See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/344642410

Why Archaeology Is Necessary for a Theory of Urbanization

Article in Journal of Urban Archaeology · January 2020

DOI: 10.1484/J.JUA.5.120914

CITATIONS READS

19 547

4 authors, including:

Scott G Ortman Luís M A Bettencourt

University of Colorado Boulder University of Chicago
101 PUBLICATIONS 2,753 CITATIONS 284 PUBLICATIONS 13,877 CITATIONS

SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Scott G Ortman on 21 October 2020.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Journal of Urban Archaeology
 Journal of Urban Archaeology
Volume 1

Founding Editors
Professor Rubina Raja, Centre for Urban Network Evolutions and Department of
History and Classical Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark, rubina.raja@cas.au.dk
Professor Søren M. Sindbæk, Centre for Urban Network Evolutions and Department
of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark, farksms@cas.au.dk

Editorial Board
Professor Shadreck Chirikure, University of Cape Town, South Africa, and University of Oxford, England
Dr Manuel Fernández-Götz, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Professor Roland Fletcher, University of Sydney, Australia
Sir Robert Ho Tung Professor Li Liu, Stanford University, USA
Associate Professor Nadine Moeller, University of Chicago, USA
Professor Rubina Raja, Aarhus University, Denmark
Professor Søren M. Sindbæk, Aarhus University, Denmark
Professor Christopher Smith, University of St Andrews, Scotland
Professor Michael E. Smith, Arizona State University, USA

Editorial Assistant
Dr Eva Mortensen, Centre for Urban Network Evolutions and
Department of History and Classical Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark
jua@urbanarchaeology.net

The founding of the journal was inspired by the research undertaken by Professors Rubina Raja and Søren
M. Sindbæk before 2015 and at the Centre for Urban Network Evolutions (UrbNet) at Aarhus University since
2015. UrbNet is a Centre of Excellence funded by the Danish National Research Foundation (grant: DNRF119).
It has existed since 2015 and is directed by Professor Rubina Raja and co-directed by Professor Søren M. Sindbæk.

The Journal of Urban Archaeology is a double-blind peer-reviewed journal.

Journal of Urban Archaeology

Volume 1

F
 Cover illustration: Mosaic from the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus.
Photo by Rubina Raja, Damascus 2007.

This journal issue is made available as a Gold Open Access publication thanks to the generous
support of the Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre of Excellence for Urban
Network Evolutions (UrbNet), Aarhus University, under the grant DNRF119.

This is an open access publication made available under a CC BY-NC 4.0

International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0.

© 2020, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by
any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

D/2020/0095/203
ISBN: 978-2-503-59056-1
DOI: 10.1484/J.JUA.5.120877

Printed in the EU on acid-free paper.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations  6

Rubina Raja and Søren M. Sindbæk

Urban Archaeology: A New Agenda — Editorial 9

Michael E. Smith
Definitions and Comparisons in Urban Archaeology 15

Roland Fletcher
Urban Labels and Settlement Trajectories 31

Shadreck Chirikure
Shades of Urbanism(s) and Urbanity in Pre-Colonial Africa:
Towards Afro-Centred Interventions 49

Federica Sulas and Innocent Pikirayi

From Centre–Periphery Models to Textured Urban Landscapes:
Comparative Perspectives from Sub-Saharan Africa 67

Christopher Smith
Urban Networks in Latium 85

Simon Stoddart
An Etruscan Urban Agenda: The Weaving Together of Traditions 99

Gonzalo Ruiz Zapatero, Jesús R. Álvarez-Sanchís,

and Jesús Rodríguez-Hernández
Urbanism in Iron Age Iberia: Two Worlds in Contact 123

Scott G. Ortman, Michael E. Smith, José Lobo,

and Luís M. A. Bettencourt
Why Archaeology is Necessary for a Theory of Urbanization 151

The Backfill
List of Illustrations

Figure 2.1. Relationship between the sociological and functional definitions of urbanism.  19

Figure 3.1. Greater Angkor, Cambodia. 32

Figure 3.2. East Coast Megalopolis, USA.  33

Figure 3.3. Cahokia, USA. 35

Figure 3.4. Sayil, Mexico.  36

Figure 3.5. Interaction-Communication Matrix. 38

Figure 3.6. Trajectories on the I–C matrix. 39

Figure 3.7. The trajectory and growth of London.  40

Figure 3.8. Yoruba towns, Nigeria. Nineteenth-century trajectories.  42

Figure 4.1. Map of Africa showing cities of different time periods, scattered across different regions.  50

Figure 4.2. Map of Great Zimbabwe showing layout of the main settlement concentration.  54

Figure 4.3. The Great Enclosure at Great Zimbabwe.  55

Figure 4.4. Map of Khami showing its spread-out nature and multiple platforms.  56

Figure 4.5. Photograph showing a) trade goods imported ceramics; b) ceremonial axe;
c) divining dice; and d) the western wall of the Hill Complex at Khami.  57

Figure 5.1. Map of Africa showing the location of Aksum and Great Zimbabwe. 70

Figure 5.2. View of Stelae Park, Aksum. 71

Figure 5.3. The Great Enclosure seen from the Hill Complex, Great Zimbabwe. 71

Figure 5.4. View and plan of the Dungur building (late sixth/early seventh century ad), Aksum. 72

Figure 5.5. Map of Aksum showing the distribution of Aksumite sites and structures. 73

Figure 5.6. Map of the greater Aksum area and distribution of ‘satellite’ settlements
mentioned in the text. 74

Figure 5.7. Settlement structures on the Hill Complex, Great Zimbabwe. 75

Figure 5.8. Plan of Great Zimbabwe showing the location of the so-called ‘peripheral’ settlements. 76
 list of illust r ati o n s 7

Figure 5.9. View of Chenga enclosure with Hill Complex in the background. 77

Figure 5.10. Plan of the Chenga complex, showing the location of the trench (CH01) and the
archaeological stratigraphy. 78

Figure 5.11. View of domestic deposit with compact and degraded dhaka floor at CH01, Chenga. 78

Figure 5.12. A selection of lithic finds from CH01: quartz minute flakes and two cores.  79

Figure 5.13. View of large mound recently discovered at Chenga with scatters of pottery and
dhaka rubble visible. 79

Figure 7.1. Map of Etruria showing principal places mentioned in the text. 100

Figure 7.2. Comparison of frequency of references to Etruscan and Faliscan cities by Livy with
their estimated size. 101

Figure 7.3. Location of the major regional surveys. 105

Figure 7.4. Contrasting frequencies of settlement size between the Final Bronze Age and the
earliest Iron Age. 106

Figure 7.5. Staggered tipping points of transformation in different sectors of urbanism. 106

Figure 7.6. Veii in the ninth/eighth century bc. 107

Figure 7.7. Veii in the sixth century bc. 108

Figure 7.8. Map showing the territories of Murlo, Chiusi, Veii, and Cerveteri
and the location of Tuscania. 109

Figure 7.9. Comparison of Chiusi and Cerveteri. 109

Figure 7.10. Comparison of the density of settlement as a function of distance from the urban
centre: Cerveteri, Veii, Tuscania, and Murlo. 110
Figure 8.1. Map of the Iberian Peninsula with main regions, rivers, and the three cultural areas:
Mediterranean, inland (Meseta), and north-west/north. 124

Figure 8.2. Aerial view of Puente Tablas ( Jaén) oppidum. 125

Figure 8.3. Map showing sites discussed in the text. 126

Figure 8.4. Oppidum of La Bastida de les Alcusses (Mogente): A. Reconstruction drawing;

B. Aerial view of a sector. 127

Figure 8.5. A. Settlement pattern of the Turia Valley in the Iberian period;
B. Reconstruction of part of the town Edeta/Liria. 128
8 l i s t of i l lus tr ation s

Figure 8.6. Fortified village of Castellet de Bernabé (Liria): A. Map of the excavated site;
B. Aerial view; C. Proposal of the social structure of the living community. 129

Figure 8.7. Oppidum of Molí de l’Espigol (Tournabous): A. Aerial view;

B. Map of the excavated site. 130

Figure 8.8. Plan of the Banyeres del Penedès town (Tarragona) after a geophysical survey. 131

Figure 8.9. Aerial view of Numancia and map of its urban plan. 132

Figure 8.10. El Llano de la Horca (Santorcaz): A. Geophysical survey with streets and
structures; B. Reconstruction view. 133

Figure 8.11. A. Partial aerial view of Pallantia (Palenzuela); B. Pintia (Padilla de Duero). 133

Figure 8.12. The oppidum of El Raso (Candeleda), next to the Gredos mountain range,
preserves the remains of a dozen towers, houses, and stone walls. 134

Figure 8.13. Oppidum of Ulaca: A. Reconstruction view; B. Plan of the settlement;

C. The sanctuary with ‘altar’ for animal sacrifices; D. Vettonian sculptures
of bulls, generically known as ‘Toros de Guisando’ (El Tiemblo, Ávila). 135

