Ancient Middle Niger: Urbanism and the Self-organizing Landscape

by Roderick J. McIntosh

• ISBN13: 9780521012430
• ISBN10: 0521012430
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-11-07
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The cities of West Africa's Middle Niger, only recently brought to the world's attention, make us rethink the 'whys' and the 'wheres' of ancient urbanism. The cities of the Middle Niger present the archaeologist with something of a novelty; a non-nucleated, clustered city-plan with no centralized, state-focused power. Ancient Middle Niger explores the emergence of these cities in the first millennium B.C. and the evolution of their hinterlands from the perspective of the self-organized landscape. Cities appeared in a series of profound transforms to the human-land relations and this book illustrates how each transform was a leap in complexity. The book ends with an examination of certain critical moments in the emergence of other urban landscapes in Mesopotamia, along the Nile, and in northern China, through a Middle Niger lens. Highly-illustrated throughout, this work is a key text for all students of African archaeology and of comparative pre-industrial urbanism.

Author Biography

Roderick J. McIntosh is Professor of Anthropology at Rice University and visiting Professor of Archaeology at the University of Pretoria, South Africa

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	viii
Preface	xii
Chronology	xv
Map of the Middle Niger	xvi
Discovery	1	(44)
Jenne-jeno ``discovered'' to the world	1	(9)
City without Citadel	10	(11)
Ex astra (a brief history of values)	21	(6)
Co-evolution: an alternative path	27	(18)
Transformed landscapes	45	(56)
Historical Ecology	45	(11)
Mesopotamia, with a difference	56	(17)
Paleoclimate: phase shifts at multiple time-scales	73	(16)
Geokistics: risk, surprise, and subsistence security	89	(12)
Accommodation	101	(43)
Pulse Model	101	(22)
Ground truthing the Pulse Model	123	(6)
Specialists and the deep-time core rules of Mande	129	(15)
Excavation	144	(48)
Recognizing heterogeneity	144	(18)
Anchors and variability: the core sequence	162	(19)
``Polynucleated sprawl'': Urban Clusters	181	(11)
Surveying the hinterland	192	(17)
Prior strategies	192	(5)
Systematic urban hinterland	197	(6)
Resilience, urban sustainability, and the self-organizing landscape	203	(6)
Comparative urban landscapes	209	(21)
Alternative cityscapes: Mesopotamia and the Nile	209	(12)
China: the clustered alternative	221	(9)
References	230	(21)
Index	251