Finding Lost Cities: Part One
What's a city?
Hello and welcome back to Coffee with Clio,
With winter closing in (at least for those of you reading in the northern hemisphere), I thought it might be fun to go off an a bit of an adventure…
…finding lost cities!
This will be a more cerebral adventure than the leather-trousers-and-dysentry sort, but all the better for curling up with a hot drink.1
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that it has been a good few months for finding lost cities, and that I had thoughts about that, so here we go.
My plan is to take those headlines, ‘[Archaeologists] find lost city,’ in reverse order, so this week, I’m thinking about cities.
Next week, I’ll dig into the idea of ‘lost’. How on Earth do you lose a city? And anyway, when we say ‘lost’, how lost do we really mean?
Then, the week after that, just in time for Christmas, we’ll finally get to ‘finding’. I promise some really amazing stories and a reminder that the past is full of discoveries waiting to be made.
A city by any other name?
For now: what even is a city?
There isn’t one answer to this question. And even how you go about trying to answer it is important.
One place to start is with the words. ‘City’ is an English word that doesn’t necessarily translate perfectly to terms in other languages.
Should I translate nagaram (நகரம்) in Tamil, for example, as ‘city’, ‘town’ or even as something else (like ‘large settlement’ or ‘central place’)? How about the ancient Greek polis (πόλης), the German Stadt, the Russian gorod (город), the Chinese chéngshì (城市), or the French ville?
And English used to have many more categories than we routinely use now, often hiding in plain sight in place names.
A -burgh (Edinburgh), or -borough (Middlesborough) or -bury (Wednesbury) indicates somewhere that became a fortified settlement in the Middle Ages.2
Names ending in -caster (Tadcaster), -chester (Manchester) or -cester (Worcester) show somewhere was a fortified settlement earlier in time, under the Romans, as they are all version of the Latin terms ‘castra’ (= [military] camp) or ‘castum’ (castle), which is where English also gets ‘castle’ from.3
-wick (Hawick, Flitwick) and -wich (Ipswich, Harwich) place names mean somewhere began as a market town.4
Linguistically, then, there are lots of different terms of things we might call ‘cities’.
Upgrading a ‘millennium’ town
Today, not all of the places I’ve just named count as ‘cities’ in Britain, and that is a window into another way of looking at the problem: administratively.
In Britain, towns and cities are distinct and it is a hierarchical difference: towns are ‘less’ than cities (though the exact ways in which they are ‘less’ are not totally straightforward and differ between England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland).
In England and Wales and that lower status is usually related to two technicalities:
A city is usually the seat of a bishop (i.e. it has a cathedral, not just a church), meaning that it holds high status in the organisational hierarchy of the Church of England (which is the established state religion in the UK, even if everyday life is pretty secular, even in comparison with many legally secular countries).
Or, at city can have a royal charter, declaring it a city.
The tiny settlement of St David’s in Wales (population in 2021: 1,751) is a city, because it is home to St David’s Cathedral. However, in 1886, it was determined not to be a city, before its status was restored by royal request in 1994 (so I guess it has both?).
Meanwhile, Bournemouth, with a population of roughly 385,000, is only a town.
As it happens, I’ve actually lived through the momentous transition of a settlement from town to city: in 1985 I was born into the town of Wolverhampton, population roughly 250,000. Then, in 2000, I found myself living in a new millennium in the city of Wolverhampton, population roughly 250,000.
Wolverhampton was one of three towns in the UK chosen to receive royal charters and become ‘millennium cities’. The others were Brighton and Hove (a single place that used to be two and is now usually just called Brighton but that, understandably, annoys people from Hove), and Inverness.
This millennial ‘upgrade’ is a pretty clear example of that mysterious idea that cities are somehow ‘better’ than towns. As Warren Wilkinson from Wolverhampton’s independent newspaper, the Express and Star, said at the time,
"We have known for a long time that this is a great place with a wonderful past and a vibrant future. This announcement confirms this to the rest of the nation."