Figure 8.14. Walls and internal structure of Santa Trega oppidum. 137

Figure 8.15. Plan of Sanfins and a view of some houses and the sauna. 138

Figure 8.16. Urban sanctuaries of the north-west and the avenues that lead to them, and warrior
statues of S. Jorge de Vizela (Guimarães, Braga) and Santo Ovidio (Fafe, Braga).  139

Figure 8.17. San Chuis hill fort. 140

Figure 8.18. Oppidum of Marueleza: A. Aerial view of the north-west gate; B. Reconstruction. 141

Figure 8.19. Model of ‘low-density’ urbanism. 143

Figure 9.1. Relationship between corvée labour pool size and public works
construction rate in three pre-Hispanic New World societies. 157

Figure 9.2. Schematic view of change over time in the economy of a settlement system. 159

Figure 9.3. Phase diagram illustrating movement of the centres of settlement size vs.
consumption and personal possessions in northern Rio Grande Pueblo
society between ad 1250 and 1650.  159
 Scott G. O rtman, M ichael E . Smith, Jo sé Lobo,
and Luí s M. A. B ettencourt

Why Archaeology is Necessary

for a Theory of Urbanization
ABSTRACT In recent decades researchers in sev-
eral disciplines have promoted ‘urban science’ to
acknowledge the advantages of multidisciplinary
approaches and the expanding ability to collect
data for contemporary cities. Although practition-
ers tend to treat the city as the object of study, in
our view the more appropriate focus is the pro-
cess of urbanization. When framed this way, the
archaeological record becomes central to a robust
theory of urbanization, and even helps to clarify
aspects of urbanization that are difficult to study
in a present-day context. In this paper, we illustrate
this point by discussing examples where archaeo-
logical evidence has clarified and expanded aspects
of settlement scaling theory, an approach that was
initially developed in the context of contemporary
cities but which applies to settlements of all shapes,
sizes, and periods.
KEYWORDS Urbanization; complex systems;
settle­ment scaling; archaeology; model systems.
Acknowledgements and Funding Details
Portions of this research have been supported by a grant from
the James S. McDonnell Foundation (#220020438). We thank
Aaron Trumbo for compiling data on the dimensions of public
works from the Santa Valley survey records. We also thank the
editors of the Journal of Urban Archaeology for the opportunity
to contribute to this inaugural issue.
In recent decades technological and social devel-
opments have stimulated the collection of unprec-
edented amounts of information concerning what
people do when they agglomerate in cities. For some,
this big-data revolution driven by satellite imagery,
global positioning systems, smart phones, digital
cameras, and the internet, provides opportunities
for engineering ‘smarter’ cities that manage peo-
ple and resources more efficiently and effectively.
At the same time, the realization that many of the
challenges facing humanity involve urban areas has
led to the idea of the city as a unit of analysis for a
multifaceted approach to human agglomeration,
as the Nobel-Prize winning economist Paul Romer
(2013) has argued:
The urban environment that humans are so busily
creating is many things: a biological environment,
a social environment, a built environment, a mar-
ket environment, a business environment, and a
political environment. It includes not only the
versions of these environments that exist inside a
single city, but also those that are emerging from
the interaction between cities. Our understand-
ing of the urban environment will draw on exist-
ing academic disciplines, but it will also develop
its own abstractions and insights.
This move to study cities in new ways has drawn on
prior research traditions — notably Jane Jacobs’s
(1961) treatment of cities as an instance of ‘organ-
ized complexity’ — and more recent developments

Scott G. Ortman (scott.ortman@colorado.edu) is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University

of Colorado Boulder. His interests include North American archaeology, historical anthropology,
complex systems, and the contemporary relevance of archaeology.

Michael E. Smith is Professor of Anthropology in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change
at Arizona State University. His interests include Mesoamerican archaeology, ancient urbanism, and
interdisciplinary social science.

José Lobo is Clinical Associate Professor in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University.
His interests include urban science, social development, economic history, and theories of innovation.

Luís M. A. Bettencourt is Director of the Mansueto Institute and Professor of Ecology and Evolution
at the University of Chicago. His interests include urban science, human development, and evolution in
complex systems.

