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RESEARCH PRODUCT

À l’aube des villes antiques : vocabulaire de la cité et formes urbaines. – Introduction

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How to envisage research on the ancient city? What are the most appropriate instruments to analyse it? What are the relationships between the emergence of the city as an independent community and the urbanization as archaeology can restore it? Without claiming to resolve these difficult questions, the contributions gathered here show that urbanization and the definitions of the ancient city used by contemporary historians and archaeologists are far from being precisely determined; they can even vary according to the authors, disciplines, periods and contexts. As a consequence, there is no town, but towns; no city, but cities. The issue of a definition is also the evaluation of theories, in several aspects. Our introduction raises a number of questions which have served as a framework for our research program.