The standard account of early urbanism runs from agriculture to surplus to hierarchy to cities, and several excavated sites refuse to follow it. Çatalhöyük housed thousands of people for centuries with no palace, no temple district and houses of near-identical size. Ukrainian mega-sites of comparable scale show the same absence of central buildings. Neither is easily read as a stage on the way to anything, and both persisted for longer than many of the hierarchical cities that are treated as the norm. The evidence increasingly suggests that large settlements were organised in several different ways, and that the version leading to kings and granaries is one outcome rather than the destination.