary products revolution, the use of animals for
products other than food (Sherratt 1996, 633). What can be done when
urbanization is examined in this way can be seen from Melinda Zeders
Feeding Cities (1991), which has most usefully explored the requirements and
consequences of urbanization for agricultural, and particularly pastoral,
practices in order to satisfy demands for meat from those not themselves
engaged in animal husbandry. But it is equally true that the formation of
towns is as much about social relations as it is about the economy. As Roscoe
(1993, 116) points out, in an oral pedestrian society the scope for social
interaction is limited by the physiological limitations of the human body and
the physical properties of time and space creating an economy of time. The
formation of denser population clusters opens up new possibilities for
social interaction which may have cultural consequences in terms of social
structure and organization or cult practices as well as in terms of politics or
the economy.
If archaeologists in general have turned aside from urbanization, archaeologists working in the Mediterranean have continued to worry about it.
Indeed this volume comes less than a decade after the similarly entitled
Urbanization in the Mediterranean in the Ninth to Sixth Centuries B.C.
(Damgaard Andersen et al. 1997). In part, Mediterranean archaeologists
interested in this period have continued to concern themselves with urbanization because of the historical importance of the Greek polis, something
that has itself been kept high on the scholarly agenda by the project of the
Copenhagen Polis Centre (Hansen 1997a, 2000a). Although study of the
early Greek polis tends to retain a heavily political focus, much innovative
archaeology over the last two decades has drawn attention to ways in which
changes in the burial record (Morris 1987) or the siting of cult activity (de
Polignac 1984/1995) can both directly manifest social change and indirectly
manifest political change.
The stimulus provided by these works has, ironically, had consequences
not unlike the consequences of the loss of faith in the state in archaeology
more generally. The debate which followed the publication of Ian Morriss
Burial and Ancient Society (cf. e.g. Osborne 1989) concerned itself primarily

01 Chapter 1325 30/8/05 10:46 am Page 4

Robin Osborne

with questions of social relations and changing degrees of egalitarianism,

largely ignoring aspects of the argument which directly concerned the
formation and shaping of the town. Morris himself has developed his ideas
precisely in the direction of excavating social relations, and the latest manifestation of his thinking on this period of Greek archaeology does not
feature urbanization, urbanism, the town, the city, or even the polis, in its
index (Morris 2000). Similarly, de Polignacs work on sanctuaries has led
scholars to pay a lot more attention to sanctuaries in the countryside, rather
to the neglect of the urban cult activity for which abundant evidence is also
available (cf. Alcock and Osborne 1994; Marinatos and Hgg 1993).
The direction in which study of the early polis has moved since the 1980s
has been encouraged by the direction which Mediterranean archaeology has
taken more generally. The main sources of new archaeological data have
been, on the one hand, archaeological surveys, which have enormously
enriched our knowledge of settlement, and settlement development, in the
countryside, and on the other the careful excavation and publication of
particular, and most frequently non-urban, sites, above all cemeteries (e.g.
Osteria dellOsa, Lefkandi, Pantanello) and sanctuaries (e.g. Kalapodhi,
Isthmia, San Biagio). Although there have been a number of important
recent contributions to early urban archaeology (e.g. Mazarakis-Ainians
work at ancient Oropos, Mazarakis-Ainian 2002 with further references) we
have yet to see the detailed publication of results that may once more change
the focus of more general analytical work.
It should be no surprise, therefore, to any reader to find that several of the
studies in Urbanization in the Mediterranean in the Ninth to Sixth centuries
B.C. of 1997 were primarily concerned either with the countryside or with the
implications of the burial record. As the editors of that volume emphasize in
their introduction (Damgaard Andersen et al. 1997, 12), there is considerable
virtue in such approaches (which will not be absent from this current volume), for they appropriately insist that urban forms must be seen in context.
That insistence on context also results in a scepticism about the value of
measuring urbanism with reference to lists of traits, a further feature common to this volume. But where this volume differs is in its greater concern
with broad patterns of urbanization. The focus of the 1997 volume is
strongly on case studies, of particular sites or of small regions; the focus of
this volume is upon broader patterns. And where that volume, despite its title,
limited itself almost exclusively to Greece, Italy, Sicily, and Sardinia, the geographical scope of this volume runs from the Phoenicians and Cyprus, in the
east, to Spain and the Phoenicians, in the west.
If this volume as a whole demonstrates that in practice there is much to
say about early urbanization in the Mediterranean, the rest of this paper is
devoted to attempting to make the case for a new theoretical approach to the

