A civilization is a large human culture with a legal system and a regular way of getting food. Civilizations also tend to have advanced agriculture, a system of government based on kings and queens or elections, and some kind of writing. Civilizations may also have specialized workers and complex forms of building, such as pyramids or cities.
Unlike hunter-gatherers, who move from place to place in search of food, the people of a civilization live in villages or towns, which eventually grow into cities. City dwellers eat, work, and play together, often sharing the same language and religion. Cities also have large buildings for living and working in, such as temples or palaces, and sophisticated plumbing and sewage systems.
Early on, the earliest civilizations used farming to grow enough food for everybody to eat. Farming required people to remain in one place and concentrate their energies on producing crops rather than moving around the landscape following animals to forage for food. This new way of life created more opportunities for social and economic development.
People began to produce a variety of goods for themselves and for trade, including pottery, jewelry, and bronze weapons. They built larger houses and created centralized, hierarchical governments. These early civilizations are also credited with developing some of the earliest writing systems.
The most important characteristic of a civilization is that it has a stable base of people who can support itself. Cities are too large for all people to farm or gather food, so they need a stable population of residents who can work for the city. Cities also need a system of government to keep order, as well as sophisticated institutions for education and work.
As early urban societies grew, they developed systems of law and religion that set them apart from the simple bands of hunters and gatherers who had preceded them. They also started to produce surplus food from their farms, which meant that some of the people could work on other things, like specialized occupations or burgeoning endeavors such as art and philosophy.
Anthropologists have struggled to define civilization, which is still a term that carries the overt value judgment that civilization represents progress from “savagery” or “barbarism.” Even by the 1960’s, Childe was using terms such as “civilization” and “barbarians” to categorize different types of human communities.
Today, scholars try to distinguish civilizations by the degree to which they are complex, centralized, hierarchical, and literate. They also look at whether they have a culture that encourages learning and enables creativity. But a list of characteristics does not capture the full complexity of a civilization, and any list will reflect the judgements of its makers. Nonetheless, making such a checklist forces students to think through the question of how towns and villages turned into cities and civilizations. It also shows them that studying history is an interpretive activity.