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Concept
Urban revolution
Summary
In anthropology and archaeology, the urban revolution is the process by which small, kin-based, illiterate agricultural villages were transformed into large, socially complex, urban societies.
Australian archaeologist V. Gordon Childe introduced the term "urban revolution" in the 1930s. Childe also coined the term "Neolithic Revolution" to describe the earlier process by which hunter-gatherer societies domesticated crops and animals and began a farming lifestyle. Childe was the first to synthesize and organize the large volume of new archaeological data in the early-20th century in social terms. Whereas previous archaeologists had concentrated on chronology and technology, Childe applied concepts and theories from the social sciences to interpret archaeological finds.
Childe first discussed the urban revolution in his 1936 book, Man Makes Himself, and then in his 1950 article in the journal Town Planning Review brought the concept to a much larger audience. In that paper, he presented a 10-point model for the changes that characterized the urban revolution:
In point of size the first cities must have been more extensive and more densely populated than any previous settlements.
In composition and function the urban population already differed from that of any village ... full-time specialist craftsmen, transport workers, merchants, officials and priests.
Each primary producer paid over the tiny surplus he could wring from the soil with his still very limited technical equipment as tithe or tax to a deity or a divine king who thus concentrated the surplus.
Truly monumental public buildings not only distinguish each known city from any village but also symbolise the concentration of the social surplus.
But naturally priests, civil and military leaders and officials absorbed a major share of the concentrated surplus and thus formed a "ruling class".
Writing.
The elaboration of exact and predictive sciences – arithmetic, geometry and astronomy.
Conceptualized and sophisticated styles
Regular “foreign” trade over quite long distances.
Official source
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