Scaling in Pompeii: Preliminary Evidence for the Occurrence of Scaling Phenomena Within an Ancient Built Environment

Abstract

There has recently been a great deal of interest in the effects of the sizes of communities on the social and economic conditions of settlements, drawing on theoretical and empirical work on complex systems. However, although it is clear that there is a series of relationships between the sizes of sites and their various attributes in a range of modern and non-modern contexts, it is not yet known whether these relationships extend to life within settlements, between different neighbourhoods, blocks, or individual households. In this article, I investigate whether this is the case by focusing on one site, Pompeii. The results show that there is indeed a series of relationships between the sizes of structures, the numbers and different kinds of rooms within them, and the numbers and different kinds of artefacts associated with them, which increase at a similar rate to those from other contexts. This demonstrates, for the first time, that the same scaling phenomena that have been identified across both contemporary and non-modern urban systems can also be found within the built environment of a single, well-documented ancient settlement. This suggests that the same, or similar, social network effects exist at multiple social, spatial, and temporal scales, from individual houses to entire cities, opening up the possibility of building a series of much more ambitious theoretical and empirical models of urbanism in future, which trace the variation both within and across settlements back to the net socio-economic and infrastructural consequences of embedding social networks within built environments.