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Process by which villages transform into urban societies From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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,[1] and then in his 1950 article in the journal Town Planning Review[2] brought the concept to a much larger[citation needed] audience. In that paper, he presented a 10-point model for the changes that characterized the urban revolution:
Childe's own work highlighted the urban revolution which he identified as occurring in Mesopotamia in the course of the 4th millennium BCE.[3]
Although sometimes interpreted[citation needed] as a model of the origins of cities and urbanism, Childe's concept in fact describes the transition from agricultural villages to state-level, urban societies. This change, which occurred independently in several parts of the world, is recognized[citation needed] as one of the most significant changes in human sociocultural evolution. Although contemporary models for the origins of complex urban societies have progressed beyond Childe's original formulation,[4][5] there is general agreement[citation needed] that he correctly identified one of the most far-reaching social transformations[6] prior to the Industrial Revolution, as well as the major processes involved in the change.
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