Urban Form at Tell Brak Across Three Millennia

and other neglected early complex societies into the discussion of early urbanism. The danger of de-emphasizing scale and demography is that it can potentially swell the ranks of urban places to the point where the term ceases to have any meaning. Two examples will show the pitfalls of an over-inclusive definition. In the early second millennium bc, Chagar Bazar hosted an administrative complex from which officials of the king Samsi-Addu conducted censuses of pastoral nomadic groups in the vicinity (Talon 1997). It was thus a centre of power and administration that performed a central function for its hinterland. However, Chagar Bazar was only 12 hectares at its maximum and probably had fewer than 1500 inhabitants (McMahon et al. 2001; 2009). Almost a millennium earlier, Tell al-Raqa’i was the location of a temple and a monumental circular building complex interpreted as a grain-storage structure (Schwartz 1994). Raqa’i thus had a religious function and served as a centre for cereal redistribution, but its spatial extent did not exceed 0.4 ha. It is increasingly clear that small settlements were much more complex than our models generally assume, and that the belief in the broad existence of small self-sufficient villages with little intra-community status or wealth differences comes from the archaeological over-emphasis on large sites. If most, if not all, settlements are complex and specialized in some way or another, why do only some of them become spatially and demographically large? A common tendency in human settlements is to grow up to a point and then fission, as one component of the community leaves to form a new settlement elsewhere (Bandy 2004). There are many possible reasons, but frequently such a split results from conflict between families or lineages that renders continued cohabitation difficult or impossible (Johnson 1982). The demographic size at which these splits are most likely to occur is remarkably regular cross-culturally, generally between 150–200 persons (Bintliff 1999). For a settlement to increase beyond this threshold, there Introduction