01 Chapter 1325 30/8/05 10:46 am Page 5

WHAT IS URBANIZATION?

archaeological data. We cannot simply throw out the old framework of evolutionary politics, and the old measuring sticks of trait analysis, without
replacing them with some new understanding of the phenomenon with which
we are dealing. After a close look at the recent practice of Greek archaeologists, I shall argue that what is required is to invert the order of analysis, to
approach the town not as the answer that pops up when all the boxes have
been ticked, but as the question. Urban settlements need to be analysed in the
way that sanctuaries and cemeteries have come to be analysed, as bodies of
material readily recognizable on very minimal criteria, whose particular form
imposes certain constraints upon interpretation but whose very existence can
itself contribute to our understanding of social relations. Attempts to understand what is going on in the Mediterranean in the early Iron Age are
doomed unless we reinsert the importance of the town as a unit of analysis
and start examining the variable form of towns with the same care that is
customarily devoted to the variable forms of sanctuaries and cemeteries.

Defining Urban
No small part of the crisis in the study of urbanization lies in the difficulty of
defining urbanism. But for any discussion of urbanization, definition of the
term remains basic. The many definitions of the city have only one element
in common: namely that the city consists simply of a collection of one or
more separate dwellings but is a relatively closed settlement. So Max Weber
begins his posthumously published The City (1921/1958, 65). Neither ancient
historians nor classical archaeologists have found this lowest common
denominator approach to the city very helpful. At the very least they have
wanted to follow Wirth (1938) and talk of a large, dense, and permanent settlement of socially heterogeneous individuals (my emphasis). More often, they
have turned to Webers characterization, later in The City, of the full urban
community, where he insists that To constitute a full urban community a
settlement must display a relative predominance of trade-commercial relations with the settlement as a whole displaying the following features: 1. a fortification; 2. a market; 3. a court of its own and at least partially autonomous
law; 4. a related form of association; and 5. at least partial autonomy and
autocephaly (1958, 801).1 Webers prescription for the ideal type of the full
urban community has been a popular basis for subsequent prescriptions of
what it is to be a town.
1

I reproduce the standard translation, but it makes too much of a meal of 3, where Weber
simply writes its own courts and at least in part its own laws and renders 4 incomprehensible: Webers Verbandscharakter und damit verbunden is better rendered, was a political
community (compare Hansen 1997b, 323).

01 Chapter 1325 30/8/05 10:46 am Page 6

Robin Osborne

One such prescription seems recently to have been enjoying a renaissance

among classical scholars; it is discussed by Peter Rose (1997, 172) as well as
by Morgan and Coulton (1997). This is Gordon Childes ten-point delineation of an urban settlement from his famous paper on The urban revolution of 1950. Childes ten points were: 1. concentration of a relatively large
number of people in a restricted area; 2. craft specialization; 3. appropriation
by a central authority of an economic surplus; 4. monumental public architecture; 5. developed social stratification; 6. use of writing; 7. emergence of
sciences; 8. naturalistic art; 9. foreign trade; 10. group membership based on
residence rather than kinship.
It is just possible to see how, in the heady excitement of Childes evolutionary model, in which sedentary agriculture made possible the city and the
city made possible civilization, that cornucopia of blessings made sense as a
description of the urban settlement. Outside that context, however, it is hard
to see the use of such a shopping list of items with no functional relationship
between them (compare Wheatley 1972, 612). I find it hard to see what purpose is served by the application of that list, or, even worse, of choice parts
of that list, as a template against which to measure the Greek city, as Morgan
and Coulton (1997) do. Just as Webers full urban community makes best
sense in the context of his interest in the rise (or otherwise) of capitalism and
the question of power in society (compare Whittaker 1995), so Childes urban
settlement makes sense, if at all, only as a way of measuring settlements up
against his model of settlement development. Ironically, not only has Childes
model not stood up to the fall from fashion of explicitly evolutionary models, but only by an insistence on the use of writing can early settlements like
Catal Hyk that antedate sedentary agriculture be excluded from the category of urban settlement if urbanism is measured against Childes list of
components. To make a decision as to whether a settlement is a town depend
upon the use of writing, or on naturalistic art, is, at the least, counterintuitive. This is simply not what urban means, we are entering the realm of
private language.
If we are going to worry ourselves about the coming of the town, then the
category of town needs to mean something to us in public language. In some
circumstances the reasonable answer to What do we expect of a town? is
best framed in terms of our own current usage (compare Ward-Perkins 1996),
but, in the context of early Iron Age settlements known from partial archaeology alone, our own all-too-parochial expectations of mayors, shopping
centres, and the like, are little help. Similarly, there are circumstances in which
there is a valuable shock to be achieved by pitching our criteria for urbanization high and claiming, for example, at the end of a book which had happily
talked about towns, that Urbanization was unknown in Greece (Osborne
1987, 194); but that is to contribute to a particular debate in which the term

