ts,
institutions, purposes and ideals currently functioning in any
community. Three elements are present in each human society: man, nature
and the social structure. Human culture at any point in its history is
the social structure: the aggregate of existing culture traits, the
products of man's ingenuity, inventiveness and experimentation, set in
their natural environment.

Civilization is a level of culture built upon foundations laid down
through long periods of pre-civilized living. These foundations consist
of artifacts, implements, customs, habit patterns and institutions
produced and developed in numerous scattered localities by groups of
food-gatherers, migrating herdsmen, cultivators, hand craftsmen and
traders and eventually in urban communities built around centers of
wealth and power: the cities which are the nuclei of every civilization.

Urban centers, housing trade, commerce, fabrication and finance, with
their hinterlands of food-gatherers, herdsmen, cultivators, craftsmen
and transporters, are the nuclei around which and upon which recurring
civilizations are built. Within and around these urban centers there
grows up a complex of associations, activities, institutions and ideas
designed to promote, develop and defend the particular life pattern.

A civilization is a cluster of peoples, nations and empires so related
in time and space that they share certain ideas, practices, institutions
and means of procedure and survival. Among these features of a civilized
community we may list:

(1) means of communication, record-keeping, transportation
and trade. This would include a spoken language, a method
of enumeration, writing in pictographs or symbols; an
alphabet, a written language, inscribed on stone, bone,
wood, parchment, paper; means of preserving the records
of successive generations; paths, roads, bridges; a system
for educating successive generations; meeting places and
trading points; means for barter or exchange;

(2) an interdependent urban-oriented economy based on division
of labor and specialization; on private property in the
essential means of production and in consumer goods and
services; on a competitive survival struggle for wealth,
prestige and power between individuals and social groups;
and on the exploitation of man, society and nature for the
material benefit of the privileged few who occupy the summit
of the social pyramid;