To some degree it was simply the lack of an appropriate language. What, for instance, does one even call a ‘city lacking top-down structures of governance’? At the moment there is no commonly accepted term. Dare one call it a ‘democracy’? A ‘republic’? Such words (like ‘civilization’) are so freighted with historical baggage that most archaeologists and anthropologists instinctively recoil from them, and historians tend to limit their use to Europe.