Still, my subjective experience of being ‘citified’ was pretty muted. The signs on the way into town (which is still what we say!) and the letterheads on mail from the Council changed. I’m sure it was great for all sorts of reasons and I’m glad of all of them, but for me it was an early lesson that categories are interesting things.
I can also remember talking to people about becoming a ‘millennium’ city, which revealed various things that people, generally, might think makes a city a city (even if the ‘official’ labels say different):
a big population?
being old?
being the centre of the local economy?
having really great museums or heritage centres?
having a really great football team?
being famous (for whatever reason)?
Calling something a ‘city’, therefore, differs from one language to another and, even in one language, can be specific to particular countries or administrative practices.
As interesting as all of this (hopefully) is, though, it is pretty much never what archaeologists mean when they say ‘we found a lost city!’
A city is not a bowl (but bear with me)
That is partly because archaeologists tend to be more interested in the material ‘what’ of things, than in the rhetorical ‘what’ that things have been called.
It is also because archaeologists are often working in places, or on periods, for which we have no idea what a ‘city’ or a ‘town’ might have been called, or if they were different categories.
On top of this, much archaeological theory is interested in definitions of cities that can work across different times and places, so as to be able to compare things.
As a result of all of these, archaeologists are usually most interested in how something they might call a ‘city’ looked, what buildings and objects are found in it and what people did there, rather than what people called it.
A good comparison is a bowl: most cultures have developed a moveable, re-usable, fairly high-sided receptacle, with an open top (rather than a top that gets narrower again, like on a jug or a bottle).
These receptacles can be big, small, deep, shallow, decorated, plain, made of wood, ceramic, stone, coconut shell, hardened leather, or metal…
Specific cultures may consider certain kinds to be good for certain purposes. It may even be forbidden to use some types for particular purposes.
In another culture, each person might have one that they use for everything but that nobody else is allowed to use.
There may be different names for different kinds, but…
…it is also useful to talk about all of these receptacles, of roughly the same shape and rigidity and portability as ‘bowls’.
That doesn’t mean ignoring all of the ways in which bowls may be different. In fact, it can help to identify those differences more clearly, because when you can start to say things like ‘this site has thrown up 17 types of bowl, and this kind with a unique coloured decoration on it, is only found in this particular place’, you can begin to ask question like, ‘was this a special kind of bowl?’
Having general categories, then, is useful for comparing things, and for having conversations with other people, whose site may also have bowls.
From here, you can also start to narrow down what sorts of bowls might have been used for certain things based on their physical properties. Ceramic bowls made some sorts of clays might be lighter than others. Clay with large amounts of quartz in it could be good for heating things, so a bowl made with that sort of clay may have been a cooking vessel, and so on.
A city of parts
Scaling up from bowls to cities follows the same principle, but that doesn’t make it easy.
Think about all the different kinds of bowls there have ever been: ones with handles, ones with feet, ones on tall stands. How flat does a bowl have to be before we call it a plate, or how deep before we call it a cup? How large before it becomes a pot or a bucket?
This gets us to one of the ways that archaeologists have tried to define a city: what characteristics must a city have to be a city at all? And what characteristics might cities have, that could make them distinctive?
According to this classification, things that matter in legal or administrative terms usually go into the ‘might’ box. A city (in certain times and places) might have a bishop’s seat or a royal charter, just like a bowl might have a particular owner or a specific function.
But the things a city must have are usually imagined in more physical terms, just like the physical characteristics of a bow. Take a moment and think about what might be on your list. What must a city have?
Don’t make your list too long: too long and nobody else will be able to keep track or apply it to their own excavation.
Don’t be too specific, either. The idea is that this list will tell you whether you are looking at a city anywhere (or anywhen), so, for example, saying that a city must have a fire station isn’t going to travel very well, to any time or place without organised fire services.
Have a go: 5-10 things that every city should have…
Inevitably, archaeologists don’t completely agree. There are a few competing lists and debates about whether a city must have everything on any given list or just most things, and if so, how many, but they also overlap a lot and probably they do with your list, too.
