Wide Urban World

Michael Smith is an archaeologist at the Arizona State University School of Human Evolution and Social Change. He has been blogging for a long time, which is a bit of an inspiration. His Wide Urban World blog has a lot of great material, including this post about the connection between the archaeological study of raised field farming in the Titicaca Basin (both Peru and Bolivia) and the possibility of farming that way today. That post highlights the work of Clark Erickson, which has come up before on this blog. The archaeological study of cities might at first seem like a bit of a reach for the Amazon, or for the study of intensive agriculture, but many scholars have focused on links between the "urban" and the "rural," in societies around the world.