01 Chapter 1325 30/8/05 10:46 am Page 7

WHAT IS URBANIZATION?

urbanization had been loaded in a particular way. Urbanization is a phenomenon which admits of degreesa settlement can be more or less urbanizedand it is important that we pitch our threshold in the right place to
enable the instances that we are interested in to appear on the scale. Treatments such as Ian Morriss The early polis as city and state, in which selfgoverning communities with populations well in excess of 1,000 are admitted
to statehood but denied the status of towns, and e.g. town planning is
dismissed as more a sign of centralization than of urbanization per se
(Morris 1991, 40), undermine the notion that there is any link between
settlement form and social and political organization (if we can have statehood without urbanization then presumably the advent of the town has no
political consequences) for no compensatory gain.
What we need is a definition which raises and illuminates issues that we
want to answer. I have some sympathy, therefore, with the, in many ways
laughable, dilemma of 1960s sociologists as recounted by Goldstein and Sly
(1976, 8078):
according to the offical urban definition in 1960 (the population in localities of
2,500 or more inhabitants), Mexico was a predominantly urban country; yet
nearly 55 percent of its population was engaged in agricultural activities.
Accordingly, in Mexico a number of studies have employed non-census definitions of urban, such as the one developed by Unikel in which five criteria (proportion of labor force in non-agricultural activities, proportion literate,
proportion with primary schooling, use of footwear and proportion of salaried
employed population) are employed to distinguish two levels of urban and the
two levels of rural.

Wanting to use degree of urbanization as a measure of degree of development, and finding that the statistics to hand did not do that job, those sociologists simply replaced conventional urbanization criteria with conventional
development criteria. And, hey presto! up comes the right answer.
Those sociologists illustrate, in extreme form, the problem that we face. If
we design our criteria for urbanism according to the results we wish to
achieve then we will get out exactly, and only, what we put in. Those who
work with the assumption that urbanism is something that has desirable consequences pile Pelion on Ossa in their criteria, insisting on distinct urban
ways of life which encompass political structures and forms of economic life,
on the one hand, sometimes called structural urbanization (de Vries 1984,
12, following Charles Tilly), and forms of knowledge and forms of communication on the other (sometimes called behavioural urbanization (de Vries,
ibid.) ). Urban becomes an accolade that is awarded or withheld, not a problem to be investigated. The persistent identification between the urban and
the good, or at least the developed, the persistence, indeed, against all the
superficial denial, of a deep evolutionism, has led to the ongoing problem

01 Chapter 1325 30/8/05 10:46 am Page 8

Robin Osborne

that, to quote the opening words of Wheatleys classic paper: Urbanism is

one of the most protean of terms (1972, 601). Such urban sprawl has
nothing to offer to the archaeologist.
As a source of questions that we might want to ask about the early Iron
Age town, Weberian or Childean ideal types have their values. But as a definition of the phenomenon to be investigated, it is the minimal lowest common denominator from which we will most sensibly begin, from the
expedient definition in terms of relative population size and density.
Urbanization is a process of population concentration (Tisdale 1942). In
asking about urbanization in the early Iron Age we are primarily asking what
social, political or economic functions required, encouraged, or at least
allowed, people to come back together in relatively dense and relatively large
communities. Towns and villages should be distinguished by function
(Grove 1972, 560).