Archaeologist, Colin Renfrew, came up with this list in 2008:5
Royal palace and/or royal burials
Large temple(s) or other religious building(s)
Evidence of craft production (e.g. workshops or factories)
Fortifications
Formal public space (like a main square or town hall)
A planned centre (i.e. some sense that there was a place in the middle that people weren’t just allowed to build in and live in willy-nilly)
Neighbourhoods (meaning different parts of the settlement that can be identified as distinct because of what the buildings or objects)
How close was your list?
Lists like this have an advantage if you’re an archaeologist, because they point to things you can actually dig up and document: does it have walls or not? Is there a palace or isn’t there?
This is often called a ‘functionalist’ approach to defining cities, because it focuses on identifying physical things that had specific functions.
It can have downsides though.
In particular, lists can exclude places that we might want to include (for reasons I’ll talk about in a moment) because we view the list too strictly (e.g. every city must have everything, which most don’t and didn’t) or because we don’t recognise some buildings for how they were used. In a culture, for example, where people in charge did not live in palaces or where religious rituals were not practiced in architecturally distinct buildings, archaeologists might not realise that they are looking at Renfrew’s ‘palaces’ or ‘temples’.
That’s what a ship needs, not what a ship is…6
So, lists might be a good place to start but they also miss something: the people!
All of the things on Renfrew’s list (and other lists like it) are physical remains that exist because of things that people did, and another way of thinking about cities is to focus on those things.
So, for example, a royal palace or tombs are important because they point to a city being where government happened. These lists have been designed with earlier periods in mind, but an archaeologist looking at the remains of now would definitely want ‘parliament building’ to be on that list, probably instead of, or right next to ‘royal palace’.
Neighbourhoods, in archaeological terms, are ways of identifying physically whether people in some places did things differently - were live richer or poorer in some places; did they do business or manufacturing in one location and live somewhere else; did people group by ethnicity, which might be visible in things like different cooking utensils or interior decoration?
If you look at cities this way, they can have lots of physical characteristics, like those list items, but the meaning of a city is that people there behaved and lived in certain ways: they did government business, or travelled to different parts of the settlement to work and live and shop, or they worked in specialised ways rather than farming and making their own clothes and household goods.
This is more like the way I think about cities. A city, for me, is a place where:
There is a high population density and a large population
There is evidence for economic specialisation (i.e. people spending most of their time on specific jobs)
There are permanent buildings: this is here because you can find places with large, high-density populations of people doing specialised things that, I would say, are not cities, like a fairground, for example, or an army encampment.
This isn’t actually very different from the definition of a city provided in 1938 by Louis Wirth, an American sociologist, who said,
“For sociological purposes a city may be defined as a relatively large, dense, and permanent settlement of socially heterogeneous individuals.”7
Many archeologists actually rejected this definition in the mid-20th century because, in comparison to modern cities, very few settlements in earlier history were felt to be large or dense enough.
That is certainly true, even within the pre-modern world.
Cities in East Asia in the 8th or 9th century CE could easily have populations in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps at their largest, around a million people. Cities at the same time in most of West Europe (with the exception of the areas of modern Portugal and Spain) might count as big with a population over 30,000 and, in some areas, could be the local hub with only 5,000 or 10,000 people.8
However, I’ve tended to take the view that ‘large’ can be understood in relative terms. If a society had settlements that were ‘larger’ and served some of the purposes in our list (government, defence, religious centrality, manufacturing, etc.) then I’m generally happy to call it a city.
Definitions are not reality
And I can do that, because when we define things we (not just historians - people, everywhere, all the time) are not determining reality. We’re describing it.
Whether we call a bowl a bowl, or a cup or a bucket or a plate, doesn’t change the actual shape or size of that object or what people can do with it. But it’s useful for us to have shared descriptions that we all more-or-less agree on so that when I say, ‘Can you pass me the salad bowl?’ you know what I’m talking about.
And at the edge of any definition there are the things that don’t fit well, or maybe don’t fit at all, or that not everyone agrees on.
