bin laden was. there was another figure that you had connection to as your service, tell us about your experience tracking him and those around him? >> as analyst we had been writing briefings for policy makesser and the bottom line is iraq had nothing to do with 911 or al-qaeda, there was not the connection, after the invasion, when i became a targeting officer, kelly had rose to prominence because he had been attack targets in iraq and eventually joined al-qaeda and creating al-qaeda in iraq, my job was to dismantle network and leadership, watch tonight at 9:00 eastern on book tv, c span

2. >> welcome, everybody, to diesel, thank you so much for coming out tonight. we would like to welcome monica smith, institute of the environment and sustainability at ucla, she holds the chair in indian studies, field work in egypt, england, tu any -- tunisa, bang lad -- bangladesh and mad gas car. monica l. person to write about the book about concentration into cities, she also has a guest for vivid writing that will make come the life, please join me in welcoming monica l. smith

>> thank you for being here, great to see family and friends altogether for this evening and has been amazing day for me and i have many people to thank, i would like to say a few words about city that are essential with modern lives that we can't live with them and we can't live without them sometimes but with more than half of the world's population living in cities and the percentage scheduled to go

as time goes by, seems to be an amazing opportunity to think about the sciences of cities and the archaeology of cities and the kind of love-hate relationship when with our own urban center, everyone who came here today had an urban

from school, combination of overpriced and also the traffic and realities of the latter of achievement. in all of those ways that kind of love-hate relationship that you have with the city is not something new. >> talked about being in the streets and yet there's somebody behind you who is bumping you and the risk of cracked on the head by a delivery person is something that, of course, sounds very much like to pedestrian version of the 405. sounds a lot like beverly hills and you have place where is people are being entertained, in

meso america people were building ports in central portions of urban settlements and just a central of urban life of palaces and temples and even the names that people had for those places of entertainment are names that carries through through the present in places like the coliseum and it's not just about the future, but it's also about the past and directly resulted in the places that we live in today, but for all of that sense of accommodation that we have in cities and all of the globalized linkages that make it possible to easily navigate our ways through los angeles, london, or tokyo, rome, all of

upheld by barter because there was not yet any coined money. in fact, urbanism proceeded money by more than 3,000 years so many thriving urban economies credit, the receipt of food, mainly if people were making textiles or constructing buildings all day they had no time to also tend farms or grow food. we faced the same challenges today if we are working in office, factory, we are making a living, but we are not growing food directly, we need intermediate proxy, institution that gives us what we need to eat when we need to go home and

feed our families, the intermediate proxy was the urban temple featured in the center of town often with massive and official quarters, temple was one of central institutions with cities like babalon, also serving as practical repository which rulers made donations, temples redistributed to temple workers included the large number of women employed making textiles, reflecting the number of people involved, the number of ancient site, two seasons of

excavation, keep in mind even great excavation half the size of competition and despaired of getting through all the artifacts from just a fraction of the ancient site, another example is city in guatemala, large and complex with so many pyramids and one would think archaeologist would focus on monuments for which the site is famous. her excavations of deep trash deposit consisting of ancient sweepings at the plaza, discarded items. the result is the same as what we see tucked behind boarded up

buildings abandoned in alleys and tucked in public places of our own city, trash relentless reminder of scale of production, commerce and consumption of urban sites. every urban center has quantity of artifacts. i worked with piles of discarded and commiserated with colleagues, sometimes for years, until they can finish counting and classifying the tons of materials that they have, i stood by the side of the trench explaining to me local workers and students that, yes, we do want to pick up each and every we find in order to tally the

manufacturing and often more than dirt and takes out so much time to pick up pottery from abandoned soil that we've abandoned excavation trench, no matter what ancient city we investigate we find that people couldn't make things fast enough to throw them away. i hope that you will enjoy reading this book and thinking about your own city with archaeological eye. many, many colleagues and especially my colleague from india, my family, and, of course, diesel for this great opportunity. thank you so much for attending.