Settlement in Dark Age Greece

Living in relatively dense and relatively large communities is relatively easy to
achieve. That is, even given very modest average agricultural yield and relatively high agricultural labour-intensity, a population of 7,500 can be supported, on the labour of a third of its population, from a territory of 5 km.
radius (cf. Wilkinson 1994), and a population of perhaps 25,000, allowing for
some fall-off of production with distance, from a territory of 10 km. Higher
average yields, of anything up to three times the 250 kg. per ha. of the above
calculation, seem plausible in the Greek context, and offer the possibility of
significantly enlarging these figures. It is perhaps only when we are dealing
with populations of 70,000 or more that we can be confident that local agriculture did not provide the economic base. To put that figure in perspective,
in the whole of Europe in 1500 there were only eighteen cities with in excess
of 40,000 inhabitants, and only four of those had in excess of 80,000 inhabitants (de Vries 1984). Relatively dense and relatively large communities can,
therefore, perfectly well be formed on a local agricultural base if those who
farm the land are prepared to travel modest distances. Urbanization, on this
minimal definition of urbanization, does not require a change in the economic base, it requires a desire for living together, or compulsion to live
together, sufficient to face up to the modest costs involved in time travelling
to outlying fields, fetching water, or disposing of waste, and the modest
degree of co-operation required to cope with the added wear and tear on
areas not clearly the responsibility of individual households.
Looked at like this, it is not surprising that de-urbanization is not a
marked feature of so-called Dark Age Greece. While the collapse of the
Mycenaean palaces is demonstrable, it is equally clear, from both direct and

01 Chapter 1325 30/8/05 10:46 am Page 9

WHAT IS URBANIZATION?

indirect evidence, that living in relatively dense and relatively large communities was not abandoned with the abandonment of those palaces. That
emerges from the remains of such settlements as the lower town at Tiryns, socalled refuge settlements such as Karphi, and equally from the cemeteries of
Knossos or Lefkandi. Sites that were occupied for the first time during the
Dark Ages were not infrequently relatively densely settled: Zagora and
Hypsele on Andros, to which I shall return shortly, provide nice examples of
this. One reason why a Childean model of urbanization has been attractive to
some Greek archaeologists is precisely because within Greece itself the phenomenon that is new and interesting between 800 and 600 is not the formation of relatively dense and relatively populous settlements where there were
none before, but the way in which relatively dense and relatively populous
centres become also independent political centres, laying claim to surrounding territory, and the way in which the town becomes the standard model for
new settlements.
In insisting on returning to simpler criteria for urbanization, one of the
things that I am seeking to do is to highlight the existence of alternatives to
the urban model in mainland Greece through the Dark Ages and into the
eighth century. At least two alternative models of settlement were certainly
available. On the one hand, there was the relatively populous but not at all
dense centre formed by the sort of cluster of villages that went to make up
Sparta. Corinth seems to have been a similar cluster of villages, and indeed
to some extent so was Dark Age Athens (see further Chapter 3 (de Polignac) ).
On the other hand, the eighth century seems to see the spread of small settlements. In Attica we find eighth-century evidence of occupation, on an
uncertain scale, on a number of later village sites, and important cemeteries
are formed outside Athens itself, some of them of considerable size. It is
arguably a measure of relatively dense and relatively large settlements being
insufficient that Dark Age sanctuaries tend to be extra-urban. Dark Age settlements were not divorced from the countryside and put no premium on
meeting all their cultural needs internally; it was only in the eighth century
that any temple building within such settlements began. The existence of
Dark Age extra-urban sanctuaries, and the increasing number of dedications
that they receive in the eighth century, suggest that relatively sophisticated
community social and economic life could be more than adequately sustained
in either of these alternative settlement models.
Yet what happened around and after c.700 demonstrates that neither of
these alternative models maintained its attractions. Corinths villages seem to
have united in the seventh century. The pattern of burial at Athens suggests
the self-conscious creation of a central community of the living whose internal divisions came to be marked only by burial in various extra-urban locations. The eighth-century pattern of relatively widespread occupation in

