Questioning the Centrality of Urbanism in the Early Historic Landscape of the Southern Deccan

In South Asia, the city is considered the locus of increasing sociopolitical, economic, and religious complexity from the sixth-century BCE and is seen as one of the defining characteristics of the Early Historic period. This chapter examines two case studies from peninsular India that documented varied settlement patterns in Karnataka during the Early Historic as well as in earlier and later periods. These studies have demonstrated that there was considerable variation in site size and form, as well as multiple trajectories of occupational history subsumed under the blanket term: ‘Early Historic cities’. The chapter begins with a discussion of the varied definitions of the city and the ways in which historical or archaeological perspectives have shaped our study of urbanism. We examine how early cities have been defined as either a distinct physical form or as a suite of cultural and material practices. Although considered crucial to our understanding of the Early Historic, the early city is not well-defined and leads to questions about the centrality of this settlement form in all regions. Moving to a consideration of long-term micro histories in Karnataka, we suggest other factors such as investment by local elites, processes of iron production, and other strategies of sustainability that can be considered independently or concurrently with the urban form. This chapter therefore questions the privileging of the idea of urbanism, and suggests that in fact, some regions may have stayed small scale over time as a choice rather than from any lack of ‘complexity’.