Cities are rarely part ofthe narrative of agricultural origins.
In most cases, agricultural economies are well established by the time urban centres develop, and if included at all, cities come at the end of the story; the development of an effective, reliable agricultural base has enabled their existence.
In contrast, agriculture has been at the foundation of our traditional thinking about cities, from their origins to their abandonments.1 Scholars such as Wittfogel and Childe originally focused on the power associated with control over agricultural production and products.[334] [335] However, as our archaeological understandings of urban centres have focused increasingly on the experiences of average citizens, rather than the wealthy minority, it has become clear that we must move beyond the standard narratives of elite control, and recognize that decisions about food production and the disposition of agricultural (and pastoral) surpluses were made in particular cultural and environmental contexts, leading to the emergence of the distinctive styles of pre-industrial urbanism that we have documented around the globe. Likewise, the pressures of increasingly large, dense, and sedentary populations (and development of new social and political institutions) spurred agricultural innovation, leading to diverse intensified farming technologies and practices.In this chapter, we introduce themes relating to agriculture (and food production generally) in urban societies that anticipate discussions in several chapters of Volume 3 of The Cambridge World History. The complex relationships between food production (where, by whom, for whom, symbolism), decisions about surplus, exchange, and transport, and power-authority displays around food and agricultural commodities are at the core of comparative archaeological research on early cities. To fully explore these phenomena in diverse urban contexts is not possible here, and consequently we will focus our discussion around the twin questions of the relationships of urban centres to farming practice and to decisions about agricultural production goals and methods. Our discussion will be grounded in a critique of a pervasive historical narrative linking urbanism, surplus production, and hierarchical forms of government. From there, we will examine the relationship of cities and their hinterlands, and explore the environmental, technological, and cultural factors at play in the development and maintenance of urban agricultural systems. We conclude with a case study, Jenne-jeno (Mali), that challenges many of the standard narratives regarding agricultural production in urban societies, in particular the importance of elite-controlled surplus.
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