Ancient and Modern Cities Have the Same Urban Patterns

When it comes to ancient and modern cities, their structure isn't all that different. Scientists have taken a closer look at the functioning of both old and new cities and have found that ancient human settlements worked in much the same way as modern ones.

Previous research has shown that as modern cities grow in populations, 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 actually exhibit a surprising degree of mathematical regularity and predictability, which is known as "urban scaling."

In order to find out whether this was also the case in the past, the researchers 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.

The researchers also analyzed the dimensions 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.

"It was shocking and unbelievable," said Scott Ortman, one of the researchers, in a news release. "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."

In fact, it shows 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," said Luis Bettencourt, one of the researchers.

The findings are published in the journal Science Advances.

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