In this paper, Axel Christophersen does three important things. First, he addresses the way in which the inhabitants of premodern cities created an urban ethos through their cumulative daily actions. Second, he provides the opportunity to address a long-standing definitional challenge in the study of cities by examining what it means to undergo a process of ‘urbanization’. Finally, he focuses our attention on medieval Scandinavia as a region that has had a considerable amount of archaeological research but with which many readers may not be familiar compared to other historical periods in Europe.
The recognition of an urban ethos is an essential component of the understanding of the meaning of city life for its inhabitants. This process has been well studied by ethnographers of contemporary cities who capture city-dwellers’ philosophical musings, with some of the most poignant expressions of the relative advantages and disadvantages of urban life expressed by those engaged in menial labor and others at the margins of economic viability. Although ancient urban migrants must have engaged in similar sentiments, they are more difficult to access directly.
There are distinct advantages that accrue when we have texts describing the life of ancient urban inhabitants. Just as modern people of all social classes can clearly identify the relative merits and disadvantages of city life, so too did ancient urbanites express a simultaneous capacity for exhilaration and dismay. The Roman poet Juvenal wrote about noisy cart traffic, filthy streets and criminals in a way that provides an aura of dangerous inconvenience that we might never have imagined if we only looked at the soaring columns and triumphal architecture of the Forum and the Colosseum. In southern India, mute architecture of the first centuries A.D. is similarly enlivened by the Sangam texts that populate the urban realms with a cacophony of sound:
Often, even just a little nomenclature can provide some knowing insights into ancient peoples’ perceptions of the urban world around them. Snippets of graffiti give us the quotidian details of urban spatial realms: the map from Nippur that identifies one passageway as ‘the gate of the unclean women’ in the second millennium B.C. (Ur Reference Ur and Potts2012, 51), or the approximately 11,000 instances of graffiti at first-century A.D. Pompeii that included taunts, prayers, lovers’ entreaties and advertisements for gladiatorial games (Benefiel Reference Benefiel2010).
When we do not have specific texts, or when texts are limited, archaeology enables us to imagine other ways of being. Using the example of Trondheim in Norway, Christophersen's account of the daily trudging through dim, frozen streets reminds us of the power of narrative in the process of seeing the ancient individual, a mode of scholarly presentation that is relatively rare in the study of ancient cities, despite its inclusion in analysis of prehistory for the past 20 years or more (e.g. Boutin Reference Boutin, Baadsgaard, Boutin and Buikstra2012; Tringham Reference Tringham, Gero and Conkey1991). Interestingly, archaeologists have most often given themselves permission to impersonate the agents of small-scale societies; after the Neolithic, we expect people to be able to speak for themselves.
But even in literate eras, there are ‘people without history’. While the experiences of the rural might well have continued the tropes of prehistory, the advent of urbanism brought new ways of interacting with others. The analysis of material culture, even in a simple object such as a worn-down tool or a well-used hearth, indicates the extent to which work, culinary practices and the routines of daily life in cities are different from the quotidian configuration of rural places. People are made urbanites not only en masse, but also through individual actions. Through a first-person narrative, Chistophersen invites us to consider the way in which urban life is strung together in vignettes of experience. The author's exhortation to ‘assess the long-term consequences of the formation of social practices in urban communities’ through this narrative approach thus adds to the literature of social agency in ancient urban centers that has been handily addressed by numerous other contemporary scholars, such as R. McIntosh, Jesse Casana, Stephanie Wynne-Jones, Jeffrey Fleisher and Augusta McMahon.
The second important aspect illuminated by Christophersen relates to the issue of definitions. The author's discussion of population centers in Scandinavia illustrates the conundrum of definitions in the study of urbanism as one of the most compelling but complex subjects of archaeological and social analysis. Sometimes researchers have tried to parse this dynamism by augmenting the term ‘urban’ with prefixes and suffixes that attempt to identify the intent and outcome of different agencies within concentrated populations, referring to proto-urban, urban, urbanizing, and urbanized environments (cf. Smith Reference Smith and Smith2003). The author starts out making a similar distinction in this paper but almost immediately falls into the unavoidable position of having to use another word in order to break up the repetitive use of the words ‘city’ and ‘urban’ by using them interchangeably again with the word ‘town’. It is indeed ironic that a concept so central to the modern world, the concept of the city, should have no plausible synonym, but the use of the word ‘town’ obscures an important distinction among the sizes of population centres.