The Mongol Empire used to host huge gatherings, which could last weeks or months, where tens or hundreds of thousands of people would come together and engage in specialised activity. Is that a city?
By my definition, no, because there were no permanent buildings, but actually, I think, in some contexts the better answer is probably yes. It might not have existed all year round but, as long as people knew when it would exist, in those times those gatherings operated as a city.
Finding Lost Cities (part 1):
Okay, so now we know roughly what historians and archaeologists probably mean by the word ‘city’ most of the time (and, honestly, that is as good as it gets!), how does that help with finding lost cities?
Fair question.
There are two important ways. First, it means we have a better idea of what people might be looking for or what they might find and then identify as ‘a city’.
In other words, we now know that people ‘finding lost cities’, were either looking for, or unexpectedly found, evidence for some or all of the things on Renfrew’s list or evidence for some or all of the things on my list (and they are, as we’ve seen, mostly different ways of looking at the same things: what people do and what that means they make and build).
We also know what claim people are making when they say they have ‘found a lost city’: it doesn’t mean that they have stumbled into some Indiana Jones film set and gone, ‘Whoa… a city!’ (Sometimes, very rarely, this does happen, as we’ll see in a couple of weeks.)
Instead it means that they are claiming a site as being comparable with other things we already agree were cities, either at the same time, or in the same region, or just at a global, forever scale. And that means that they are identifying that these places also served the same purposes that cities elsewhere served.
Simply put, ‘I found a lost city’ is a way of saying ‘this is how I think we should understand this thing I found: we should understand it as being like these other things we already understand better because we have known about them for longer’.
A city isn’t its buildings. It isn’t even its people. Those are things a city needs. A city is an idea about how people live together.
Which begs the question I’ll be looking at next week: how do you lose one?
This personal, perhaps rather specific definition of adventure comes to me from watching Michael Wood’s 2000 TV documentary series, Conquistadors, following the journey of the first Spanish invaders of South America. There are lots of videos of it on YouTube and an accompanying book: Wood, Michael, Conquistadors (BBC, 2003).
In the UK (should you be from anywhere else in the world and visiting or wanting to tell friends about these amazing toponymic insights), these endings are pretty much all pronounced '-bruh’ or (for ‘bury’) ‘-bree’, so Edinbruh, Middles-bruh and Wens-bree.
These are usually pronounced as you see then, except the ‘-cester’ ones, which are generally pronounced ‘-ster’ (often with some other bits and pieces left out along the way, so Gloucester = Gloster, Worcester = Wooster, Leicester = Lester.
And defining pronunciation for the things that in Old English would have been called ‘wic’ is just really difficult. Some, like Ipswich are said about how they are written (so, Ips-witch), but some of them… aren’t. I intentionally picked two of the most fun examples: Hawick = Hoick (i.e. H-oi!-ck) and Flitwick = Flittick.
Renew, C. (2008), ‘The city through time and space: transformations of centrality’, In J. Marcus and J. Sablof (eds.), The Ancient City: New Perspectives on Urbanism in the Old and New World (SAR Press), 29-52, pp. 47-48.
‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ here gets the credit for getting the complexities of definition into popular cinema, when Captain Jack Sparrow (played by Johnny Depp) says to William Turner Jr. (played by Orlando Bloom), ‘It's not just a keel and a hull and sails; that's what a ship needs. Not what a ship is. What the Black Pearl [Jack’s ship] really is, is freedom.’
Wirth, L. (1938) ‘Urbanism as a way of life’, American Journal of Sociology 44, 1-24, p. 8.
For a good overview of a lot of the things I’ve talked about here, and about the archaeological debates over defining cities in general, this is a great piece: Smith, ‘How Can Archaeologists Identify Early Cities: Definitions, Types, and Attributes’, in Eurasia at the Dawn of History: Urbnaization & Social Change, ed. by Manual Fernández-Götz and Dirk Krausse (Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 153–68 <https://www.academia.edu/7315578/_How_Can_Archaeologists_Identify_Early_Cities_Definitions_Types_and_Attributes_2016_>