01 Chapter 1325 30/8/05 10:46 am Page 10

10

Robin Osborne

Attika is followed by retrenchment in the Archaic period before renewed village settlement in the Classical period. Seventh-century evidence in Attika is
notoriously more abundant for cult sites than for settlement sites, and while
some of this may be explained in terms of pottery use and discard, some of
it may indeed reflect increased dominance of the town of Athens after 700
(Osborne 1989; DOnofrio 1997; cf. Mersch 1997). The Classical Athenian
deme system certainly largely reflects settlement at the end of the sixth
century, but there is increasing reason to think that some Athenian demes
were fifth-century creations (Osborne 1996a). More particularly, although
attempts have been made to detect internal divisions within such settlements
abroad as Megara Hyblaea (Svenbro 1982; de Polignac 1999) it is not possible to point to a single foundation abroad that adopts a loose cluster of villages rather than a single relatively dense and relatively large centre (see
further Chapter 3 (de Polignac) ).
The evidence from surface survey, though rarely subject to much chronological precision, also suggests that neither alternative model spread significantly. Survey provides one nice positive example of what I am suggesting
was the standard model, the case of Phleious. The most significant Geometric finds found in the Nemea valley are from Phleious and from what are
clearly sanctuary sites. In the Archaic period the evidence from Phleious
much increases and spreads into the adjacent plain to the south, suggesting
to Alcock (1991) that the town was laying claim to territory in a way that
argues for polis status. Elsewhere the support that survey offers tends to be
negativethe failure of the Lakonia survey, for instance, to find any occupation of the countryside before the sixth century and the similarly very
limited finds of early Iron Age material from the survey of north-west Kea.
Survey does at first sight provide some possible parallels for the Attic
model. On Methana Geometric pottery is mainly found at the three major
sites of Methana town, Magoula and Oga, sites that continue to dominate
the Archaic pottery distribution, before a quite different pattern develops in
the Classical period with many small sites, with Methana town expanding
and acquiring fortifications, and with Oga and Magoula remaining at their
Archaic extent. In the area of the southern Argolid survey, the archaeologists
suggest that a site hierarchy emerged in the seventh century with five major
sites (not just the later poleis of Halieis and Hermion, but Mases, Fournoi,
and Eileioi). How reasonable a conclusion that is depends on how one interprets the facts that at Iliokastro 45 per cent of the material dated was Geometric, 8 per cent Archaic, and at Fournoi 50 per cent was Late Helladic,
5 per cent Geometric and just 1 per cent Archaic. If a pattern of villages was
present or incipient in the eighth century it is tempting to see signs of its
decay, rather than its continuation (contra Jameson, van Andel and Runnels
1994, 375) in the Archaic period. The refoundation of Eileioi on a new site

01 Chapter 1325 30/8/05 10:46 am Page 11

WHAT IS URBANIZATION?

11

(G2 rather than G1), and with orthogonal planning, in the fifth century
should arguably be seen as precisely that, a new venture, not simply the latest
version of a long continued pattern of settlement.
Urban units, on my minimalist definition, were nothing new in late
eighth-century Greece. What was new from around the end of the eighth century was the dominance of relatively populous, relatively dense settlements as
the only model. Different areas arguably conform to this norm at different
rates, but no new settlement patterns of a significantly divergent nature can
be found. The biggest qualification is that urban dominance came later where
villages were relatively closely clustered or where, as on Methana, land communications were blocked. Arguably the ancient stories that explain, for
instance, the Athenian settlement pattern, by telling of an episode of synoikism that no one can square with any archaeological data, themselves indicate the dominance of the standard model and the need felt by Greeks
themselves to explain anomalies. Yet it is important to stress that this dominance of the urban form is not necessarily a dominance of the city-state: by
no means all the relatively populous and dense centres also laid claim to a
significant degree of political independence.

Explaining the Spread of the Town

Ironically, I want to argue that we can best see why the urban form became
dominant by looking at some signal failures among towns. Almost twenty
years ago now, Anthony Snodgrass drew attention to what he called the
failed poleis, the group of relatively dense and relatively large settlements
that flourish in the ninth and eighth centuries only to be abandoned somewhere around 700 BC, usually with continued use only of their sanctuaries.
The cases to which he drew attention then were Zagora on Andros,
Koukounaries on Paros, Agios Andreas on Siphnos, and Xobourgo on
Tenos. Intrigued by these claims I persuaded the British Academy to give me
a small grant to go and look at those sites. At that stage, looking at the settlements from close to, I was much more impressed by the diversity visible
between those sites than by their similarities: Agios Andreas and Xobourgo
were inland and rather defensible sites, Zagora and Koukounaries coastal
and variably accessible; the precise dates of abandonment seemed different
and the material cultures distinct. Since that time we have come to know most
of these sites better, and we have also been made aware of a further Cycladic
site with a very similar history: Hypsele on Andros, another site on a coastal
peninsula, on the south-west coast of Andros, some 15 km. north of Zagora.
The addition of Hypsele to the catalogue of failed towns surely makes it
even more pressing to account for the failure not by separate explanations but
by linked explanations. Although Kastro on Siphnos shows that Cycladic