‘Towns’ deserve to be more closely analysed as definitionally separate and functionally distinct entities. Their roles as settlements of intermediate size enabled residents to participate in the economic, social and political activities of urbanizing environments in specific ways. Researchers working on social complexity are beginning to address the way in which towns have their own dynamic processes that are in some ways independent of proximate urban centres (e.g. Tol et al. Reference Tol, de Haas, Armstrong and Attema2014). In fact, the study of towns is likely to yield a more tractable way of understanding the first truly urban realms, because any city's origins are otherwise very difficult to ascertain, buried as they are beneath metres and metres of occupation. In addition to studying towns in the interstices of urban networks, as Tol and colleagues are doing, one can also evaluate them as offshoots of urban centres that then engage in their own trajectories of growth (e.g. Mohanty, Smith and Matney Reference Mohanty, Smith and Matney2014) and as the apex of settlement hierarchies when true urbanism does not seem to form (e.g. papers in Neitzel Reference Neitzel1999). In sum, the threshold events that seem essential to city life might be most efficiently identified in towns as both precursors and contemporaries of truly ‘urban’ spaces.
Scandinavia is an ideal place from which to address the transition from rural to town to city life. Located in an area of distinct environmental challenges and opportunities, Scandinavia represents a concentrated seasonality for domestic plants and animals and associated outdoor productivity. Christophersen's imagined street scene would have characterized much of the year, in which harsh exteriors were matched with warm, noisy interiors that became increasing concentrated in urban spaces. At the same time, the region had excellent maritime connectivity in a manner that can compare well with other regions of the world, such as the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, where connectivity across the ocean was often easier than connectivity overland. Urban centers in Scandinavia were the nodal points of this connectivity, linking together the most challenging of outside worlds with the great intimacy of closed spaces once ashore.
The long-distance, trade-based connectivity of northern Europe started in the Roman period in the early first millennium A.D., and continued through the Anglo-Saxon and Viking periods that set the stage for continued interactions between Scandinavia, Britain, Iceland and beyond. Towns played a central role in the Viking Age of the first millennium A.D. (see e.g. Clarke and Ambrosiani Reference Clarke and Ambrosiani1995), as did the concept of ‘things’ or gatherings that brought populations together in ostensibly neutral areas as a way of creating community and imposing law across dispersed populations (Iversen Reference Iversen2015).
The multiple ways in which people entered into collective social realms in the challenging environments of Scandinavia provide critical comparative insights for the study of urbanism elsewhere. Initial archaeological assessments of urbanism focused on the temperate zones of the Near East and classical Mediterranean worlds, in which the provisioning of settlements was tied to a seasonality of rainfall and storage of plant foods. More recently, studies of tropical urbanism (in regions such as the Maya region and South East Asia) have shown the ways in which the challenges of provisioning and social organization in those environments were distinct from those developed in temperate locales. The distinct physical landscapes, harsh environments and maritime focus of Scandinavian cities of the first and second millennia A.D. provide yet another important comparative region for understanding the development and continuity of urban life, in which the storage of animal foods and a greater dependence on fish provided distinct conditions for the support of durable-goods production and consumer economies.
In sum, Christophersen's paper brings to light the ways in which archaeology and history (when we have it) can be utilized to humanize the past as endured by those who lived and thrived in challenging conditions while creating distinct and enduring forms of community. One hopes that he will continue this trajectory into more comprehensive works that bring the past alive for scholars and for the general public alike, as a way of illustrating the shared humanity of the urban experience even when lived under circumstances very different from today. James Deetz (Reference Deetz1977) provided for us an excellent model in his book In small things forgotten, for which Chrisophersen could handily provide a counterpoint through large places remembered.
