Ancient and Modern Cities Are More Alike Than Previously Thought

Since the days of the Mayans, Incas and Aztecs we've come a long way. At least, that's what we used to think. But new research has shown that ancient and modern cities are more alike than we previously thought, and work in much the same way.

Previous research has shown that as modern cities grow in population, so do their efficiencies and productivity. For example, a city's population outpaces its development of urban infrastructure and its production of goods and services outpaces its population. These patterns represent a mathematical phenomenon called "urban scaling."

According to this theory, despite obvious differences in appearance and governance, ancient human settlements aren't structured all that different from modern ones.

"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," lead researcher Scott Ortman from the University of Colorado-Boulder said in a statement.

To reach their conclusions, Ortman and his colleagues examined archaeological data from the Basin of Mexico. More specifically, they examined ancient settlements spanning 2,000 years and four cultural eras in pre-contact Mesoamerica.

They also analyzed the dimensions of hundreds of ancient temples and thousands of ancient houses to estimate populations and densities, size and construction rates of monuments and buildings, and intensity of site use.

Based on what they found, it appears that the bigger the ancient settlement, the more productive it was. This, in turn, points to the fact that ancient cities functioned similarly to modern ones.

"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 Luis Bettencourt, one of the researchers.

The results were published in the journal Science Advances.

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