This is an open access article made available under a cc by-nc 4.0 International License. Journal of Urban Archaeology, 1 (2020), pp. 151–167
FHG  10.1484/J.JUA.5.120914
152 s cott g. o rtman , m i c h ae l e . s m i t h , j o s é lo b o, and lu í s m. a. b e t t e nco u rt
in urban economics, complex systems, and network
science (Glaeser 2011; Newman 2010) has led to the
emergence of a new field that has come to be known
as urban science (Batty 2013). As Michael Batty (2019,
998) explains:
Urban science deals with the structure and func-
tioning of cities, and the generic laws that seem
to govern cities everywhere insofar as they can
be articulated […] a science of human behavior
as it applies to cities. […] This is not the science
of the physics of buildings or energy flows in cit-
ies (although it clearly relates in part to some of
these aspects), it is the science of people flows,
flows of goods, and the flow of information and
ideas and the extent to which all these can be
generalized over city size and scale.
An exciting outgrowth of urban science has been the
improved identification of empirical regularities in
the properties of cities across an urban system. Some
of these regularities — such as Zipf ’s Law of city-size
distributions, the Gravity Law of interaction, and
Gibrat’s Law of system-wide urban growth — have
been known for many decades (Gabaix 1999; Stewart
1941; Zipf 1949). In addition to these, researchers
have identified genuinely new (allometric) scal-
ing relationships that connect the population size
of cities to a variety of other socio-economic and
infrastructural quantities (Angel and others 2016;
Bettencourt and others 2007; Chave and Levin
2003; Glaeser and Gottlieb 2009; Nordbeck 1971;
Pumain and others 2006; West 2017). The aver-
age relationship between these quantities across
cities in an urban system generally takes the form
, with representing a city’s popula-
tion, the aggregate quantity for a city of size
, a baseline value, and an exponent reflect-
ing the relative growth rate of relative to . For
example, for circumscribing areas the value of this
exponent is typically , for quantities related
to infrastructural and resource needs it is typically
, and for quantities related to socio-eco-
nomic rates it is typically . In recent years,
increased awareness of these regularities has stim-
ulated new theory that seeks to account for these
relationships based on the multiplicative effects of
human interaction embedded in space (Bettencourt
2013; 2014; Lobo and others 2013). Although there is
debate over the functional form of urban statistics
(Clauset, Shalizi, and Newman 2009), the degree to
which is consistent over time and space (Depersin
and Marthelemy 2018), and the extent to which scal-
ing relations depend on urban definitions (Arcaute
and others 2015; Cottineau and others 2017), there is
substantial evidence that scaling relations are both
real and widespread (Bettencourt 2013; Keuschnigg,
Mutgan, and Hedstrom 2019; Lobo and others 2019;
Rybski and others 2009; van Raan 2013).
Several aspects of these developments are creat-
ing opportunities for archaeologists to contribute
to a general theory of urbanization. First, models
proposed to account for urban scaling relationships
do not rely on the specifics of modern technology,
democracy, capitalism, industrialization, or finance.
Instead, they build from the idea of a spatial equi-
librium that emerges from individuals balancing
movement costs with interaction benefits, follow-
ing the tradition of Johann Heinrich von Thünen
(1966) and William Alonso (1964). As a result, there
is every reason to suspect that the social processes
responsible for contemporary urban scaling also
operated in ancient cities and even in other (non-ur-
ban) settlements, with the same material effects. And
indeed, there is abundant evidence that this is the
case (Cesaretti and others 2016; Hanson and others
2019; Hanson, Ortman, and Lobo 2017; Lobo and
others 2019; Ortman and others 2016; 2015; 2014;
Ortman and Coffey 2017). Upon reflection, this
should not be surprising. Darwin explicitly leaned
on uniformitarianism in adducing the evidence for
evolution, and today all accept that evolutionary the-
ory should apply to the fossil record just as much as
it applies to contemporary populations (Sepkoski
2012). In the same way, a good theory of urbaniza-
tion should apply to the archaeological record just
as well as it applies to contemporary cities. So, the
fact that the same scaling relations are as apparent
in past settlement systems as they are in contempo-
rary urban systems is a promising sign.
Second, archaeologists have a long tradition of
recording the aggregate properties of entire settle-
ments — from site areas to the numbers and sizes
of houses, amounts of public works, and amounts
and varieties of artefactual debris. Indeed, these
sorts of quantities have been routinely collected as
part of settlement-pattern surveys for many d­ ecades
(Adams 1981; Drennan, Berrey, and Peterson 2015;
Kowalewski 2008; Kowalewski and others 1989;
Phillips, Ford, and Griffen 2003; Sanders, Parsons,
and Santley 1979; Willey 1953; Wilson 1988), and
archaeologists also have a long tradition of detailed
surface mapping and artefact analysis of entire settle-
ments (Millon, Drewitt, and Cowgill 1973; Robertson
2015), with emerging technologies greatly facilitat-
ing the effort (Canuto and others 2018; Evans and
others 2007; Kvamme and Ahler 2007; Rassmann
and others 2014). So, at least on an empirical level,
the complex-systems approach to urban science,
which takes a ‘crude look at the whole’, is some-
thing with which archaeologists are already famil-
 w hy archaeo lo gy i s nece ssary fo r a t heo ry o f u rb anization
iar. Indeed, it maps very well onto the realities of
archaeo­logical evidence, which at best provide
time-averaged indexes of aggregate human behav-
iour as opposed to the details of daily individual
activity (Perreault 2019).
Finally, if in fact urbanization can be defined in
terms of a set of uniformitarian social processes, it
is possible that they may actually be easier to study
in smaller and simpler settlements of the past than
they are in contemporary cities. Many branches of
science have advanced through the use of model
systems — relatively simple systems that neverthe-
less capture the fundamental properties and rela-
tionships of interest. The clearest examples are in
biology, where C. elegans provides a model for the
nervous system, fruit flies a model for evolution, and
mice a model for cancer. There is also a long tradi-
tion of model-building in economic geography that
uses abstract models to capture fundamental entities
and relationships (Haggett 1965). In many ways, the
smaller and simpler settlements of the past approxi-
mate such models more closely than contemporary
cities do. Consequently, although the past was cer-
tainly different from the present in as many ways
as one could choose to enumerate, in some cases
it may be easier to study the urbanization process
using archaeological data than contemporary data.
In this paper we share a few examples from our
own work to illustrate ways in which archaeological
evidence is in fact contributing to a general theory
of urbanization that applies to the present as well as
the past, and can even be used to make predictions
about the future. Importantly, we show that archae-
ology is not merely being used to replicate pres-
ent-day findings in the past but is also being used
to clarify and expand a general theory of urbaniza-
tion, what we call settlement scaling theory (SST).
We develop three examples to make this case. First,
we show that the fundamental role of concentrated
social interaction in space is much clearer in pre­
industrial cities than it is in contemporary cities due
to the stronger correspondence between the physi-
cal and social aspects of settlements in an archaeo-
logical context. Second, we present archaeological
cases where the temporal and spatial rhythms of
social mixing were more varied than those in con-
temporary cities, but increasing returns to population
scale are still apparent, to show that contemporary
cities represent only one of many ways people can
potentially take advantage of social networking in
space. Finally, we show that the direct effects of
agglomeration for economic growth are much eas-
ier to isolate in smaller and simpler societies of the
past, where rates of technological change were gen-
erally much slower than they are today.
153
We hope the implications of these examples will
be clear. If in fact uniformitarianism applies with
respect to fundamental processes in human socie-
ties, then it would seem that archaeological evidence
with its unique access to human diversity over long
periods is essential for development of a theory of
urbanization that is sufficiently general and predic-
tive to guide future planning. If this is accepted, there
is an important and as of yet unrealized opportunity
for archaeologists to collaborate with social scien-
tists in other fields to investigate issues surround-
ing the urbanization process (Ortman 2019). We
hope our paper will convince at least some readers
to follow this path.
Cities vs Urbanization
Before diving into our examples, we want to empha-
size an important distinction in the definition of
urban science introduced above. All of us, even those
who do not live in urban areas, have experience of the
city as a physical object defined by arrangements of
buildings and infrastructure. This built environment
of course facilitates the social process that charac-
terizes cities; but it is this social process itself, and
not the built environment in which it occurs, that
is most fundamental across time, space, and cul-
ture. We have labelled this process the ‘social reac-
tor process’ (Bettencourt 2013) or ‘energized crowd-
ing’ (Smith 2019), and urban science is ultimately
about processes like these. It is not so much about
the built environment itself as it is about the com-
plex networks of people, goods, and information
that flow within built environments. This creates a
challenge for archaeologists because it is the mate-
rial traces of built environments, and not social pro-
cesses themselves, that are most directly apparent
in the archaeological record.
Fortunately, there are two reasons why this is not
an insurmountable problem. First, built environ-
ments are not constructed all at once, but are built
over time in the context of a group of people par-
ticipating in the social life of the community. This
is as true for contemporary cities as it is for settle-
ments of the past. So, to the extent that the social
reactor process conditions the manner in which
built environments develop, properties of the result-
ing environments should reflect the operation of
this process. Second, archaeological sites also con-
tain artefact accumulations that are the net result of
production, distribution, and consumption activ-
ities in the context of a social network, and these
can be incorporated into the analysis independent
of measures drawn from the built environment. So
154 s cott g. o rtman , m i c h ae l e . s m i t h , j o s é lo b o, and lu í s m. a. b e t t e nco u rt
although archaeological contributions to urban sci-
ence necessarily involve analyses of proxy measures,
as opposed to direct observations of social life in pro-
gress, there are good reasons to believe that these
measures reflect the social processes urban scien-
tists are interested in.
In the examples that follow, we illustrate several
ways in which archaeological data have deepened
our understanding of the social reactor process. To
understand these contributions, it is necessary to
get ‘under the hood’ of the social reactor process, so
to speak, because it is in investigation of its under-
lying assumptions that archaeological data have
proven most helpful. Derivations of the various for-
mal models of settlement scaling theory have been
presented in a number of places (Bettencourt 2013;
Cesaretti and others 2016; Hanson and others 2019;
Hanson, Ortman, and Lobo 2017; Lobo and others
2019; Ortman and others 2016; 2015; 2014; Ortman
and Coffey 2017). Here, we discuss aspects of these
models that are relevant for each of our examples,
highlighting the key assumptions that the archaeo-
logical evidence helps to clarify.
Settlements as Spatial and Social Entities
Our first example deals with the city as a spatial
and a social entity. A surprisingly complex issue
in urban studies is the question of how to define
a city. Louis Wirth (1938) proposed that a city is a
large and permanent settlement of heterogeneous
individuals living and working at high population
densities. Richard Sennett (1977, 39) suggested that
‘a city is a human settlement where strangers are
likely to meet’. Architectural historian Spiro Kostof
(1991) observed that ‘cities are places where a cer-
tain energized crowding of people takes place’. More
recently, the urban economist Edward Glaeser (2011)
describes cities as ‘the absence of physical space
between people and companies. They are proxim-
ity, density, closeness’. Finally, in a recent urban-eco-
nomics textbook O’Sullivan (2011) defines cities as
geographical areas with concentrations of individu-
als and activities that are higher relative to the sur-
rounding area. These various definitions illustrate
that the essence of urbanism is not physical space
per se, but frequent and intense social interactions
among a diversity of individuals within a given space
(Smith 2019).
Operationalizing this view of cities requires the
consistent identification of spatial units that cap-
ture this social process. In a modern context this
task is difficult, even when large volumes of data
are available, because cities can be so large spa-
tially. Many of the urban definitions above allude
to density as an important property, but this con-
cept presupposes a relevant delimited physical
space over which people are counted. Such spaces
can be defined using residential densities, but due
to commuting the resulting units need not capture
actual patterns of daily interaction — where people
work, shop, and socialize — that are at the core of
the city as a social entity. Since the 1960s the US
Census Bureau has attempted to solve this problem
using the concept of the Metropolitan Statistical
Area (MSA) (Berry, Goheen, and Goldstein 1969).
An MSA consists of a core county or counties in
which lies an incorporated city (a politico-admin-
istrative entity) with a population of at least fifty
thousand people, plus adjacent counties having a
high degree of social and economic integration with
the core counties measured through commuting
ties. Essentially, MSAs are unified labour markets
revealed by daily commuting flows. These flows are
interpreted as reflecting the frequent exchange of
goods, labour, and information, which in turn is a
proxy for diverse and intense socio-economic inter-
action (Glaeser, Scheinkman, and Sheliefer 1995). It
is also important to note that scaling relations with
respect to a variety of socio-economic measures
are apparent for MSA populations (Bettencourt
and others 2007).
Since the 1960s this functional approach to
defining cities has spread to many other nations
but some researchers have questioned the MSA
approach, expressing concerns that the documented
empirical characteristics of cities may be unduly
influenced — or even determined — by the choice
of spatial unit of analysis (Arcaute and others 2015;
Cottineau and others 2017). This issue is often
referred to as the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem
(MAUP): ‘the areal units (zonal objects) used in
many geographical studies are arbitrary, modifia-
ble, and subject to the whims and fancies of who-
ever is doing, or did, the aggregating’ (Openshaw
1983, 3). This debate reinforces how essential it is
that the chosen spatial units encapsulate the phe-
nomenon of interest, which in the case of a city
is a network of social interactions embedded in
space. The MSA definition attempts to capture
this, whereas urban spatial units defined by local
density thresholds, contiguous built areas, or polit-
ical boundaries need not. And in fact the literature
demonstrates that the observation of urban scal-
ing phenomena does depend on the urban defini-
tion that is used (Arcaute and others 2015). So a
fundamental issue raised by these debates is the
at times complex relationship between built space
and daily patterns of social mixing.
 w hy archaeo lo gy i s nece ssary fo r a t heo ry o f u rb anization 155

