Civilization, Cities, and Towns

Abstract

CIVILIZATION, CITIES, AND TOWNSIf I have a complaint against distinguished contributors to ANTIQUITY and, indeed, its Editor himself, it is not that they use a different terminology to mine, but that they neglect the peculiar potentialities of the English language to express relatively subtle shades of meaning.The use of the words ' civilization ', ' city ', ' town ', by Kenyon (ANTIQUITY, WM,)) Wheeler (ibid., 132-4) and the Editor himself (ibid., 129), in reference to neolithic Jericho, in no wise enhances the transcendant significance of the site.It just deprives prehistorians of convenient terms for giving expression to economic and sociological distinctions that can be recognized in the gross material data provided by dirt archaeology.Good English usage contrasts towns not only with villages but also with cities.Since the 18th century ' civilization ' has been applied to the culminating term of an historical process.Lewis H. Morgan gave a more precise anthropological content to the terms ' savagery ', ' barbarism ' and ' civilization ' as denoting successive stages in cultural evolution.When the prospect opened in the 1920's of giving sociological or economic significance to the technological divisions of the archaeological record, Morgan's terminology, with some modifications of his criteria, seemed quite convenient.As a result of the insistence by Elliott Smith and Perry on the contrast between ' food-gathering ' and ' food-production ', ' savagery ' was equated with the parasitic economy of hunting, fishing and collecting and opposed to the productive economy based on agriculture and/or stock-breeding distinctive of ' barbarism '.Now just at that time the best known early neolithic cultures in Europe-Windmill Hill (just discovered by Leeds and Keiller), Vouga's Lower Neolithic on the