This paper examines the patterns of Etruscan urbanism by the innovative use of newly available rural data, employing rank size, and indices of centralization. The detailed case study looks at the development of urbanism of pre-Roman Etruria where both robust and delicate urbanism were present alongside one another. To achieve this end, the paper will draw on the complementary features of two recent articles—Redhouse and Stoddart (2011) and Palmisano et al. (2018)—to provide a synthesis that both examines the large places and the supporting rural settlement. The territorial boundaries of the major urban places were predicted by the XTENT model in the first article. The cumulative numbers of rural settlement (and other proxies of population) over time were examined in the second article. This paper will look at the regional variation in landscape organization within the predicted territorial boundaries of the major robust centres and the more delicate transitory centres, as well as the buffer zones in between. At least three phases of boundary development can be examined, equivalent broadly to the Iron Age, Orientalizing/Archaic and Post Archaic periods, seeking to match these with the correspondingly dated rural settlement. The results will be critically examined in terms of broader knowledge of the economic and political development from current fieldwork in Etruria. The ethnographic analysis of Kopytoff (1989) will also be applied to assess the application of the internal African frontier to the central Italian context. In this way, the quantitative will be matched with the qualitative to provide a deeper understanding of urban development in an under-assessed example within the Mediterranean world.

A manifold of concepts of urbanity have been discussed in the past and many criteria of towns have been developed. These criteria, e. g. size, population,legal aspects, way of life, structural and functional approaches are insufficient, because they cover just a part of the phenomenon and because they partly use fixed and arbitrary thresholds. We turn to an understanding of urbanity as a process which fills and shapes the scenery of the buildings and people and which involves complexity as one of the main drivers. In this sense we understand urbanity as a process of adaption to changed requirements or contexts in a complex settlement system, triggered by size, attracted by exemplary solutions and characterized by the emergence of new structures. With this paper we address the issues of relativity in the urbanity process. As adaption process, urbanity is relative in the sense, that other places may have gained better or worse adaption. Concerning networks, this means that network centrality measures have to be adapted to geographical networks. This paper applies this concept to the Princely Seats of the Early Iron Age with a special focus on the Heuneburg. A very limited part of the material culture is used to represent similarities and interaction between the different nodes. For this purpose we use fibulae which allow rather good dating and hence ensure a narrow time slice for the network analysis. Fibulae also provide a limitation to a certain social segment, which can be addressed as a middle class. This paper is intended to contribute to the problem of addressing the rather complex issue of urbanity using rather simple approaches such as network analysis. We pay attention to a tight integration of theory and method as well as to certain conceptual issues. This paper has two main results. First, we develop a consistent approach to apply social network centrality measures on geographical networks. Secondly, the role of a kind of middle class in the course of urbanity processes is enlightened.

This article investigates the urban expansion and economic development of ancient Rome through the application of models and theories originally designed for the study of contemporary cities. While the growth of ancient settlements is often difficult to track and analyze, archaeologically observable changes in land use can be read and interpreted as a function of broader economic oscillations over the longue duree. By re-examining the available archaeological and textual evidence pertaining to land use change on Rome’s eastern periphery this article demonstrates how the frameworks selected can be successfully appropriated via a narration of Rome’s urban transformations from the mid-Republic to the later Imperial period. The ultimate goal is to determine if the patterns of urban expansion identified in modern cities also existed in ancient Rome. The findings provided have the potential to produce rich insights on the dynamics of urban and economic growth across time and geographies, thereby opening the door for new and further studies.

Comparative studies of cities throughout history are one of the greatest sources of insight into the nature of change in human societies. This paper discusses strategies to anchor these comparisons on well-defined, quantitative and empirical characteristics of cities, derived from theory and observable in the archeological and historical records. We show how quantitative comparisons based on a few simple variables across settlements allow us to analyze how different places and peoples dealt with general problems of any society. These include demographic change, the organization of built spaces, the intensity and size of socioeconomic networks and the processes underlying technological change and economic growth. Because the historical record contains a much more varied and more independent set of experiences than contemporary urbanization, it has a unique power of illuminating present puzzles of human development and testing emergent urban theory.