Table 9.1. Relationship between population and area for contemporary cities and archaeological settlements. Note the
inconsistent results for contemporary cities vs the consistent results in keeping with the theoretical expectation
for historical and archaeological settlements (C.I. = confidence interval; SE = Standard Error; ha = hectares).­

Dependent Exponent
Case Variable N (95 per cent C.I.) R2 Source

Urbanized areas, Sweden (1965) Area 1800 0.65 (0.64–0.65) 0.89 (Nordbeck 1971)

Total area
Metropolitan Statistical Areas, USA (2000) 358 0.48 (SE = .03) 0.385 This study
(square miles)
Ancestral Pueblo villages, south-west Colorado, Circumscribing
278 0.66 (0–0.81) 0.22 (Ortman and Coffey 2017)
USA (ad 1060–1280) area (ha)
Mandan/Hidatsa villages, North Dakota, USA Circumscribing
35 0.64 (0.48–0.80) 0.65 (Ortman and Coffey 2017)
(ad 1200–1886) area (ha)
Farming/administrative settlements, Circumscribing
57 0.69 (SE = 0.06) 0.68 (Ortman and others 2016)
central Andes, Peru (ad 1000–1532) area (ha)
Herding settlements, central Andes, Circumscribing
39 0.66 (SE = 0.156) 0.32 (Ortman and others 2016)
Peru (ad 1000–1532) area (ha)
‘Amorphous’ settlements (pop.<5000), Settled (circum ­
1510 0.67 (0.65–0.69) 0.74 (Ortman and others 2015)
Basin of Mexico (1150 bc–ad 1520) scribing) area (ha)
Medieval Western European cities and towns
Settled area (ha) 173 0.71 (SE = 0.03) 0.81 (Cesaretti and others 2016)
(ad 1300)

Greek and Roman Cities (100 bc–ad 300) Settled area (ha) 53 0.65 ( 0.59–0.72) 0.88 (Hanson and Ortman 2017)

It turns out that defining a spatial entity that
corresponds to a strongly interacting social net-
work is much easier to do in an archaeological con-
text. Despite the many challenges of archaeological
evidence, one of its advantages is the intrinsic cor-
respondence between settlement boundaries and
spatial patterns of social interaction. In preindustrial
societies, people walked, or in some cases rode on
animals or in carts, on paths that were much more
uneven than modern roads. Most people who worked
within settlements lived close to — or even at —
their place of work (Laslett 1971). People rarely lived
in one settlement and worked in another (Laslett
1971; Sjoberg 1960). In addition, most workers were
farmers who regularly walked out to their fields
(Christiansen 1978). If there were ‘commuter flows’
at all they involved farmers commuting between set-
tlements and their fields.
These features of transport, agriculture, and
movement lead to the conclusion that commuter
flows between ancient settlements were minimal.
Commuting served to disperse people for individ-
ual farm work, with most social interactions being
confined to the settlement itself. This pattern is in
strong contrast to contemporary cities, where com-
muting serves to concentrate people for socio-eco-
nomic interactions. As a result, the physical settlement
(based on the circumscribing or built-up area) and
the functional settlement (based on social mixing
patterns) were essentially one and the same in the
ancient world. This reality suggests that testing the
idea that human settlements, including cities, rep-
resent social networks localized in space, may actu-
ally be more straightforward using archaeological
evidence than contemporary evidence. SST rep-
resents an attempt to formalize this view of cities,
and below we show that archaeological data do in
fact capture this idea more directly than contem-
porary urban data.
A basic assumption of SST is that when individ-
uals arrange themselves in space, they do so in a way
that balances the benefits of interacting with others
with the costs of moving around to do so. When set-
tlements are small and unstructured, the cost of such
movement is given by , where is the energetic
cost of movement, and is the transverse distance
across the area over which people have settled. Note
that in this circumstance the distance is proportional
to the square root of the circumscribed area,
. The social benefits resulting from such movement
are simply the number of interactions a person has
per unit time, given by , where is the
156 s cott g. o rtman , m i c h ae l e . s m i t h , j o s é lo b o, and lu í s m. a. b e t t e nco u rt
average length of the path travelled by an individ-
ual in a day, is the distance at which interaction
occurs, and is the average population density
within this circumscribing area. One can translate
these interactions into net benefits by considering
that there is some average net-material consequence
of interaction across all interaction types that can
occur such that . Then, by assum-
ing that , such that there is a spatial equilib-
rium of costs and benefits, , and
this simplifies to:
, (1)
where . Equation 1 proposes that as
the number of people who mix socially on a regu-
lar basis increases, the total area taken up by these
people will grow more slowly than the number of
people such that the area taken up by each person
decreases. Notice, however, that in order to see this
process empirically one must be able to define the
circumscribing area over which the social mixing
of people occurs on a regular basis, and indeed,
a circumscribing area needs to be a reasonable way
of characterizing the area over which people are
distributed.
The specific relationship specified in Equation
1 has been observed in at least one contemporary
urban system (Nordbeck 1971), but it does not char-
acterize the areas of US MSAs relative to their pop-
ulations. This is because MSA areas are sums of the
areas of entire contiguous counties whose people
commute to a central location, and this can lead to
the inclusion of large amounts of extra space, espe-
cially in the case of smaller cities. In addition, scaling
relations vary substantially, and can even disappear,
when cities are defined by different density thresh-
olds and commuting percentages (Arcaute and oth-
ers 2015). Despite these complications with respect
to contemporary cities, the relationship specified in
Equation 1 is routinely found across ancient settle-
ments of all sizes (Table 9.1). We attribute this find-
ing to the fact that the ‘containers’ of daily interacting
populations in past societies correspond much more
closely and directly to settlement boundaries, and
are more appropriately characterized as circular or
elliptical areas, than is often the case for contem-
porary cities, especially in first-world nations. So
even though the proposed spatial equilibrium may
be present everywhere behind the scenes, it appears
easier to observe and measure it in an archaeo­logical
context.
Social Mixing beyond Settlements
A second area where archaeological evidence con-
tributes to a general theory of urbanization involves
the identification of social mixing patterns that are
not characteristic of contemporary cities. A key
assumption of the SST framework is that social mix-
ing occurs on a regular basis. The idea embedded in
Equation 1 above, for example, is that the balancing
of costs and benefits occurs on a daily or near-daily
temporal rhythm, such that the resulting interac-
tions are part of an individual’s daily subsistence.
The implied model is of a metropolitan area where
residents concentrate during the day, primarily in
city centres, via commuting. In this context, the
relevant area over which the balancing of costs and
benefits occurs is defined by the network of public
spaces and infrastructure, , through which indi-
viduals travel to interact during the day. This can be
approximated by imagining a street network whose
area is given by , where is the street area
per person, and this is in turn proportional to the
average area per person, or . Under
this model, the total network area is:
. (2)
From here, one can substitute for and sim-
plify, leading to:
. (3)
Equation 3 implies that, as the population of a set-
tlement grows, the area over which people interact
grows more rapidly than the circumscribing area;
namely, with population to the power. From
here, SST proposes that socio-economic rates among
mixing populations are proportional to the total
number of interactions that take place per unit time.
The maximum possible number of interactions that
can occur per unit time is given by
, but this is not feasible due to the time and ener-
getic cost of movement. The total interactions that
are feasible is given by , and given Equation
3 above this can be simplified to:
, (4)
where is a baseline productivity and is the
aggregate (extensive) socio-economic rate of a settle-
ment with population . Notice, however, that this
model simply captures the effects of social mixing
in space, and this process is sufficiently general that
one might expect such effects to occur in any con-
text where people concentrate themselves in space
 w hy archaeo lo gy i s nece ssary fo r a t heo ry o f u rb anization
for productive activities. Indeed, the network area
in Equation 3 could be defined for forms of social
mixing that take place less frequently, and even in
varying locations, relative to contemporary cities.
In such cases, one may be able to observe increasing
returns to population scale, as specified by Equation
4, for forms of social mixing that involve lower-fre-
quency movement, even when it is not feasible to
directly measure the associated interaction area. It
turns out that the archaeological record contains
examples of these slower dynamics.
The clearest example we have encountered thus
far involves public works construction in pre-His-
panic societies of Mesoamerica and the Andes. The
administrative hierarchies of these societies mani-
fest themselves as settlement hierarchies, such that
local centres administered adjacent hamlets, regional
centres adjacent local centres, and polity capitals the
entire polity (Blanton and others 1993; de Montmollin
1995; Sanders, Parsons, and Santley 1979; Wilson
1983; Wright and Johnson 1975). These administrative
centres also contain concentrations of public works
(temples, palaces, raised platforms, defensive walls,
and roads) that were constructed via corvée labour,
and the labour pools for these construction projects
appear to have mapped onto the span of control of
a centre. This means that workers periodically trav-
elled to several different centres, at different positions
in the administrative hierarchy, to pay their labour
taxes (Ortman and others 2015). Since these labour
pools involved people working together simultane-
ously (sort of like backfilling an excavation!), they
are analogous to the integrated labour markets of
contemporary metropolitan areas. However, they
differ from contemporary labour markets in that cor-
vée labour pools came into being only periodically,
and over a period of time subjects participated in dif-
ferent labour pools, in different administrative cen-
tres. Robert Drennan and Christian Peterson (2012,
75–76) label the ratio of the labour investment in
civic architecture to polity population the ‘tax rate’
of a polity, and they show that this measure varied
considerably among early chiefdom polities around
the world (Peterson and Drennan 2012).
This pattern of movement bears little resem-
blance to the daily commute of contemporary urban-
ites, and indeed it is not feasible to directly measure
the relevant area over which people periodically
moved to engage in construction activity. But we
can still estimate the population sizes of the labour
pools involved by summing the populations of set-
tlements administered by a given centre, and we can
measure the average rate of construction by divid-
ing the total volume of public works constructed
in a centre during a given archaeological period by
157
Figure 9.1. Relationship between corvée labour pool size and public
works construction rate (in m3/year) in three pre-Hispanic New World
societies. The coordinates for each society have been centred so that
the mean coordinate of the cases from each region is at the origin.
the duration of that period. When this is done, the
average relationship between corvée labour pools
and monument construction rates exhibits the same
returns to scale predicted by Equation 4. Table 9.2
presents three examples, drawing upon settlement
pattern data from the Basin of Mexico,1 the south-
west periphery of the Classic Maya world,2 and the
Moche area of north-coastal Peru.3 All of these data
were collected by others, and we used this informa-
tion to: 1) compile the surveyors’ population esti-
mates for individual settlements based on dwelling
counts or a combination of settlement areas and
artefact densities; 2) estimate the volumes of civic
architecture at each site based on their recorded
shapes and dimensions, and 3) associate each settle-
ment with its place in the regional settlement hierar-
chy during its occupation period. In all three cases,
we assume corvée labourers represent a consistent
fraction of the population administered by a centre,
based on the position of that centre in the adminis-
trative hierarchy and the estimated populations of
subject settlements. We also assume that the num-
ber of days of labour service in each society had a
well-defined mean and variance. In all three cases,
the estimated value of is within a few hundredths
of the predicted value of 7/6 or 1.167. Since sample
sizes for each region are relatively small, Table 9.2
also presents a combined analysis using centred data
for each region.
1 See Ortman and others 2015 for details.
2 Data from de Montmollin 1995.
3 Data from Wilson 1985; 1988; 2015.
158 s cott g. o rtman , m i c h ae l e . s m i t h , j o s é lo b o, and lu í s m. a. b e t t e nco u rt
Table 9.2. Relationship between corvée labour pool populations and public works construction rates in pre-Hispanic complex
societies of Latin America. In all cases the dependent variable is m3 of monument construction per year, and the contributing
populations to monument construction are based on the positions of settlements in the settlement hierarchy of the relevant
time period. All regressions are significant (P<0.0001). The analysis data are presented in the Appendix.
Exponent (95 per cent
Region N Confidence Interval)
Basin of Mexico
48 1.177 (1.028–1.327)
(1150 bc–ad 1520)
Rosario Valley, Mexico
27 1.184 (0.988–1.380)
(Maya) (ad 700–950)
Santa Valley, Peru
41 1.161 (0.983–1.338)
(1000 bc–ad 1532)
Combined (centred) data4 110 1.170 (1.073–1.267)
Centring places the mean coordinates of the cases
at the origin for each group. This has the effect of
controlling for the variety of factors that influenced
the baseline rate of monument construction in each
region (average days per year of labour service, con-
struction material costs, etc.) while leaving the rela-
tionship between labour pool size and construction
rate intact. Analysis of the pooled, centred data yields
the same result as the regional analyses, but with a
tighter confidence interval (also see Fig. 9.1).
These results imply that interaction areas were
associated with these labour pools, and that they
increased with population as specified by Equation
3. However, it is not feasible to measure these inter-
action areas directly because they involved paths and
spaces that are no longer preserved. It is also impor-
tant to note that these data suggest increasing returns
in public works construction are apparent, despite
the fact that the people who concentrated in space
to build these monuments did so at a much slower
temporal rhythm than is characteristic of contem-
porary cities. Nevertheless, these results show that
dramatically different patterns of movement, and
social mixing at a range of temporal rhythms, can
lead to increasing returns in socio-economic out-
puts that have the same elasticities as contemporary
urban indicators. Consequently, it would seem that
the temporal and spatial patterns of movement and
social mixing that characterize contemporary cities
represent just one of many ways that human groups
can potentially harness the social reactor process,
and that the archaeological record is an important
source of information on these alternatives, and
potentially even ideas for the future.
4 Centring involves subtracting the group mean of a variable from
each measurement, after log-transformation, and then pooling
the resulting data for analysis. The resulting pooled data have a
single mean value at the origin (see Ortman 2019).
R2 Source
0.85 (Ortman and others 2015)
This study (de Montmollin 1995,
0.85
tables 10 and 14)
0.81 This study (Wilson 1985; 1988; 2015)
0.84 This study
Model Systems for
Fundamental Processes
Our final example involves isolating the determi-
nants of economic growth. In contemporary urban
economics there is debate regarding the extent to
which urbanization fosters increases in per-capita
outputs, with some arguing that growth is an intrin-
sic by-product of agglomeration, and others arguing
that the effect is inconsistent (Duranton and Puga
2004; Glaeser and Gottlieb 2009; Henderson 2003;
Jedwab and Vollrath 2015). A key challenge in dis-
entangling these issues is the fact that both popula-
tion and technology (interpreted broadly to include
cultural and institutional innovations) are viewed
as factors behind contemporary economic growth
( Jones 2013; Jones and Romer 2010), and in recent
history both population growth (including migra-
tion) and technological progress have occurred rap-
idly and simultaneously. As a result, it is often diffi-
cult to control for these factors in ways that allow us
to assess the contribution of each to the overall result.
The archaeological record, in combination with
SST, provides a means of distinguishing technolo-
gy-driven from agglomeration-driven growth. We
begin by noting that Equation 4 specifies the effects
of settlement population for socio-economic rates,
but over time the energetic productivity of inter-
action can increase due to technological progress,
and a variety of locally contingent factors affects the
observed output of each settlement as well. Given this,
Equation 4 can be written in a more precise way as:
, (5)
where is the aggregate output (a socio-eco-
nomic rate) of a given settlement with resident
population at time ; represents the range
of social and technological factors of a given time
 w hy archaeo lo gy i s nece ssary fo r a t heo ry o f u rb anization 159

