Excerpt from Courses Toward Urban Life: Archeological Considerations of Some Cultural Alternates
Because of the foregoing circumstances, what we achieved was in no sense a universal and world-wide consideration of the subject matter of our concern. We believe, however, that it was our very good fortune to have had such particular participants and area coverage as we did have.
As it was originally announced, the subject matter of the symposium was proposed to be as follows:
From 15,000 B. C. To The Thresholds Of Urban Civilizations: A World-Wide Consideration Of The Cultural Alternatives
The symposium is to be concerned with tracing man's history from latest Pleistocene times up to the threshold of the urban civilizations. It is projected on a world-wide basis. It will deal, substantively, with those archeological evidences that reveal the varying degrees of intensification of food-collecting, the transitions from food-collecting to partial or to fully effective food production, and the eventual emergence of city life and civilization. The cultural consequences and accompaniments of these transitions are to be examined closely. Inquiry will be directed not only to those regions where urbanization was first to crystallize but to those more "peripheral" regions that may or may not have attained full urbanism.
Attention will be given to environmental adaptations under differing conditions and to shifts in adaptations either before or following the appearance of food production. The relative roles of environmental factors and migration and/or diffusion in the conversion of hunter-collector cultures to those of food production will also be studied. Interest will center upon those qualities and quantities of cultural intensifications immediately antecedent to the appearance of urban civilizations, analyzing the evidences for such things as settlement patterns, population sizes and groupings, long-range trade, incipient "priesthoods," "kingships," and the institution of warfare. In brief, we will be posing the questions: What can the prehistoric archeologist contribute to the understanding of why urban civilizations came about when and where they did?
As a working hypothesis we will use the delineations of an urban civilization given by Childe (1950) with Redfield's comments in The Primitive World and Its Transformations (1953). The goal of the symposium is not so much the definition of urban civilization as such or a post facto analysis of its genesis via "historic" materials - as a consideration of the varieties of cultural build-ups leading to the thresholds of urban civilizations.
Certainly not all our desiderata were achieved, but it was against this framework of problem that the background papers of the participants were prepared. These papers were circulated in advance among the participants and were not read as such during the sessions of the symposium.
The symposium opened with three and one-half days of panel discussions based upon the background papers. Discussions ranged over possibilities of generalizations about culture change in widely separated world areas.
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