there's an opportunity for questions, just give mic so they can be heard. peter, the mic. >> the rifting sound of coastal elites, i've had the impression that the cities were by their name cosmopolitan, progressive and liberal, is that something that you explore or have any opinion on, i mean, of course the immigrant population in cities can create a reaction where conservative ideas can develop and take root but i've just understood them to be kind of a liberal force. >> right, so not unproblematic as we have experience and are experiencing now, cities are places that also have greater variety of places into which people can insert themselves and so when you think about

immigrant neighborhoods, they are in cities, when you think about chinatowns and little ethiopias, they are in cities and when you think about the diversity of lgbtq communities, they are in cities because cities have a much greater range of opportunity and much greater tolerances and globally there's a difference in political outlook of cities compared to rural places but even that is also not new. [laughter] >> what are your thoughts of the sort of big bang questions of cities, why do people abandon what is in many ways a more advantageous way of life to this

city thing, what triggers it, what do you think? >> so there's book from a number of years ago that's called bright lights, big city and i think that that really sums up the way that people think about urban opportunities. if you read about people in places like the philippines or in ghana or in bolivia, you think about what is it that is leading them to abandon these surroundings and they will tell you they want work, they want a better paycheck, they want education, they want opportunities, they want more sophisticated medical care, and those are the things that only come up in cities, now, there are occasionally people who reject all of that, you know, they want to go back to vermont and start a goat farm or something like that, but every one person that actually does that, there's hundreds of thousands of other people clambering to come in.

>> i have a question, in the development of cities where do you place early cities jericho which are so much older and predate agriculture in terms of development of cities, urban living? >> so that's an interesting question about the relationship of agriculture to urbanism and urbanism is made up of people who are not farmers and so they depend on this outlying network of people to provide food which actually in a funny way makes cities more resilient and i have a colleague and he's looked at satellite images to be able to see the trackways of paths that come into the early urban settlements and what he sees it's not just one road that comes in or two, or even three, the cities are provisioned with

an entire network of interactions and if you think about it, that's kind of the same way we are now, that we have all kinds of food that comes into our urban settlement and it's only when you look at the little tinny stickers that you see like this apple is from where exactly, how did that happen, so that same sense of provision means that a city is quite resilient. there are places that were on trajectory to becoming cities but the kind of topped out at my 3 or 4,000 people and i think that that's a type of archaeology that's really underdeveloped, i think they'll be archaeology of towns because often times archaeologists are focused on the the biggest and earliest sites. i think we are missing important development stages and the point

that you make about the sites that seem to be almost cities, those are places where i think there's some wonderful intellectual work that can be done about what makes urbanism actually happen. >> can you talk a little bit about your current work with india? >> thank you so much, so as i mentioned my colleague professor have been working together for about 15 years with large group of indian scholars and students from my home institution of ucla and what we have been doing is looking at is development of large urban settlement and so we were excavating at the site and some of the stories are from the experiences that we had working at the large urban settlement and we were very fortunate as

archaeologist for investigating the wonderful ancient site and after we had done excavations and surveys at large settlements, we thought about what makes the city work, not just the people coming in but people in surrounding areas and so the successes we've worked at the town sites, we looked at village sites, we have just came back at field looking at coastal settlement and if you think about what makes city works, it's really all of those outlying interactions but i can tell you from working at a village site after working at urban settlement you can see exactly why people went to the city. [laughter] >> because in the when you shall rein settlement you have all of the disposable consumer goods, cheap kind of or notments made of terakata and you go to village and it's a simple life,

bright lights big city thing is something you can see on the ground and particularly the young people, i think we should have an archaeology of youth because they are like, i see something different happening and i'm going, if you look at modern cities, it's exactly the same. >> so you mentioned that 15% of the world's population live in cities today if we project in the future we may end up with 70 or 80 or 90%, is this a scaling up of what exists today or transition of something new that you see out of your research? >> fortunately there's an answer in the last chapter that even the growth of cities that we see today. >> 50% is not as great as some ancient cultures that had greater proportion of people in cities, i think we still have

