Archaeological theory has been dominated by the Judeo-Christian tradition of the city as a place of despotic rule over an enslaved populace, focusing on city walls and massive buildings as a means of control. Additionally, the Classical tradition focused on monumental architecture separating urban from nature. From this comes the focus of the city as a single dominant entity evidenced by monumental architecture with a heterogeneous population maintained by the despotic state. Archaeological investigations with this focus thus ignore non-monumental expressions, and slight the social/residential in favor of the monumental. Iron Age West African sites, particularly Jenne-jeno, and Bronze Age Chinese sites, particularly Cheng-chou and An-yang, counter this focus. The urban entity at these sites is a cluster of discrete interacting settlements functioning together as a city. The author proposes that urban clusters reflect a different social contract. The settlements are occupied by ethnic or specialist corporate groups. As opposed to centralized power used to prevent class conflict and to maintain the privileges of the elite, the urban clusters present an opportunity for multiple agancies of authority, maintaining peace by a sense of belonging to the community within the larger horizontally-integrated urban system.