Cities

1

Why Cities?

As an archaeologist, my favorite place in Rome is not the Colosseum or the Forum. It's the ancient trash dump of Monte Testaccio. Right in the middle of the city, it is a giant mound of broken pottery where the ancient Romans threw away the containers used to ship wine and olive oil all around the Mediterranean. Each of those vessels was about half the height of a person and made of coarse clay that would have roughed up a stevedore's hands. Their odd shape of two handles and a pointy base made them good for packing into a ship's hold or standing upright on a sandy shoreline but very inconvenient for much else. After a cargo of them arrived at its destination on the bustling shores of the Tiber at the very heart of the Roman world, a few were reused and a few were recycled. Mostly, people poured out the contents and threw the containers away. Over the centuries, the pile of discards grew, with the result that one of the famous hills of Rome is actually not a hill at all but a human construction-a landfill, essentially. Today Monte Testaccio is topped by trendy nightclubs and has been endlessly mined for construction, but there are still the remains of twenty-five million ancient containers poking up from the vegetation of the hillside.
Now consider a very different metropolis. My favorite part of Tokyo? The backside of the Tsukiji fish market, the part that tourists don't visit. Tsukiji is enormous, and the passageways are crowded with plastic buckets and barrels teeming with every kind of creature that you can imagine from the briny deep. Crabs attempt to crawl their way out of baskets, little fish are piled up in ice buckets, and great slabs of tuna glisten under the klieg lights. The market is open to everyone, with chefs and restaurant owners jostling with homemakers for a clearer view of the day's catch. It's a world without friendly chitchat, punctuated by the dangerous darting movements of souped-up forklifts that dodge their

Monica L. Smith is professor of anthropology and professor in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles. She holds the Navin and Pratima Doshi Chair in Indian Studies and serves as the director of the South Asian Archaeology Laboratory in the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology. Her archaeological expertise includes fieldwork in Egypt, England, India, Italy, Tunisia, Bangladesh, Turkey, and Madagascar, supported by highly competitive research grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Geographic Society.

"[A] compelling journey from city life in ancient urban centers to the present and beyond...By the time the book reaches the urban-age anxieties of the present, we not only appreciate their proper place within the complex trajectory of cities and their rise, we are compelled to consider Smith s assertion that cities were, and continue to be, central to human ascendancy for better or worse." Science

Monica Smith is the person best qualified to write a book about the big problems raised by the increasing concentration of the human population into cities. She also has a gift for vivid writing that makes the science of cities come to life for the broad public. Jared Diamond, author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed and Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

"A lively romp that takes the reader through a rich landscape of urban scenarios and across an inclusive cross-section of city dwellers . . . The author is a well-known figure in the anthropological and archaeological study of cities, and the book represents a summation of decades of scholarly reflection as well as of fieldwork at a dizzying variety of sites across different continents." American Journal of Archeology

"Smith is a professional archaeologist who has excavated many ancient ruins around the world. As she conjures the lives lived among those now tumbled stones, she depicts people who bear an uncanny resemblance to contemporary, urban Californians." The New York Review of Books

Cities captures the reality and stress of how we make cities and how, sometimes, cities make us. This is a must-read book for any city dweller with a voracious appetite for understanding the wonders of cities and why we re so attracted to them. Zahi Hawass, author of Hidden Treasures of Ancient Egypt

"[An] enjoyable, humorous combination of archeological findings, historical documents, and present-day experiences.