01 Chapter 1325 30/8/05 10:46 am Page 12

12

Robin Osborne

towns could flourish in the seventh century, what we seem to have is not the
separate failure of a number of different relatively dense settlements, but
something systematic. In the current state of our knowledge of the material
we cannot put a chronology on the abandonment of these settlements, but
even if we do not know the order in which the dominos fell, it is worth asking whether we do not see a domino effect. What we are seeing is not the
wholesale desertion of whole islandsthe continued use of sanctuaries in
these towns in itself makes that clearbut the abandonment of the town as
the preferred residential form.
Despite the variation in proximity to the sea, to which I have alluded,
these failed towns share a defensive siting. None of them is easy of access, all
have some sort of defensive walling, and in all cases one of the attractions of
the urban form in the first place may well have been the advantages of numbers for mutual defence. Urban living makes sense as a local choice in conditions of insecurity, and there are some signs that at Koukounaries, the least
inaccessible of the sites, the settlement did indeed come under attack. The
additional costs, in terms of access to good agricultural land and indeed
access to a wider world, can be seen as necessary burdens to put up with in
the interests of security. Comparison of the assemblage from Zagora with the
assemblage from, for example, Lefkandi does strongly suggest that Zagora
was indeed materially isolated.
One-purpose sites are always going to be vulnerable when that purpose
ceases to be a high priority, but the near-simultaneous abandonment of the
whole group of sites within one or two generations seems unlikely to be the
result simply of defence seeming now a lower priority. It is hard to believe
that life in the Cyclades suddenly became dramatically more pacific around
700 BC if anything what happened at Koukounaries may show the reverse.
What certainly happened around 700 BC was urban sprawl, the concentration
of populations into relatively dense clusters, not only across mainland Greece
but in lands west which were being newly explored. These were most normally settlements that were not walled and where the clustering was not
defensive. What made town life attractive, I suggest, was town life elsewhere.
The pace of exploration and settlement abroad in the late eighth century was
frenetic, and I have argued elsewhere that the size of the population sustained
at Pithekoussai can only have been possible if there were large numbers of
ship movements on which Pithekoussai was one port-of-call (Osborne
1996b). But to be a worthwhile port-of-call a community had to be of a certain size and density: of a size to guarantee that there would be goods to be
supplied and demanded, and of a density to ensure that all transactions
could be done at a one-stop shop. The demand for settlements to acquire
urban form was not restricted to the areas newly settled, although it certainly
did apply with particular force there; it also applied to the old world of main-

01 Chapter 1325 30/8/05 10:46 am Page 13

WHAT IS URBANIZATION?

13

land Greece. But that demand was not for any sort of settlement that was
both relatively large and relatively dense, but for accessible settlements of that
kind. Zagora, Hypsele, Agios Andreas, and Xobourgo could not fit that bill.
Koukounaries might have done, but we might speculate that there was an
even more attractive node for vectors heading for Paros.
What I have tried to do in this paper is to break free of models of
urbanization that insist on particular internal or organizational features of
towns. Such features are often close to arbitrary or question-begging, and
insistence upon them frequently counter-intuitive. What is important about
towns is not that they necessarily do or involve any thing in particular, but
that they make possible a whole range of economic, social, and political
activities which cannot be managed, or managed as effectively, in other
forms of settlement. Those possibilities are released not by particular types
of bureaucracy, literacy, or footwear, but by the fact of a relatively large
population being gathered relatively densely. I have then tried to justify this
liberating move of asking about the formation of relatively dense and populous settlements first, and looking into the functions that they play afterwards, taking the situation in eighth to sixth-century Greece as an
example. I have argued that we can see a distinct change in settlement preferences in Greece and parts of the world settled from Greece, around the
end of the eighth century, in the form of a move to a more or less exclusive preference for urban settlement. This change in preference, I have further suggested, can only be understood when the overall pattern of
settlement is appreciated; we must look at the advantages of a system of
towns, rather than concentrating on the internal features of particular settlements. The advantages of a system of towns depended not simply on
populousness and density but upon accessibility. In the radical change in
urban settlement in the Cyclades we can see how rapidly the growth of the
system of towns changed the priorities for urban siting. More briefly, only
by abandoning the sprawl of definitions of urbanization can we explain
the sprawl of the urban form itself.

