Abstract
Cities are increasingly the fundamental socio-economic units of human societies worldwide, but we still lack a unified characterization of urbanization that captures the social processes realized by cities across time and space. This is especially important for understanding the role of cities in the history of human civilization and for determining whether studies of ancient cities are relevant for contemporary science and policy. As a step in this direction, we develop a theory of settlement scaling in archaeology, deriving the relationship between population and settled area from a consideration of the interplay between social and infrastructural networks. We then test these models on settlement data from the Pre-Hispanic Basin of Mexico to show that this ancient settlement system displays spatial scaling properties analogous to those observed in modern cities. Our data derive from over 1,500 settlements occupied over two millennia and spanning four major cultural periods characterized by different levels of agricultural productivity, political centralization and market development. We show that, in agreement with theory, total settlement area increases with population size, on average, according to a scale invariant relation with an exponent in the range . As a consequence, we are able to infer aggregate socio-economic properties of ancient societies from archaeological measures of settlement organization. Our findings, from an urban settlement system that evolved independently from its old-world counterparts, suggest that principles of settlement organization are very general and may apply to the entire range of human history.
Highlights
Many studies over the last few decades have demonstrated that aggregate properties of contemporary urban settlements –from socio-economic outputs to land area to the extent of infrastructure– vary systematically and predictably with population size [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]
This appears to be as true for ancient settlements as it is for modern cities
A surprising expectation of these models is that the scaling relations observed in contemporary cities should be apparent in ancient settlement systems
Summary
Many studies over the last few decades have demonstrated that aggregate properties of contemporary urban settlements –from socio-economic outputs to land area to the extent of infrastructure– vary systematically and predictably with population size [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9] These regularities emerge from two advantages of larger settlements: the realization of greater material economies of scale, and the promotion of increased rates of social interaction, which enhance the production of general socio-economic quantities including those related to the size, organization and value of their economies. These ideas make no quantitative predictions about the distribution of socio-economic functions with city size, beyond the fact that they should, on average, form a hierarchy [26]
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