and place (common to all settlements) that convert

these interactions into output; ; and
captures the range of influences unique to each city
that lead to a deviation of productivity in any given
settlement from the average expectation.
One can take the natural logarithm of Equation
5 to express it as a linear function:

, (6)

and then express this in terms of the ensemble aver-

age ( ) across all settlements:

. (7)

Since by definition , it can be dropped Figure 9.2. Schematic view of change over time in the economy of a settlement
from the ensemble average. Equation 7 indicates that system. Between time and , two types of change can occur. First, the
the average log-output of settlements in a system at baseline output level can increase from to , with no change in the
a particular time is the sum of the log-baseline pro- settlement-size distribution. In this case, the x-coordinate of the centre (the
ductivity in that society and the average average coordinate across settlements) will be constant, but the y-coordinate
log-settlement population multiplied by the scaling will change. Alternatively, the baseline level of output can be constant while
the settlement-size distribution changes. In this case, will be constant but
exponent . Note also that the total log-out-
both coordinates of the centre will change. In contemporary cities both types
put of the society is given by , where
of change occur simultaneously, but in pre-industrial societies technological
is the number of settlements.
change was often very slow, leaving agglomeration as the primary mechanism.
Finally, we can differentiate both sides of Equation
7 to convert it to a growth equation:

.(8)