References
Alcock, S. 1991: Urban survey and the polis of Phlius. Hesperia 60, 42163.
Alcock, S. and Osborne, R. (eds) 1994: Placing the Gods: Sanctuaries and Sacred
Space in Ancient Greece (Oxford).
Bahn, P. 1996: Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford).
Bruhns, H. 19879: La cit antique de Max Weber. Opus 68, 2942.
Childe, V. G. 1950: The urban revolution. Town Planning Review 21, 915.
Christie, N., and Loseby, S. T. 1996: Towns in Transition: Urban Evolution in Late
Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Aldershot).
Cornell, T. J. and Lomas, K. (eds) 1995: Urban Society in Roman Italy (London).

01 Chapter 1325 30/8/05 10:46 am Page 14

14

Robin Osborne

Cunliffe, B. W. 1985: Aspects of urbanization in northern Europe. In Grew, F. and

Hobley, B. (eds) (1985), 15.
Damgaard Andersen, H., Horsnaes, H. W., Houby-Nielsen, S., and Rathje, A. (eds)
1997: Urbanization in the Mediterranean in the Ninth to Sixth Centuries BC. Acta
Hyperborea 7 (Copenhagen).
de Vries, J. 1984: European Urbanization 15001800 (London).
DOnofrio, A.-M. 1997: The 7th century BC in Attica: the basis of political organization.
In Damgaard Andersen, H. et al. (eds) (1997), 6388.
Eisenstadt, S. N. and Shacher A. 1987: Society, culture, and urbanization (Newbury
Park, CA).
Fagan, B. M. 1997: Archaeology: A Brief Introduction, 6th edn (New York).
Goldstein, S. and Sly, D. F. (eds) 1976: Patterns of Urbanization: Comparative Country
Studies, 2 vols (Dolhain).
Gosden, C. 1998: Anthropology and Archaeology: A Changing Relationship (London).
Grew, F. and Hobley, B. (eds) 1985: Roman Urban Topography in Britain and the
Western Empire. CBA Research Report 59 (London).
Grove, D. 1972: Function and future of urban centres. In Ucko, P. et al. (eds) (1972),
55965.
Hansen, M. H. (ed.) 1997a: The Polis as an Urban Centre and as a Political Community.
Acts of the Copenhagen Polis Centre 4 (Copenhagen).
Hansen, M. H. 1997b: The polis as an urban centre: the literary and epigraphical
evidence. In Hansen, M. H. (ed.) (1997a), 986.
Hansen, M. H. (ed.) 2000a: A Comparative Study of Thirty City-State Cultures
(Copenhagen).
Hansen, M. H. 2000b: The impact of city-state cultures on world history. In Hansen,
M. H. (ed.) (2000a), 597623.
Hodder, I. 1992: Theory and Practice in Archaeology (London).
Hohenberg, P. 1990: The city: agent or product of urbanization. In van der Woude, A.
et al. (eds) (1990a) 35264.
Jameson, M. H., van Andel T. H., and Runnels, C. N. 1994: A Greek Countryside: The
Southern Argolid from Prehistory to the Present Day (Stanford, CA).
Marinatos, N. and Hgg, R. (eds) 1993: Greek Sanctuaries: New Approaches
(London).
Mattingly, D. J. 1997: Beyond belief ? Drawing a line beneath the consumer city. In
Parkins H. M. (ed.), Roman Urbanism: Beyond the Consumer City (London),
21018.
Mazarakis-Ainian, A. 2002: Recent excavations at Oropos (northern Attica). In
Stamatopoulou, M. and Yeroulanou, M. (eds), Excavating Classical Culture:
Recent Archaeological Discoveries in Greece (Oxford), 14978.
Mersch, A. 1997: Urbanization in the Attic countryside from the late 8th century to
the 6th century BC. In Damgaard Andersen, H. et al. (eds) (1997a), 4562.
Morgan, C. and Coulton, J. J. 1997: The polis as a physical entity. In Hansen, M. H.
(ed.) (1997a), 87144.
Morris, I. M. 1987: Burial and Ancient Society: The Rise of the Greek City-State
(Cambridge).
Morris, I. M. 1991: The early polis as city and state. In Rich, J. W. and WallaceHadrill, A. (eds) (1991), 2557.

