URBAN REVOLUTION

in anthropology and archaeology, the process by which small, kin-based, nonliterate agricultural villages are transformed into large, socially complex, civilized urban centres. The term urban revolution was introduced by V. Gordon Childe, an Australian archaeologist. Although Childe equated civilization with urbanism, other social scientists, while admitting a considerable overlap, distinguished between the cultural phenomena characteristic of urban areas and those of civilized societies. Childe identified 10 formal criteria that, according to his system, indicate the arrival of urban civilization: increased settlement size, concentration of wealth, large-scale public works, writing, representational art, knowledge of exact sciences, foreign trade, full-time specialists in nonsubsistence activities, class-stratified society, and political organization based on residence rather than kinship. He saw the underlying causes of the urban revolution as the cumulative growth of technology and the increasing availability of food surpluses as capital. Further archaeological evidence demonstrated that the formal criteria Childe proposed were, in reality, not universal. A core of basic structural trends, however, appeared to be essential as cities appeared in different areas at different times. The American anthropologist Robert McCormick Adams suggested that the essential transformation in the urban revolution was in the realm of social organizationan increase in the scale and complexity of society and the emergence of new political and religious institutions, which precipitated cultural and technological changes. There is general agreement among scholars that one of the necessarybut not sufficientpreconditions for the urban revolution is the potential for production of storable food surpluses. Whether the actual production of surplus preceded the development of social institutions or whether these institutions induced or compelled farmers to produce a surplus is a matter for debate. Other features that may have been important include agencies for exchange and redistribution of goods between specialized and interdependent zones and differential control over productive resources. These conditions, in turn, would lead to concentration of wealth and class stratification. Population increases usually followed, rather than preceded, the core of the urban revolution. The urban revolution seems to have occurred first in Mesopotamia about 3000 BC. Cities appeared somewhat later in Egypt, in the Indus Valley, and in northern China. In the New World the earliest-known urban centres are in Meso-America and Peru and date from about the 1st millennium AD.