Introduction

Abstract

Cities are a constant interplay between tangible and intangible, visible and invisible factors. Long-lived cities can provide data to compensate for the brevity of our modern urban experience (Croce 1985). To overcome these gaps in research, just beginning to close, the city is a most useful unit of study. Ancient cities can serve as four-dimensional models (length, width, height, and time) of how humans survived in their ecological niches. Yet comparative studies of groups of cities—such as Rorig’s (1967) of German medieval trading cities of the Hanseatic League, Andrews’s (1975) of the urban design history of Maya cities, and Hohenberg and Lee’s (1985) of the economic history of European cities—ignore the geological setting. The setting of our study is the Mediterranean periphery where cities are united by their Greco-Roman historical and cultural relationships. From the twenty-five Greco-Roman sites studied in Water Management in Ancient Greek Cities, we have selected for further study 10 sites with sufficient geological information to form a basis of comparison. Our comparisons are based on the physical aspects—both form and function—of the local area, not the particular object. There are exciting possibilities, both intellectual and practical, in such an approach. Until recently, ancient Mediterranean cities have been investigated mainly by ancient historians and classical archaeologists. Cities, however, are so complex as to require every possible sort of investigation. Because each model and methodology leaves out too much, the use of a single model from one discipline, whether archaeological, mathematical, engineering, or historic, has limited usefulness. The documents of the classicists and the physical remains located by archaeologists seem to an urban historian like myself to be useful but incomplete sources that take for granted the geographical base, assume a past social organization, and may ignore the technological and scientific aspects of ancient urban life. As classicist M. H. Jameson (1990) has written, “The surviving literature from Classical Greece sheds light only incidentally on practical matters such as patterns of settlement and domestic architecture . . . [yet] conceptions drawn from literature, sometimes with dubious justification, continue to prevail.”