Cities, Large Villages, or Neither? The Conundrum of "Megasites" in Prehistory

‘Giant’ settlements, or ‘mega-sites’ were a periodic feature of human settlement history from around 4000 BCE right up to the 19th century CE. Such sites are usually characterized as ‘urban’, ‘pre-urban’ or ‘proto-urban’, but urbanism has become an exceedingly plastic categorization with a rather nebulous definition. Furthermore, these sites appear to share behavior which is quite different to that of classic urban sites, challenging our assumptions about how such settlements should classified. A session at the SAA conference in 2013 explored the characteristics of some prominent examples of these settlements, including the European Iron Age Oppida, Cahokia and Great Zimbabwe. This session is designed to revisit and deepen that discussion by considering new research in those regions and bring together new ideas and data that have emerged in the past four years. A consideration of these settlements in this context has the potential to provide significant new insight into the structure and organization of human settlement behavior in prehistory.