Equation 8 states that the growth rate of mean set-

tlement output is the sum of the growth rate of base-
line productivity and the growth rate of the mean
settlement population multiplied by . This
result illustrates that overall economic growth can
be decomposed into growth in baseline productivity
, which is driven by the variety of technologies
that affect movement costs and interaction bene-
fits across the settlement system, and growth due
to agglomeration, which is given by .
This framework leads to an analytical strategy
for distinguishing agglomeration effects from tech-
nological progress using time-series data. First, one
can plot vs. by time period and use Figure 9.3. Phase diagram illustrating movement of the centres of settlement size
regression to estimate the slope and intercept of vs. consumption (grey) and personal possessions (black) in northern Rio Grande
the relationship for each period. A prediction of Pueblo society between ad 1250 and 1650. Note that with just a few exceptions the
the framework is that the slope of the fit line will be centres follow a single scaling relation with slope , consistent with Equation
consistent across periods and should be . 8 in the case of constant technology (after Ortman and Lobo 2020, fig. 6).
Second, one can examine the movement of the inter-
cept and the centre (average coordinate)
of the data from one period to the next to distin- movement of the centre (Bettencourt 2019). But in
guish the contribution of technology-driven and cases where technology was static, our framework
agglomeration-driven growth to the overall growth predicts the intercept of the fit line will be
rate (Fig. 9.2). constant, such that across periods. In
In contemporary societies such time-series anal- this circumstance, all growth will be attributable to
yses typically reveal both a changing intercept and a agglomeration effects.
160 s cott g. o rtman , m i c h ae l e . s m i t h , j o s é lo b o, and lu í s m. a. b e t t e nco u rt
Several studies of scaling relations in past socie-
ties have found good evidence for correlated change
in both and over time, but no good
evidence for change in (Ortman and others
2015; 2016; Ortman and Davis 2019). This pattern
suggests that agglomeration, as opposed to techno-
logical progress, was the fundamental driver of eco-
nomic growth in pre-industrial societies. In a recent
paper, Ortman and Lobo (2020) provide an even
clearer demonstration of this using data from the
pre-Hispanic northern Rio Grande Pueblos of New
Mexico. Previous research suggests that between ad
1250 and 1540 this society experienced substantial
increases in agglomeration and per-capita outputs
in the context of a relatively stable regional popu-
lation (c. 35,000 people) and relatively stable tech-
nology with respect to transport, energy capture,
and information processing (Adams and Duff 2004;
Cordell and Habicht-Mauche 2012; Habicht-Mauche,
Eckert, and Huntley 2006; Marshall and Walt 1984;
Ortman and Davis 2019; Snow 1981; Spielmann 1991;
1998; Wilcox 1981). Ortman and Lobo demonstrate
that several economic indicators developed from
archaeological measures exhibit change over time
that is consistent with Equation 8 in the case where
technology is constant, such that . The data
involved in these analyses are tabulations of room
counts, room areas, and pottery assemblages from
excavation and surface survey. Room counts are
used as the proxy for maximum settlement popu-
lation; room areas are used to construct an index
of personal possessions; and pottery assemblages
are used to assign settlements to time periods and
to construct an index of painted-pottery consump-
tion. Figure 9.3 presents phase diagrams that show
the movement of the centres of these data over time.
The figure shows that the centres for each index sim-
ply track a single scaling relation, with a constant
intercept and slope . This in turn
implies that and that all economic growth
in the society was given by . As a result,
Ortman and Lobo could estimate the growth rate
in personal possessions and decorated-pottery con-
sumption in northern Rio Grande Pueblo society
over time based on estimates of across the
society for each time period.
Engaging beyond Archaeology
The examples presented above illustrate several
ways in which archaeological data are proving essen-
tial for a general theory of urbanization. In the first
case, we have shown that the source of increasing
returns in cities lies in the concentration of social
interaction in space, but such concentrations are
much more readily apparent in archaeological sites,
where built environments and mixing populations
correspond much more closely. In the second case,
we have shown that the daily pattern of movement
that is characteristic of contemporary metropolitan
areas represents just one of the ways human groups
can utilize social mixing to achieve increasing returns
to population size. And finally, in the third example,
we have shown that it is possible to isolate the effect
of agglomeration for economic growth by examin-
ing time-series data from a society where techno-
logical change was much slower than is characteris-
tic of industrialized nations. All three examples are
cases where concepts embedded in SST, which was
initially developed in the context of contemporary
cities, have been clarified and expanded through
application to the archaeological record.
Some readers may be surprised by our argument
that archaeological data, despite their many shortcom-
ings, nevertheless provide a clearer window through
which to study certain aspects of the urbanization
process than contemporary data. The reason for this
is not because of the inherent quality of the archaeo-
logical record in comparison to contemporary urban
data. Indeed, it should be obvious that contempo-
rary data have higher temporal resolution, are more
precise and accurate, and are more abundant overall.
Instead, the reason archaeological data are useful for
urban science is because they derive from relatively
simpler and smaller-scale societies where the built
environment relates more directly to its associated
social network so that it becomes easier to disentan-
gle social processes that are often conflated today.
The examples we have discussed focus on clar-
ifying and extending understandings of the social
reactor process, which clearly characterizes contem-
porary cities as well as many smaller-scale settlement
systems of the past. But there is a much wider range
of topics related to urbanization for which archaeo-
logical evidence is also relevant: What factors lead to
increasing or decreasing inequality over time? Why
do cities vary so much in density? Why do city-size
distributions tend to follow the rank-size rule? What
causes deviations from that rule? What aspects of the
built environment facilitate productivity in cities?
What do neighbourhoods do for cities? Are there
limits to how large cities can become? What factors
govern the persistence and sustainability of cities?
The realization that archaeologists can make real
contributions to these and other important ques-
tions about settlements and urbanism should inspire
us to generate the kinds of data required to address
such questions. To do this, we will need solid quan-
titative data, especially measurements, that derive
 w hy archaeo lo gy i s nece ssary fo r a t heo ry o f u rb anization
from rigorous fieldwork and analysis, both across
individual settlements and across settlement sys-
tems. We will also need to recognize explicitly the
value of comparison and comparative analysis (see
Smith, this volume) so that our data can be pre-
sented and analysed in ways that contribute to these
broader discussions.
Given that archaeological data have proven to
be essential for understanding scaling phenomena
in the present, it stands to reason that they are also
necessary for useful answers to many of these addi-
tional questions. In this regard, we want to emphasize
that our examples have not emanated from discus-
sions among archaeologists in isolation. Rather, they
have emerged from engaged collaborations between
archaeologists and urban scientists on both a theo-
retical and a methodological level. Archaeologists
have a long tradition of applying models from urban
geography to archaeological data. What we suggest,
161
based on the examples presented here, is that in
addition to applying such models, archaeologists
can and should work to develop and test new the-
ory, not just for other archaeologists but for social
scientists working in the present. This will require
archaeologists to reach out beyond the discipline
to discover what the outstanding problems are for
questions like those posed above, and to collaborate
with researchers in geography, economics, demog-
raphy, and sociology to develop and test potential
answers to these questions using archaeological evi-
dence. We recognize that this approach represents a
substantial expansion of effort relative to the tradi-
tional aims of archaeology, which have focused on
constructing narratives of the past and cross-cultural
comparison. But at least with respect to urbaniza-
tion, tomorrow’s problems are also yesterday’s prob-
lems, and our experience suggests archaeology has
much to offer to the future.
162 s cott g. o rtman , m i c h ae l e . s m i t h , j o s é lo b o, and lu í s m. a. b e t t e nco u rt

Appendix

The table below lists public works construction rates and subject populations for three pre-Hispanic New
World societies.
Volume of public works Subject
Site construction (m3)/yr population Notes
ROSARIO
164 207.52 3135 Rosario Polity Capital
217 2.01 203 Population adjacent to the Ojo de Agua polity
219 41.32 325 Ojo de Agua E District Capital
227 80.84 2722 Ojo de Agua W District Capital
230 22.84 325 Ojo de Agua E population
232 2.87 201
234 2.64 153
238 1.44 73
241 6.47 152
242 267.76 3482 Ojo de Agua Polity Capital
244 1.52 29
250 3.11 70
253 2.54 108
261 2.08 277
264 28.49 805 Los Encentuaros Polity Capital
278 254.99 2520 Conception Polity Capital, subject population estimated
based on area and 70 houses/km2
285 0.87 43
286 1.44 93
289 1.66 42
294 0.39 54
302 45.26 799 Ontela Polity Capital
308 3.14 60
309 3.91 52
312 0.93 55
320 0.79 Not sure what associated population is
328 1.87 Not sure what associated population is
330 54.22 1756 Ojo de Agua W District Capital
335 2.13 170 Site descriptions missing, area estimated from district map
339 4.71 197 Site descriptions missing, area estimated from district map
BASIN OF MEXICO
Ixtapalapan 36.93 4933
Ixtapalucan 120.65 2106
Tenanco 125.33 7265
Tenayuca 437.50 12,500 Population estimated based on sizes of other regional centres
Mexica 7396.29 23,1375 Population is Mexica portion of Triple Alliance
Tlalmanalco-Chalco Excluded because both centres are beneath modern towns
Amecamecan 35.16 10,585
Tuexotla 139.06 25,590
Chimalhuacan 45.33 13,290
 w hy archaeo lo gy i s nece ssary fo r a t heo ry o f u rb anization 163