01 Chapter 1325 30/8/05 10:46 am Page 15

WHAT IS URBANIZATION?

15

Morris, I. M. 2000: Archaeology as Cultural History (Oxford).

Osborne, R. 1987: Classical Landscape with Figures: The Ancient Greek City and its
Countryside (London).
Osborne, R. 1989: A crisis in archaeological history: the seventh century in Attica.
BSA 84, 297322.
Osborne, R. 1996a: Greece in the Making, 1200479 BC (London).
Osborne, R. 1996b: Pots, trade and the archaic Greek economy. Antiquity 70, 3144.
Pendery, S. 1996: Urban archaeology. In Fagan, B. M. (ed.) Oxford Companion to
Archaeology (Oxford), 734.
Polignac, F. de 1984/1995: La Naissance de la cit grecque: cultes, espace et socit
VIIIeVIIe sicles avant J.C. (Paris), translated as Cults, Territory and the Origins
of the Greek City-State (Chicago).
Polignac, F. de 1999: Linstallation des dieux et la gense des cits en Grce dOccident,
une question rsolue? Retour Mgara Hyblaea. In La Colonisation grecque en
Mditerrane occidentale. Actes de la rencontre scientifique en hommage Georges
Vallet (Rome), 20929.
Renfrew, C. and Bahn, P. 1996: Archaeology: Theories, Methods, Practice, 2nd edn
(London).
Rich, J. W. and Wallace-Hadrill, A. (eds) 1991: City and Country in the Ancient World
(London).
Roscoe, P. B. 1993: Practice and political centralization: a new approach to political
evolution. Current Anthropology 34, 11140.
Rose, P. W. 1997: Ideology in the Iliad: Polis, Basileus, Theoi. Arethusa 30, 151200.
Sherratt, A. 1996: Secondary products revolution. In Fagan, B. M. (ed.), Oxford
Companion to Archaeology (Oxford), 6335.
Smith, M. E. 1989: Cities, towns and urbanism: comment on Sanders and Webster.
American Anthropologist 91, 4549.
Stoddart, S. 1999: Urbanization and state formation. In Barker, G. (ed.) Companion
Encyclopaedia of Archaeology II (London), 90849.
Svenbro, J. 1982: Mgara Hyblaea: le corps gomtre. Annales ESC 37, 95364.
Tisdale, H. E. 1942: The process of urbanization. Social Forces 10, 31116.
Ucko, P., Tringham, R., and Dimbleby, G. (eds) 1972: Man, Settlement and Urbanism
(London).
van der Woude, A., Hayami, A., and de Vries, J. 1990a: Urbanization in History: A
Process of Dynamic Interactions (Oxford).
van der Woude, A., Hayami, A., and de Vries, J. 1990b: The hierarchies, provisioning, and demographic patterns of cities. In van der Woude et al. (eds) (1990a),
119.
Ward-Perkins, B. 1996: Urban continuity? In Christie, N. and Loseby, S. T. (eds)
(1996), 417.
Weber, M. 1921/1958: The City, edited and translated by D. Martindale and G.
Neuwirth (New York).
Wells, P. 1984: Farms, Villages and Cities: Commerce and Urban Origins in Late
Prehistoric Europe (Ithaca, NY).
Wheatley, P. 1972: The concept of urbanism. In Ucko, P. et al. (eds) (1972), 60137.
Whittaker, C. R. 1990: The consumer city revisited: the vicus and the city. JRA 3,
11018.

01 Chapter 1325 30/8/05 10:46 am Page 16

16

Robin Osborne

Whittaker, C. R. 1995: Do theories of the ancient city matter? In Cornell, T. J. and

Lomas, K. (eds) (1995), 926.
Wilkinson, T. J. 1994: The structure and dynamics of dry-farming states in Upper
Mesopotamia. Current Anthropology 35, 483520.
Wirth, L. 1938: Urbanism as a way of life. American Journal of Sociology 44, 144.
Zeder, M. 1991: Feeding Cities: Specialized Animal Economy in the Ancient Near East
(Washington).