The History and Future of Places: Part 1 – The earliest placemakers

My aim in this series is to identify historical periods which demonstrate consistency in the ways places were made and experienced. Evidence of placemaking practices can be seen in the street patterns, heritage buildings and archaeological traces of places that still exist. Experiences of and relationships to places, which are more difficult to ascertain retroactively, I will consider mostly in terms of advances in communication – roads, printing, railways and so on.

The periods I identify are mostly familiar ones. I illustrate them where possible with my own knowledge of particular places, especially in Europe and North America. The histories of places in Asia, Africa, and Latin America follow different paths, although advances in communications, colonialism and global trade since about 1500 have ensured that large swathes of recent place history have been shared across continents and cultures. Very importantly, population growth and urban growth are two long-term trends that underlie the entire history of places. I will begin with those.

Almost every century in the last 12,000 years has seen more people in more parts of the world, and since about 1800 there have been many more people in much more populous places.

Graphs of population growth have two distinct elements: a gentle upward incline, almost horizontal, from about 10,000 BCE, when the world population is thought to have been about 4 million, to 1800 when it reached about 1 billion; and since 1800, an almost vertical line to 2020 and the present population of about 7.7 billion. There have been regional and temporary setbacks because of plagues, famines and wars, but these scarcely show. The fundamental fact is that the history of places is a history of accommodating population growth.

Population growth has been accommodated through diffusion (more people in more places) and – in some ways from the outset, but especially over the last two hundred years – by concentrating populations in urban places.

The first cities – by current standards, actually small urban settlements with populations of a few thousand – were founded about 3500 BCE. Since then, the tendency of cities everywhere has been to grow bigger.

This is important to the history of place for two different reasons.

The first is that the proportion of people living in cities has steadily increased, though it probably remained under 10 percent in most parts of the world until about 1800. Since then it has accelerated faster than population growth, and now surpasses 50 percent for the world and 80 percent in most developed countries.

The second reason is that the history of cities is better documented in archaeological and written records than the history of rural areas. This means that there is a bias towards urban places, even when they held only a small proportion of the population, simply because there is more information about them.

The First Stable Places

Humans in the Stone Age depended on foraging and hunting, were continually on the move, and left little evidence of life in fixed places, presumably because they did not have the skills, means or inclination to modify environments.

Nevertheless, they must have had the sense of place shared by all sentient beings that made it possible to find their way around, and to get back to wherever there was good shelter or food. In addition, cave paintings in Indonesia and Spain, dated respectively to 44,000 BCE and 35,000 BCE, indicate that they identified places with special significance.

Places as distinctive and enduring creations where people lived and died, and through which they connected to the world around them, begin with sites of stone monoliths, such as the one at Gobleki Tepe in Turkey made about 9,000 BCE. Gobleki Tepe and other such places with standing stones made over the course of several millennia seem to have been associated with burial and/or ceremonial sites.

Given the considerable work necessary to create these sites, and the fact that they were roughly contemporary with the gradual domestication of crops and animals, it is reasonable to assume that they were associated with settlements that provided a measure of security and made possible long-term connections between communities and particular locations.

In other words, though there is scant archaeological evidence of domestic placemaking, it was probably at this time, and in these places that enduring attachments to place first developed.

• Coming next week: From the Bronze Age to Classical Antiquity
• Read Professor Relph’s blog Place, Placeness, Placenessless