Coming Together: Comparative Approaches to Population Aggregation and Early Urbanization

The pursuit for universally applicable definitions of the terms "urban" and "city" has frequently distracted scholars from scrutinizing processes of how ancient nucleated settlements evolved and developed. Based on the premise that similar social dynamics to a great extent governed nucleation trajectories throughout human history, Coming Together focuses on both prehistoric aggregated and early urban settlements. Drawing from a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, archaeologists, anthropologists, and classicists discuss how nucleation unfolded in strikingly different sociopolitical contexts in North America, Europe, and the Near East. The major themes of the volume are nucleation's origins, pathways to sustainability, and the transformative role of these sites in sociopolitical and cultural change.