Ch. 1: Theory of Urban Genesis

URBAN GENESIS AT CHACO: Case Study of the Origin of Civilizations Chapters: 1 2 3 4 5 6

1.33 Refinements of the Model of Urban Genesis

With the model that has been discussed so far, there are still two basic problems that need to be addressed. First of all, was the Chaco Phenomenon an instance of primary urban genesis? Urban societies had already existed in Mesoamerica for centuries, and complex societies were evolving in the lower Mississippi Valley as well as the nearby Hohokam culture along the Salt River. Secondly, how do cultures change from non-urban to urban, and why? To begin to answer these questions we turn to the works of Paul Wheatley.

Paul Wheatley built upon Adams' ideas in his analyses of the emergence of urban society in China (1969), Japan (1976), and Southeast Asia (1983). To use China as a case study, Wheatley first had to demonstrate that the emergence of cities in China was an instance of primary urban genesis. Cities emerged in the Indus Valley more than a thousand years earlier than in China, and it is very possible that the pre-urban Chinese had direct knowledge of cities and urban life on the Indus river plain. But Wheatley argues that knowledge of urban society does not translate easily into practice, because urbanism is primarily a system of social organization. Theories of cultural diffusion were developed to explain the spread of technologies such as the bow and arrow, ceramics production, the concept of zero, or the subdivision of time into regular intervals. These technologies may be very sophisticated, but they can be learned and applied by just a few individuals, even if they lack social organization and material resources. Cities, on the other hand, are a nexus of social and cultural institutions which require the participation of an entire society. Even for the most powerful leaders of a non-urban society, restructuring their own social and cultural institutions into an urban system would require a thorough understanding of how their society works, as well as the ability to change it. Such a knowledge is extremely difficult to translate across cultural boundaries, and such authority, by its very nature, can only be developed within a specific place and time. Authority rests upon legitimacy, and legitimacy rests upon culturally-specific belief systems and the established personal reputations of the individuals to whom the society grants decision-making powers. Wheatley insists that

apart from the imposition by an already established political authority of urban foundations, cities formerly could come into being only where an appropriate conjunction of internal forces induced spontaneous readjustments of social, political and economic relationships. Mere knowledge of city life diffusing through a folk society could, and can, never be sufficient to induce the generation of urban forms. (1969:7)

Imposed urban genesis, or secondary urbanization, was routinely used as a method of expanding and consolidating empires. The Phoenicians, Greeks, Persians, Chinese, Romans, Spaniards, English, Americans, and Russians have all used this process, planting colonies of people who had clear, fixed views about how the world should be--often with a deliberate disregard for the preexisting cultural meanings of the people being colonized. Although imperial domination may be short-lived, it is very likely to trigger an ongoing process of urbanization in a society that, before conquest, was not urban. Wheatley identifies three actions taken by conquering cultures that often catalyze urbanization:

the creation of an administrative organization moulded according to, and designed to sustain, the value system of the colonial homeland; the imposition on the simpler society of the legal definitions of property current in the colonists' homeland; and not infrequently the extension to embrace the newly colonized territories of certain sectors of the metropolitan economy (Wheatley 1969:6).

Induced urbanization also leaves distinct markers in the built environment. Secondarily-urbanized societies tend to emulate the designs and built forms of the conquering society, just as they emulate the bases of political legitimacy employed in the conquering society (Wheatley 1969 and 1983).

Based on Wheatley's criteria, I believe that the Chaco Phenomenon was an instance of primary urban genesis. Cities had emerged in Mesoamerica more than one thousand years earlier, and the Hopewell culture in the Ohio Valley arose during or slightly before the florescence of Chaco, and yet there is no indication that Chacoans borrowed building designs nor cultural institutions from either of these urban cultures. Chacoans certainly traded, at least indirectly, with central Mexico: macaw skeletons and Mesoamerican copper bells were found in Pueblo Bonito. If the Pueblo tradition of long-distance runners dates back to the eleventh century, then the Chacoans would have had direct and rapid communication with the civilizations to the south and east (see Nabokov 1981, Ferguson and Hart 1985). However, the sequence of evolution of the Chacoan built environment does not bear the mark of imported building types designed to support the social institutions of either the Mesoamericans nor the Hopewellians such as pyramids, earthworks, ballcourts, or stelae. The large, formal structures of the Chacoans are the great-house and the great kiva; and though the function and meaning of these two building types are extremely problematic, they do clearly derive from preexisting local building types. At the larger scale, Chacoan site design also seems to be unique: not only entirely different from the site designs of other urban cultures on the continent at the time, but without precedent or successor even in the Pueblo building tradition.