The book is an ode to conspicuous consumption and conspicuous discarding of trash. While this position is understandable for her profession--after all other civilizations' garbage is her treasury--but it smacks of willful neglect of economics, military affairs and the environment. Also it betrays her admiration for upper and upper middle classes and disdain for the lower classes. "Well-being of the upper classes depends on incessant supply of the poor" (Voltaire) was good for the ancien regime libertine, but it is quite strange for a California liberal arts professor.
Her willful ignorance of economics of production makes her storyline deficient. Her cities appeared ready-made as Athena emerged from the head of Zeus. First, because of paltry yields of crops, one had to have several agricultural families to support one family of urbanites. My own back-of-the-envelope estimates based on one of the wealthiest Roman provinces--Africa--suggest the proportion of urban to rural population 1:5-6 for equal food consumption in the city and in the village. These estimate agrees well with the actual demographic proportions in pre-industrialized societies. Second, contrary to her assumption, urban populations of Hellenistic cities, Rome included, actively participated in agriculture.
Landlords decamping to their latifundia--and sleeping around with boys and girls of their freedmen managers during harvest are well documented in contemporary fiction. But, given the seasonal character of agricultural work, it is simply impossible to imagine that poor urbanites would not engage in seasonal sowing and harvest--or that the landowners will keep so many otherwise useless slaves for peak activities. At least, poor denizens of medieval London formed work gangs, which engaged in agriculture, animal husbandry and their own procreation in their native villages.
Obviously, for the nascent cities to emerge, they had either to be protective enclaves against the depredations of other humans or animals alike--similar to the pueblos, factorias, encomiedas and missions of early America--where most of the population still engaged in agricultural pursuits, or to be the centers of political power exploiting the countryside by armed coercion. The latter model is well known from the facts of the Norman Conquest of England.
She obscures the dual role of the cities as both defensive encampments and magnets for aggression--unlike villages, which have low concentration of wealth and need to be constantly exploited by the occupiers; hoards of artisanal goods, precious metals and food attracted invaders from the times immemorial. Heretofore, the defensive fortifications were first hallmarks distinguishing cities from villages.
There is a fantastic assumption that cities never died; at least in the last millenium, except, of course, Chernobyl. While she describes abandonment of Angkor Wat and Mayan cities, she claims that these were exceptions. If the example of numerous Central Asian states, with their urban centers, or Homeric Troy destroyed by nomadic invasions [1], first and foremost, by Mongols is not convincing enough for her, she obviously needs to visit our corner of the United States or Michigan where she graduated.
None of the cities of our so-called Southern Tier were razed by warfare. But if one looks at the vast expanse between Binghamton and Buffalo, whether on New York, or Pennsylvania side, she will observe a number of previously mighty cities, which slowly regress into villages. Elmira, Horseheads, Corning, Binghamton, Johnstown, Otsego, Oswego, Troy, Mansfield, Lock Haven, Williamsport, Sayre were once important and proud cities. Now the lifestyle of people there is more reminiscent of what Monica Smith observes in villages--no important centers of power, even if they are residencies of the county governments, religion, culture or economics, no vertical mobility of the population, the only young people staying are the ones repeating life trajectories of their parents, etc etc. And all this happened in the last hundred years.
[1] Merv, Urgench--in Khwarazmia, Qara-Kitai of the namesake state, etc. etc. and I am not an anthropologist.
