Elizabeth Murphy
Imperial Cities
Essay 1
16 September, 2010
In his contribution to The Ancient City: New Perspectives on Urbanism in the Old and
New Worlds, entitled, “Early Cities: Craft Workers, Kings, and Controlling the
Supernatural,” Bruce Trigger offers an interesting historiographical account of the
archaeological study of ancient cities. He also dedicates a major section of the article to
situating his own work on civilizations and their urban constituencies within broader,
contemporaneous trends in archaeological thought.
In typical Trigger fashion, he presents a very informative, yet easily accessible, outline of
the broad trends in archaeological theory. Centering specifically on the study of ancient
cities, his article traces archaeological approaches to the urban subject since the 1950s.
Indeed, under what Trigger describes as the “humanist tradition,” archaeological
investigations tended to conceive of urban excavation as a means to assess the ‘best’
cultural achievements of ancient peoples. According to this academic approach, little
effort was put forth to develop inferences on social and political lives of ancient peoples,
but rather centered on retrieving objects and texts for use in museums and universities.
With the processual behavioralist approaches arising in the 1960s and 70s, functions of
cities in ancient society became central archaeological topics of inquiry. A broad range
of locational analyses (e.g. cost-based modeling, central place theory) were developed
and employed to better understand, in ecological and geographical terms, the roles that
centers played in systemic social change. More recently, post-processual approaches to
urban entities have begun to explore culturally specific topics, such as the role of cities,
as places “where the human and divine realms came in especially close contact” (63).
Commonalities observed in cosmological conceptions of urban settings and their
organization, Trigger also notes, tie into recent research into fundamental patterns in
human cognition and culturally-specific cosmological systems of ancient groups.
Although not directly relevant to the discussion on ancient cities, the point that I found
most interesting about this article is way in which Trigger situates his own work in the
history of archaeological thought. Although he is probably best known for writing one of
the most important recent accounts of the history of archaeological theory (A History of
Archaeological Thought), he very rarely cites his own research in that work. Thus,
produced very close to the end of his life, this piece represents one of the last writings by
the respected scholar and reveals that his work on early civilizations stems from a
tradition of processualist locational analyses. Such locational analyses often attempted to
create functional classificatory systems of settlements based on a variety of variables. In
consideration of these typologies, Trigger correlates these city classifications in function
of their broader socio-political state organizations. Accordingly, he differentiates
between cities of city-states, territorial states, and regional states, with the characteristics
of each city-type reflecting their broader state-level organization.
This classificatory approach presented by Trigger, needless to say, presents many of the
limitations and problems repeatedly observed for other types of processualist/locational
analysis approaches. Most notably, the reductionist nature of such classification systems
often fails to recognize and contextualize the nuanced (and often culturally and
historically specific) variability of archaeological case studies. Furthermore, such
grandiose classifications are typically based on very fragmented bodies of archaeological
data. Despite the limitations and problems presented in Triggers’ classificatory system of
ancient cities highlighted in this essay, the contribution nevertheless offers a very
interesting historiographical perspective to the archaeological study of ancient cities (and
where Trigger positions his own work in that history).