Recently derived equations that describe development patterns in modern urban areas appear to work equally well to describe ancient cities settled thousands of years ago, according to a new study led by a researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder.
鈥淭his study suggests that there is a level at which every human society is actually very similar,鈥� said Scott Ortman, assistant professor of at 抖阴旅行射-Boulder and lead author of the study published in the journal . 鈥淭his awareness helps break down the barriers between the past and present and allows us to view contemporary cities as lying on a continuum of all human settlements in time and place.鈥�
Over the last several years, Ortman鈥檚 colleagues at the (SFI), including Professor Luis Bettencourt, a co-author of the study, have developed mathematical models that describe how modern cities change as their populations grow. For example, scientists know that as a population increases, its settlement area becomes denser, while infrastructure needs per capita decrease and economic production per capita rises.
Ortman noticed that the variables used in these equations, such as cost of moving around, the size of the settled area, the population, and the benefits of people interacting, did not depend on any particular modern technology.
鈥淚 realized that if these models are adequate for explaining what鈥檚 going on in contemporary cities, they should apply to any settlements in any society,鈥� he said. 鈥淪o if these models are on the right track, they should apply to ancient societies too.鈥�
To test his idea, Ortman used data that had been collected in the 1960s about 1,500 settlements in central Mexico that spanned from 1,150 years B.C. through the Aztec period, which ended about 500 years ago. The data included the number of dwellings the archaeologists were able to identify, the total settled area and the density of pottery fragments scattered on the surface. Taken together, these artifacts give an indication of the total population numbers and settlement density of the ancient sites.
鈥淲e started analyzing the data in the ways we were thinking about with modern cities, and it showed that the models worked,鈥� Ortman said.
The discovery that ancient and modern settlements may develop in similar and predictable ways has implications both for archaeologists and people studying today鈥檚 urban areas. For example, it鈥檚 common for archaeologists to assume that population density is constant, no matter how large the settlement area, when estimating the population of ancient cities. The new equations could offer a way for archaeologists to get a more accurate head count, by incorporating the idea that population density tends to grow as total area increases.
In the future, the equations may also guide archaeologists in getting an idea of what they鈥檙e likely to find within a given settlement based on its size, such as the miles of roads and pathways. The equations could also guide expectations about the number of different activities that took place in a settlement and the division of labor.
鈥淭here should be a relationship between the population of settlements and the productivity of labor,鈥� Ortman said. 鈥淪o, for example, we would expect larger social networks to be able to produce more public monuments per capita than smaller settlements.鈥�
The findings of the new study may also be useful to studies of modern societies. Because ancient settlements were typically less complex than today鈥檚 cities, they offer a simple 鈥渕odel system鈥� for testing the equations devised to explain modern cities.
鈥淭he archaeological record actually provides surprisingly clear tests of these models, and in some cases it鈥檚 actually much harder to collect comparable data from contemporary cities,鈥� Ortman said.
Other co-authors of the study include Andrew Cabaniss of Santa Fe Institute and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and Jennie Sturm of the University of New Mexico.
The study is available at . Read the press release from the Santa Fe Institute at
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Contact:
Scott Ortman, 303-492-6064
Scott.Ortman@colorado.edu
Laura Snider, 抖阴旅行射 media relations, 303-735-0528
Laura.Snider@colorado.edu
The remains of the ancient city of Teotihuacan, located in central Mexico. Teotihuacan was one of the more than 1,500 ancient Mexican settlements studied by 抖阴旅行射-Boulder anthropologist Scott Ortman for a study that showed that ancient settlements follow the same rules of development as modern cities. Photo from Wikipedia.