Volume of public works Subject

Site construction (m3)/yr population Notes
BASIN OF MEXICO (cont.)
Coatepec 107.24 3370
Coatlinchan 72.19 11,890
Tepetlaoztoc 188.98 23,525
Texcoco 2129.17 90,975 Population is total Acolhua confederacy
Cuitlahuac 65.63 10,125
Culhuacan Excluded because centre is beneath modern town
Xochimilco 44.50 3595
CH-LF-5 23.27 5200
CH-TF-16 29.17 2200
DF-1 213.33 20,000 Cuicuilco
IX-TF-4 8.54 1850
IX-TF-3 0.33 200
IX-TF-5 57.31 1600
IX-TF-8 0.25 50
TX-TF-1 9.18 2650 Includes TX-TF-2
TX-TF-10
TX-TF-14 2.00 500
TX-TF-15
TX-TF-2
TX-TF-36 6.00 1200
TX-TF-4 15.17 600
TX-TF-51 28.67 1200
TE-CL-1 6040.90 150,000 Teotihuacan; population is total Teotihuacan Valley population
CH-ET-31 16.33 800 Large nucleated village
CU-ET-21 12.73 850 Regional centre
TE-ET-21 3.78 1015 Large nucleated village
TX-ET-18 334.27 12,775 Regional centre (includes TX-ET-17 and IX-ET-1)
TX-ET-23 5.19 560 Small dispersed village; includes TX-ET-22 as well
TX-ET-4 17.28 7200 Regional centre; includes TX-ET-5)
TX-ET-7 191.80 8000 Regional centre
ZU-ET-12 27.21 1500 Local centre
TE-TF-101 1.29 200 Tezoyuca hill-top centre
TE-TF-23 1.28 440 Tezoyuca hill-top centre
TE-TF-26 0.91 300 Tezoyuca hill-top centre
TE-TF-33 1.24 320 Tezoyuca hill-top centre
TE-TF-34 4.72 350 Tezoyuca hill-top centre
CH-CL-12 1.05 1485 Large hamlet, population is total of Cluster 1
CH-CL-24 4.35 1710 Small dispersed village, population is total of Cluster 3
IX-EC-17 1.07 150 Small dispersed village
IX-EC-18 4.80 550 Large dispersed village, time span includes Late Classic
component (IX–LC-3)
IX-EC-7 2.50 900 Local centre, time span includes Late Classic component
(IX–LC-1)
TX-EC-26 1.07 130 Large hamlet, population includes adjacent TX-EC-27
164 s cott g. o rtman , m i c h ae l e . s m i t h , j o s é lo b o, and lu í s m. a. b e t t e nco u rt

Volume of public works Subject

Site construction (m3)/yr population Notes
SANTA VALLEY
SVP-CAY-12 4.06 375
SVP-CAY-15 3.18 150
SVP-CAY-17 2.58 110
SVP-CAY-19 4.68 150
SVP-CAY-21 0.77 50
SVP-CAY-22 21.80 450
SVP-CAY-23 2.35 125
SVP-CAY-25 4.88 150
SVP-CAY-26 2.23 150
SVP-CAY-28 2.42 50
SVP-CAY-31 1.25 100
SVP-CAY-32 4.62 200
SVP-CAY-34 0.92 55
SVP-CAY-36 3.48 150
SVP-CAY-39 0.28 15
SVP-CAY-4 1.20 115
SVP-CAY-40 1.98 100
SVP-CAY-5 7.83 165
SVP-CAY-52 0.78 150
SVP-CAY-6 7.69 175
SVP-CAY-8 4.23 75
SVP-CAY-9 3.69 100
SVP-ESUCH-122 14.60
SVP-ESUCH-123 10.80
SVP-ESUCH-34 18.00 85
SVP-ESUCH-50 17.23 90
SVP-ESUCH-90 30.00 450
SVP-ESUCH-92 7.82 85
SVP-LSUCH-116 1.31 180
SVP-LSUCH-134 26.40 210
SVP-LSUCH-77 7.93 160
SVP-LSUCH-84 2.30 50
SVP-GUAD-111 615.33 3600
SVP-GUAD-128 301.59 1765
SVP-GUAD-131 16.00 760
SVP-GUAD-202 50.00 1040
SVP-GUAD-204 3.84 150
SVP-GUAD-3 47.68 295
SVP-GUAD-93 102.67 2750
SVP-ETAN-100 3.04 110
SVP-ETAN-147 178.20 5870
Great Wall 828.00 19,355 Total Tanguche population of valley minus population of
sites with huacas
Roads 1000.00 11,300 Total population of S-C desert
 w hy archaeo lo gy i s nece ssary fo r a t heo ry o f u rb anization 165

Works Cited

Adams, E. C. and A. I. Duff (eds). 2004. The Protohistoric Pueblo World, ad 1275–1600 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press).
Adams, R. McC. 1981. Heartland of Cities: Surveys of Ancient Settlement and Land Use on the Central Floodplain of the Euphrates
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Alonso, W. 1964. Location and Land Use: Toward a General Theory of Land Rent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
Angel, S. and others. 2016. Atlas of Urban Expansion: 2016 Edition, i: Areas and Densities (New York: New York University).
Arcaute, E. and others. 2015. ‘Constructing Cities, Deconstructing Scaling Laws’, Journal of the Royal Society Interface,
12.2014745.
Batty, M. 2013. The New Science of Cities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
—— . 2019. ‘On the Confusion of Terminologies’, Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 46: 997–98.
Berry, B. J. L., P. G. Goheen, and H. Goldstein. 1969. Metropolitan Area Definition: A Re-evaluation of Concept and Statistical
Practice (Revised), Bureau of the Census Working Paper, 28 (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census).
Bettencourt, L. M. A. 2013. ‘The Origins of Scaling in Cities’, Science, 340: 1438–41.
—— . 2014. ‘Impact of Changing Technology on the Evolution of Complex Informational Networks’, Proceedings of the IEEE,
102: 1878–91.
—— . 2019. ‘Towards a Statistical Mechanics of Cities (April 9, 2019)’, Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation Research Paper,
8. Available at SSRN <https://ssrn.com/abstract=342749> [accessed 1 June 2020] and <https://dx.doi.org/102139/
ssrn.342749>.
Bettencourt, L. M. A. and others. 2007. ‘Growth, Innovation, Scaling, and the Pace of Life in Cities’, Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), 104: 7301–06.
Blanton, R. E. and others. 1993. Ancient Mesoamerica: A Comparison of Change in Three Regions, 2nd edn (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press).
Canuto, M. A. and others. 2018. ‘Ancient Lowland Maya Complexity as Revealed by Airborne Laser Scanning of Northern
Guatemala’, Science, 361.6409: eaau0137.
Cesaretti, R. and others. 2016. ‘Population-Area Relationship for Medieval European Cities’, PLoS ONE, 11.10: e0162678.
Chave, J. and S. Levin. 2003. ‘Scale and Scaling in Ecological and Economic Systems’, Environmental and Resource Economics,
26: 527–57.
Christiansen, S. 1978. ‘Infield-Outfield Systems: Characteristics and Development in Different Climatic Environments’,
Geografisk Tidsskrift, 77: 1–5.
Clauset, A., C. R. Shalizi, and M. E. J. Newman. 2009. ‘Power-Law Distributions in Empirical Data’, SIAM Review, 51: 661–703.
Cordell, L. S. and J. A. Habicht-Mauche (eds). 2012. Potters and Communities of Practice: Glaze Paint and Polychrome Pottery in
the American Southwest, ad 1250–1700 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press).
Cottineau, C. and others. 2017. ‘Diverse Cities or the Systematic Paradox of Urban Scaling Laws’, Computers, Environment and
Urban Systems, 63: 80–94.
de Montmollin, O. 1995. Settlement and Politics in Three Classic Maya Polities, Monographs in World Archaeology, 24
(Madison: Prehistory Press).
Depersin, J. and M. Barthelemy. 2018. ‘From Global Scaling to the Dynamics of Individual Cities’, Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), 115: 2317–22.
Drennan, R. D., C. A. Berrey, and C. E. Peterson. 2015. Regional Settlement Demography in Archaeology (Bristol, CT: Werner).
Drennan, R. D. and C. E. Peterson. 2012. ‘Challenges for Comparative Study of Early Complex Societies’, in M. E. Smith
(ed.), The Comparative Archaeology of Complex Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 62–87.
Duranton, G. and D. Puga. 2004. ‘Micro-Foundation of Urban Agglomeration Economies’, in J. V. Henderson and J.-F. Thisse
(eds), Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, iv (Amsterdam: Elsevier), pp. 2064–2117.
Evans, D. and others. 2007. ‘A Comprehensive Archaeological Map of the World’s Largest Preindustrial Settlement Complex at
Angkor, Cambodia’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), 104: 14277–82.
Gabaix, X. 1999. ‘Zipf ’s Law for Cities: An Explanation’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1999: 739–67.
Glaeser, E. L. 2011. The Triumph of Cities: How our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier
(New York: Penguin).
Glaeser, E. L. and J. D. Gottlieb. 2009. ‘The Wealth of Cities: Agglomeration Economies and Spatial Equilibrium in the
United States’, Journal of Economic Literature, 47: 983–1028.
Glaeser, E. L., J. A. Scheinkman, and A. Sheliefer. 1995. ‘Economic Growth in a Cross-Section of Cities’, Journal of Monetary
Economics, 36: 117–43.
Habicht-Mauche, J. A., S. L. Eckert, and D. L. Huntley (eds). 2006. The Social Life of Pots: Glaze Wares and Cultural Dynamics
in the Southwest, ad 1250–1680 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press).
166 s cott g. o rtman , m i c h ae l e . s m i t h , j o s é lo b o, and lu í s m. a. b e t t e nco u rt

Haggett, P. 1965. Locational Analysis in Human Geography (London: Edward Arnold).