Traditional ways of doing archaeology impact the world in a variety of ways, but despite recent efforts the practical relevance of archaeology has remained limited. In this paper, I discuss why this is the case and suggest how archaeology can achieve greater practical relevance. I argue, first, that the traditional focus of archaeology on reconstructing the past is valuable but is unlikely to expand its practical relevance because the results are too context-specific. Second, I suggest traditional responses to the problem of historical contingency are also inadequate because the results are too general to connect to the specific issues and solutions society needs. Finally, I make a surprising and perhaps radical suggestion: that a productive way forward is to resuscitate and reformulate elements of the New Archaeology that were never realized by its proponents. I use the example of settlement scaling theory to illustrate that this is both possible and productive, and that additional work in this spirit would enhance the practical relevance of our field.

The rise of the state in Ancient Italy went hand in hand with an increase in infrastructural power i.e. settlement centralization and urbanization. The paper discusses theoretical challenges and introduces a modeling approach to a case study, one of the earliest cities in Southern Italy, Pontecagnano, with the aim of understanding the community dynamics at the time of the earliest urbanization (ca. 900-600 BC). The model is a two-mode model that derives from social network analysis, an approach that has been fruitfully adapted to archaeological research. The model is applied to detect trends in burial contexts from the community involved. Burial was, at that time, in the region, a key instrument in the creation of memory and display of status and thus for building and consolidating state power. The analytical network model is able to detect the dynamics in the community over time very well: network Cohesion is expanding and contracting, and points to the existence of tension and a tight control of funerary behavior. The study of Centrality of selected nodes provides a good understanding of the strategies in terms of the circulation of key resources. The latter is particularly significant for studying urbanization because the appropriation of resources was not possible without centralization and the development of infrastructure, as well as an ideology. Based on the study of selected resources it is suggested that an increase in crop storage has played a particular role in the development of state power and the urbanization process at Pontecagnano. In due course, the paper also addresses methodological challenges of working with fragmented datasets when applying models to study the past.

The conventional history of urban growth defines agrarian-based cities prior to the 19th century CE as densely inhabited and commonly bounded by defenses such as walls. By contrast industrial-based cities are viewed as more spread out and without marked boundaries. Since the 1960s a trajectory towards extensive, low-density urbanism with sprawling, scattered suburbs surrounding a denser core has been formally recognised and given various names such as megalopolis in the West and desakota in southern and eastern Asia. These sprawling industrial cities have been regarded as a unique derivative of modern phenomena such as mechanized transport and the commercial property market. However, this set of premises are not valid. The agrarian-based world also contained dispersed, low-density urbanism - on its grandest scale, the vast circa 1000 sq km urban complex of Greater Angkor and the famous Maya cities of lowland Central America with maximum areas of about 200 sq km. The Maya only used pedestrian and riverine transport so the conventional transport explanation for industrial dispersed urbanism is at best partial. There was another trajectory to extensive, low-density settlement forms for places which were generally less than 15-20 sq km in extent but could on rare occasions reach areas as large as 40 to 90 sq km. Famous examples are Great Zimbabwe, Chaco Canyon and the European oppida of the late 1st millennium BCE. No-formally agreed term is available to refer to them. I will refer to them by default as “Giants”. The three trajectories to low-density settlement form redefine the history of settlement growth and the meanings of the term “urban”. Worryingly, none of the successive low-density settlements derive from any of the low-density cases of the preceding trajectory. Neither Angkor nor the Classic Maya cities have any connection to the industrial low-density cities. By contrast compact cities, the epitome of the obsolete definition of cities display continuity to succeeding urban forms over several thousand years. The implications for modern, giant, low-density cities are ominous.

Empirical studies of ancient cities must break down communities into their component parts, but frequently encounter difficulty with the scarcity of excavated domestic structures (e.g. Kramer 1982, 673). I introduce to the archaeological literature the entropy estimating statistical bootstrap (EESB), a tool developed in information theory and computational social science by DeDeo et al. (2013) which provides a way to assess how representative a small dataset is of a parent population, categorized according to some useful typology. This method can be used to decide when small datasets can add further detail to our quantitative studies of archaeological settlements or when they need to be rejected as too small. I then illustrate its uses within the context of urban demography by examining the distribution of house forms to calculate household characteristics specific to Metapontum, an ancient Greek city. Future applications will include building larger urban datasets that are empirically grounded in the specific evidence for each community, facilitating the work of research programs such as urban scaling.