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Cover -- Epigraph -- 1. Why Cities? -- 2. City Life, Past and Present -- 3. How to Dig an Ancient City -- 4. Before Cities, There Was . . . -- 5. Urban Building Blocks -- 6. Infrastructure Holds Things Up -- 7. The Harmony of Consumption -- 8. The Mojo of The Middle Class -- 9. Anxiety, Risk, and Middle-Class Life -- 10. A World of Cities -- 11. The Next 6,000 Years -- Acknowledgments -- About Monica L. Smith -- Notes -- Index -- Copyright.

"Using case studies from around the globe and multiple time periods, Smith makes the case that abundance provides an essential explanatory perspective on ancient peoples' choices and activities. Focusing on plentitude enables the understanding of cohesive behaviors that were equally important for the development of social complexity"--Provided by publisher

Although ubiquitous today, the "state" did not always exist. Archaeological and historical assessments of state beginnings—and research on the characteristics of the state form in both past and present—help address how the state as a social, economic, and territorial construct became dominant. Utilizing the categories of politics, violence, literacy, and borders, this article examines how individuals and households are mutually implicated in negotiations of power and expressions of everyday life that have been present from before the inception of the state through to the modern day. The state is constituted and expressed through nested exploitative engagements predicated on actual and perceived benefits; the outcomes of the existence of the state range from collaborative platforms for integration to the realities of inequality, environmental degradation through future discounting, and institutionalized power dynamics. As a container for human interactions, the state may be situationally unwanted but also seems inescapable once initialized.

Urban centers have inner and outer landscapes whose physical remains can be read as the materialization of social, political, economic, and ritual interactions. Inner landscapes are manifested in architecture and spatial organizations that configure relationships on the basis of economic status, ethnicity, occupation, age grade, and gender within the city. Outer landscapes are composed of the hinterlands on which urban centers depend for resources, including agricultural products and in-migrating laborers who seek economic and social opportunities. Urban-based elites reach deep into the countryside not only as a matter of political control, but also for investment of centralized resources into infrastructure such as canals, roads, and territorial borders. The monumental and household configurations of cities, expressed both at the heart of urban centers and in their countrysides, enable a distinct phenomenology of interaction mapped into daily experiences.

Food preference is a socially constructed concept in which both consumers and producers define what is "good to eat." Staple crops and daily meals are an important component of these definitions, as the regular use of particular foods reinforces norms of identity. Food preferences also affect agricultural systems because choices among cultivars are based on social needs in addition to economic variables such as yield and caloric value. Through textual and archaeological evidence, the trajectory of rice production is examined for Sri Lanka, the Brahmaputra Valley, the Tamil region, and Vijayanagara. In these regions and elsewhere in South Asia, shared ideologies of food preference resulted in a consensus mode of agricultural production: Irrigation works increased the tax base for political leaders and the donation base for temple economies, but they also benefited local inhabitants who would have been able to partake of a preferred food on a more regular basis.