A new study published in the journal Science Advances strengthens the view that human settlements of all times and places function in the same way by manifesting strongly interacting social networks, thus magnifying rates of social interaction and increasing the productivity and scope of material resources, human labor, and knowledge.
The Maya city of Palenque in modern-day Mexico. Image credit: Peter Andersen / CC BY-SA 3.0.
Previous studies have shown that as contemporary settlements grow in population, so do their efficiencies and productivity. A city’s population outpaces its development of urban infrastructure, for example, and its production of goods and services outpaces its population.
What’s more, these patterns exhibit a surprising degree of mathematical regularity and predictability.
According to the study carried out by Prof Luis Bettencourt of Santa Fe Institute and his colleagues from the University of Colorado Boulder, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, ancient human settlements function in much the same way as contemporary ones, despite notable differences in appearance and governance.
In the 1960s, surveyors examined all ancient settlements in the Basin of Mexico, spanning 2,000 years and four cultural eras in pre-contact Mesoamerica.
Prof Bettencourt’s team used these archaeological data to analyze the dimensions of hundreds of ancient temples and thousands of ancient houses and to estimate populations and densities, size and construction rates of monuments and buildings, and intensity of site use.
Their results indicate that the bigger the ancient settlement, the more productive it was.
“It was shocking and unbelievable. We were raised on a steady diet telling us that, thanks to capitalism, industrialization, and democracy, the modern world is radically different from worlds of the past. What we found here is that the fundamental drivers of robust socioeconomic patterns in modern cities precede all that,” said first author Dr Scott Ortman of the University of Colorado Boulder and Santa Fe Institute.
Çatalhöyük, an ancient settlement in modern-day Turkey. Image credit: Dan Lewandowski.
“Our results suggest that the general ingredients of productivity and population density in human societies run much deeper and have everything to do with the challenges and opportunities of organizing human social networks,” added Prof Bettencourt.
“Settlement scaling theory proposes that one can use a variety of aggregate quantities as measures of infrastructure, socioeconomic outputs, social network connectivity, and their evolution over time in any society,” the scientists wrote in the paper.
“In this case, we have shown that in the pre-Hispanic Basin of Mexico, larger population aggregates used space more efficiently, produced public goods more rapidly, and were more productive per household.”
“Further, the congruence of these results with theory suggests that the benefits of scale across all these domains ultimately derive from the properties of strongly interacting social networks embedded in structured spaces.”
Though excited by the results, the scientists see the discovery as just one step in a long process. They plan to examine settlement patterns from ancient sites in Peru, China, and Europe and study the factors that lead urban systems to emerge, grow, or collapse.
_____
Scott G. Ortman et al. 2015. Settlement scaling and increasing returns in an ancient society. Science Advances, vol. 1, no. 1; doi: 10.1126/sciadv.1400066
