How do you solve a problem like the city?

Abstract

The ebbs and flows of archaeological scholarship often see trends come and go, with big questions giving way to more fine-grained analysis only to, in turn, feed back into new, sweeping narratives. Thinking about the ancient city is no exception. Recent works from across the spectrum of archaeology and ancient history show a desire to draw new connections amongst urban sites in the same region, to explore similarities between regions, and even to interrogate the extent of similarity between settlements of drastically different periods and places.