Hanson, J. W. and S. G. Ortman. 2017. ‘A Systematic Method for Estimating the Populations of Greek and Roman
Settlements’, Journal of Roman Archaeology, 30: 301–24.
Hanson, J. W., S. G. Ortman, and J. Lobo. 2017. ‘Urbanisation and the Division of Labour in the Roman Empire’, Journal of the
Royal Society Interface, 14.136: 1–12.
Hanson, J. W. and others. 2019. ‘Urban Form, Infrastructure and Spatial Organization in the Roman Empire’, Antiquity, 93: 702–18.
Henderson, J. V. 2003. ‘Urbanization and Economic Development’, Annals of Economics and Finance, 4: 275–341.
Jacobs, J. 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House).
Jedwab, R. and D. Vollrath. 2015. ‘Urbanization without Growth in Historical Perspective’, Explorations in Economic History,
58: 1–21.
Jones, C. I. 2013. Introduction to Economic Growth (London: Norton).
Jones, C. I. and P. M. Romer. 2010. ‘The New Kaldor Facts: Ideas, Institutions, Population, and Human Capital’, American
Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 2.1: 224–45.
Keuschnigg, M., S. Mutgan, and P. Hedstrom. 2019. ‘Urban Scaling and the Regional Divide’, Science Advances, 5: eaav0042.
Kostof, S. 1991. The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings through History (Boston: Bullfinch).
Kowalewski, S. A. 2008. ‘Regional Settlement Pattern Studies’, Journal of Archaeological Research, 16: 225–85.
Kowalewski, S. A. and others. 1989. Monte Alban’s Hinterland, Part ii, University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology
Memoirs, 23 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press).
Kvamme, K. L. and S. A. Ahler. 2007. ‘Integrated Remote Sensing and Excavation at Double Ditch State Historic Site, North
Dakota’, American Antiquity, 72: 539–61.
Laslett, P. 1971. The World We Have Lost: England before the Industrial Age, 2nd edn (New York: Scribner’s).
Lobo, J. and others. 2013. ‘Urban Scaling and the Production Function for Cities’, PLoS ONE 8.3: e58407.
—— . 2019. ‘Settlement Scaling Theory: Bridging the Study of Ancient and Contemporary Urban Systems’, Urban Studies, 57:
731–47 <https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098019873796>.
Marshall, M. P. and H. Walt. 1984. Rio Abajo: Prehistory and History of a Rio Grande Province (Santa Fe: New Mexico Historic
Preservation Program).
Millon, R., R. B. Drewitt, and G. L. Cowgill. 1973. The Teotihuacan Map (Austin: University of Texas Press).
Newman, M. E. J. 2010. Networks: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Nordbeck, S. 1971. ‘Urban Allometric Growth’, Geografiska Annaler, 53: 54–67.
Openshaw, S. 1983. The Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (Norwick: Geo Books).
Ortman, S. G. 2019. ‘A New Kind of Relevance for Archaeology’, Frontiers in Digital Humanities, 6 <https://doi.org/10.3389/
fdigh.2019.00016>.
Ortman, S. G. and G. D. Coffey. 2017. ‘Settlement Scaling in Middle-Range Societies’, American Antiquity, 82: 662–82.
Ortman, S. G. and K. E. Davis. 2019. ‘Economic Growth in the Pueblos?’, in S. G. Ortman (ed.), Reframing the Northern Rio
Grande Pueblo Economy, Anthropological Papers of the University of Arizona, 80 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press),
pp. 1–16.
Ortman, S. G. and J. Lobo. 2020. ‘Smithian Growth in a Non-Industrial Society’, Science Advances, 6: eaba5694.
Ortman, S. G. and others. 2014. ‘The Pre-history of Urban Scaling’, PLoS ONE, 9.2: e87902.
—— . 2015. ‘Settlement Scaling and Increasing Returns in an Ancient Society’, Science Advances, 1: e1400066.
—— . 2016. ‘Settlement Scaling and Economic Change in the Central Andes’, Journal of Archaeological Science, 73: 94–106.
O’Sullivan, A. 2011. Urban Economics, 8th edn (New York: McGraw-Hill).
Perreault, C. 2019. The Quality of the Archaeological Record (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Peterson, C. E. and R. D. Drennan. 2012. ‘Patterned Variation in Regional Trajectories of Community Growth’, in M. E.
Smith (ed.), The Comparative Archaeology of Complex Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 88–137.
Phillips, P., J. A. Ford, and J. B. Griffin. 2003. Archaeological Survey in the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley, 1940–1947
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press).
Pumain, D. and others. 2006. ‘An Evolutionary Theory for Interpreting Urban Scaling Laws’, Cybergeo: European Journal of
Geography, 343: 1–20.
Raan, A. F. J. van. 2013. ‘Universities Scale Like Cities’, PLoS ONE, 8.3: e59384.
Rassmann, K. and others. 2014. ‘High Precision Tripolye Settlement Plans, Demographic Estimations and Settlement
Organization’, Journal of Neolithic Archaeology, 16: 96–134 <https://doi.org/10.12766/jna.2014.3>.
Robertson, I. G. 2015. ‘Investigating Teotihuacan through TMP Surface Collections and Observations’, Ancient Mesoamerica,
26 (2015): 163–81.
Romer, P. M. 2013. ‘The City as Unit of Analysis’ <https://paulromer.net/the-city-as-unit-of-analysis/> [accessed 27
February 2020].
 w hy archaeo lo gy i s nece ssary fo r a t heo ry o f u rb anization 167

Rybski, D. and others. 2009. ‘Scaling Laws of Human Interaction Activity’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
106.31: 12640–45.
Sanders, W. T., J. R. Parsons, and R. S. Santley. 1979. The Basin of Mexico: Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization
(New York: Academic Press).
Sennett, R. 1977. The Fall of Public Man (New York: Knopf).
Sepkoski, D. 2012. Rereading the Fossil Record: The Growth of Paleobiology as an Evolutionary Discipline (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press).
Sjoberg, G. 1960. The Preindustrial City: Past and Present (New York: The Free Press).
Smith, M. E. 2019. ‘The Generative Role of Settlement Aggregation and Urbanization’, in A. Gyucha (ed.), Coming Together:
Comparative Approaches to Population Aggregation and Early Urbanization (Albany: State University of New York Press),
pp. 37–58.
Snow, D. H. 1981. ‘Protohistoric Rio Grande Pueblo Economics: A Review of Trends’, in D. R. Wilcox and W. B. Masse (eds),
The Protohistoric Period in the North American Southwest, ad 1450–1700, Anthropological Research Papers, 24 (Tempe:
Arizona State University), pp. 354–77.
Spielmann, K. A. (ed.). 1991. Farmers, Hunters, and Colonists: Interaction between the Southwest and the Southern Plains
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press).
—— . 1998. Migration and Reorganization: The Pueblo IV Period in the American Southwest, Arizona State University
Anthropological Research Papers, 51 (Tempe: Arizona State University).
Stewart, J. Q. 1941. ‘The “Gravitation”, or Geographical Drawing Power, of a College’, Bulletin of the American Association of
University Professors (1915–1955), 27: 70–75.
Thünen, J. H. von. 1966. Isolated State: An English Edition of ‘Der isolierte Staat’ (Oxford: Pergamon).
West, G. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities,
Economies, and Companies (New York: Penguin).
Wilcox, D. R. 1981. ‘Changing Perspectives on the Protohistoric Pueblos, ad 1450–1700’, in D. R. Wilcox and W. B. Masse
(eds), The Protohistoric Period in the North American Southwest, ad 1450–1700, Anthropological Research Papers, 24
(Tempe: Arizona State University), pp. 378–409.
Willey, G. R. 1953. Prehistoric Settlement Patterns in the Viru Valley, Peru, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin, 155
(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution).
Wilson, D. J. 1983. ‘The Origins and Development of Complex Prehispanic Society in the Lower Santa Valley, Peru:
Implications for Theories of State Origins’, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 2: 209–76.
—— . 1985. ‘Prehispanic Settlement Patterns in the Lower Santa Valley, North Coast of Peru: A Regional Perspective on the
Origins and Development of Complex Society’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Michigan).
—— . 1988. Prehispanic Settlement Patterns in the Lower Santa Valley, Peru: A Regional Perspective on the Origins and
Development of Complex North Coast Society (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press).
—— . 2015. ‘Site Descriptions of the Santa Valley Project, North Coast of Peru’ (unpublished manuscript in possession of the
author).
Wirth, L. 1938. ‘Urbanism as a Way of Life’, American Journal of Sociology, 44: 1–24.
Wright, H. T. and G. A. Johnson. 1975. ‘Population, Exchange and Early State Formation in Southwestern Iran’, American
Anthropologist, 77: 267–89.
Zipf, G. K. 1949. Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort (Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley).
View publication stats