backdirt 2012 | 83 RESEARCH IN ACTION engage with others for even the most basic daily activities such as getting provisions. It was a big leap of faith for people to start to live far from their agricultural ields and depend on a supply network to provide them with food, but the fact that cities appear over and over in the archaeological record indicates that our species may well be “hard-wired” to live in large groups whenever possible. This factor opens our eyes to the possibility of seeing cities not as a problem, but as a solution to many contempo- rary areas of concern, such as human-environmental dynamics and the mitigation of social tensions. The site of Sisupalgarh was irst investigated by Professor B. B. Lal in 1948. The availability of Monica L. Smith 1 and Rabindra Kumar Mohanty 2 INTRODUCTION Like the Great Wall of China, the ancient city of Sisupalgarh represents so much labor investment that it can be seen from space. First occupied more than 2,500 years ago in the ancient land known as Kalinga on the eastern coast of India, the settlement is framed by a perfectly square fortiication wall and eight equally-spaced gateways that surround a complex of monolithic pillars at the center of the site (Fig. 1). Its architecture and remarkable degree of preservation make it one of the most distinctive ancient cities in India and the focus of a long-run- ning joint project between UCLA and India’s Deccan College. Our team’s principal research questions went well beyond “how old is it?” to engage with some of the most vital new themes of archaeological research. What can archaeological investigations tell us about the way people live in urban areas? How did people interact in the crowded but excit- ing spaces of the irst cities? What was the relation- ship between civic authorities and urban dwellers? Sisupalgarh’s long occupational history provides abundant evidence that life in ancient cities was not so different from what we experience today. In order for cities to come into existence, people had to put aside their wariness of strangers and 1 Department of Anthropology and Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA. 2 Department of Archaeology, Deccan College Post-Graduate and Research Institute, Pune, India. Reports from the Field Timeless Insights from an Ancient City: Research at Sisupalgarh, India Figure 1. Topographic map of Sisupalgarh showing fortiication walls and central architecture. Map: G. Greene.