THE SECOND URBANISATION

Detailed chapter description

The expression “second urbanisation” is commonly used for the growth of towns, cities, states, specialised production and long-distance exchange in northern India during the early first millennium BCE, especially in the Ganga plains. It is useful only if it is not turned into a fixed date or a single-cause event. Archaeological sequences differ from site to site; some settlements grew gradually from earlier agrarian occupations, some acquired fortifications or durable architecture at different times, and some remained rural while participating in increasingly complex exchange networks. This chapter therefore uses “second urbanisation” as a regional process whose components became visible at different rates rather than as a moment when villages suddenly became cities (Allchin 1995; Sawant and Shete 2016). The term contrasts early historic urban growth with the much earlier cities of the Indus or Harappan civilisation. It does not imply direct institutional continuity between those urban traditions and the Middle Ganga cities. The long chronological and geographical gap requires independent explanation. The “second” urbanisation is thus a historiographical label for a renewed and differently organised urban process in the first millennium BCE. Its archaeological signature includes settlement concentration, fortifications, specialised crafts, exchange, coins, increasingly durable construction and the emergence of political and religious institutions, but the exact bundle varies among sites. Chapters 2–5 demonstrated long sequences of hunting, farming, animal keeping, fishing, craft production and riverine mobility before the early historic period. Chirand, Chechar, Panda, Oriup and other sites already show communities capable of managing surplus, mixed subsistence and exchange. Urban growth must therefore be understood as a reorganisation and intensification of existing social landscapes, not as civilisation arriving in an unoccupied forest. This point also corrects older models in which dense forest was imagined as the single barrier that iron axes suddenly removed.