growing to do to catch up with our ancestors. >> i know you mention the concept and was that a result of abandoned location, was it a lazy way of using building materials, what gave rise to the tale? >> one of the questions that we often get is archaeologists and my colleagues in the audience will know this, why do you have to dig, where did all the dirt come from? in ancient time people didn't have the bulldozers to get rid of something that we didn't like, now that we have a building that we don't like we flattened it and like if it wasn't ever there. they flattened foundations of building and used it at platform for raising building, and so on,

over time you had deeply developed site that is we can call and that is a kind of 3d, you know, architecture dependency, not only what people have surrounding them, their neighbors houses that can strain them but also what kind of foundations and what kinds of developments they can have, that's one partial answer to where does all of that dirt come from, the ways in which the ancient sites were sort of accretionary and slightly unintentional in their build-up, i think perhaps we should have one more question and go back and enjoy the interior. >> thank you very much. looking forward to reading the book, so the answer to the

question is probably there, civilization is synonymous with city and to some extent because most of the writings were happening there, it has been handed down to us through systems, but cities have also been from the beginning linked to greatest, most systematic, slavery really begins with cities, so to what extent is this -- any idea of cities where civilization is free of slavery, for instance, or exploitation of other human beings? >> this is a very important question about class and economic opportunity and, you know, when we think of people coming into cities nowadays it's often driven by middle class, aspirations, educated salaried employment, but cities are also a draw for people who have no

other resources, think about pickpockets, for example, you cannot be a pickpocket in a village because you'll be found out very quickly. so there are ways in which people can survive in an urban environment. if you think about homelessness, homelessness is primarily an urban problem because people can somehow manage to survive in ways that would not be possible. we do see many kinds of economic exploitation that has to do with involuntary servitude even in present day, it is not an ancient problem, this is also a modern concern and then we have the problem of slums, those are not new either. if you scaf gait and any of these ancient settlements beyond palaces and temples that draw archaeologists, make-shift housing both past and present.

cities are not imperfect. there are many way that is cities can also leverage different types of success, has written a book reinventing cities for people and the planet, and in it she points out that things like infrastructure are much more efficiently delivered when you have then housing, if you have an apartment building you can service that with one water connection for 30 families as opposed to having 30-single family homes, so infrastructure is a matter of social justice and here in los angeles and in every city people are, every time we have an election we are being asked to consider things like infrastructure development and maintenance and i think that that's an optimistic sign that we recognize that cities are here to stay and that they are

pretty good an very attractive but there are things that we do to proactively to actually make them better. thank you. [applause] >> thank you all again for coming and thank you so much monica that was beautiful talk, monica has agreed to sign the books inside, we are selling books and so please make your way back inside, it's a little warmer in there too, thank you. [inaudible conversations] >> here is a look at authors featured on book tv afterwords, our weekly author interview program which features best-selling books, jim acosta

offered firsthand account on reporting on the trump administration. coming up michael will discuss the far-right movement and origins and this weekend on afterwords former cia intelligence analyst provides inside look at the agency and her work tracking terrorists. >> i think some of the biggest take away for members of the public is the question regardless of -- of anonymous statement, ask for a receipt, ask for declassifying reports as much as possible so we can understand the reasoning and the detail behind it, i also think during that time period is when change narrative really took huge, huge, was a huge role in the decision for iraq war and galvanizing that kind of support for it. it was a snow-ball effect that every time they said the same thing over and over on tv, it just had the impact of, well,

this will be the truth regardless of what is being said and all previous after words available in podcast and to watch online at booktv.org. [inaudible conversations] >> hello, my name is robin, i would like to start off with just a few housekeeping rules, check and make sure your phones are on st