If Urban Population is so Important, Why Don't More Archaeologists Measure it?

This post consists mostly of a passage from chapter 3 of my book, Urban Life in the Distant Past. The book will be released in February or March, 2023. This passage is my answer to the question posed in the title.  Just for fun, I include here a table from that chapter. For the sample of early cities that I use as case studies, the table compares examples in the New World and Old World. Now, this is not a great sample for analysis (see the book on this), but it does show something rarely discussed in a systematic form. Early cities were denser in the Old World. But, it turns out that the median population size is very similar! This surprised me, and it is possible that it derives from the small sample size of my case study group. 

From chapter 3:

If population is so important, why have archaeologists been so resistant to measure or estimate past populations? When I tout the importance of population estimates to my colleagues, I typically get replies like this: “Archaeological population estimates often rest on so many uncontrolled variables and assumptions, that they cannot be meaningfully sustained.” But just about EVERY social interpretation of past society by archaeologists rests on similar chains (or cables) of what can be called poorly-controlled variables and assumptions (Chapman and Wylie 2016). If we were to extend this evidentiary standard to other realms, archaeologists would have to pack up and go home; we would not be able to say anything at all interesting about past societies. I cannot accept this commonly-offered reason for the resistance to demographic estimates by the very same archaeologists who readily employ parallel assumptions to make inferences about other past phenomena, whether social structure, religion, or economics. The reticence of my colleagues to population estimates has deeper roots.

 Most directly, the anti-quantitative and anti-science turn in archaeology (Chapter 1)—excluded demography and population as topics worthy of study. The broad spread of such ideas throughout the discipline (at least for the archaeology of complex societies) resulted in the omission of demography from many graduate training programs in archaeology. Beyond this, much of the hesitation to engage in population estimates from fragmentary remains probably derives from the general skepticism about the simplification required for comparative analysis (Chaper 1). Demographic reconstruction requires a complex empirical reality to be reduced to a small number of measures, and some archaeologists object to such simplification on principle. Also, an operation like population estimation requires that many uncertain parameters (e.g., household size or occupancy rate,)—and the methods of their derivation and analysis—be made explicit before estimates can be generated. Again, this level of detail is avoided by some archaeologists, in favor of grand, abstract accounts of the past (Chapter 1). 

 Nevertheless, some archaeologists have forged on, developing methods and concepts for reconstructing past populations from survey and excavation data. It is unfortunate that it has taken several decades for early work in archaeological population estimation (Hassan 1981) to be followed up and extended (Berrey et al. 2021; Drennan et al. 2015; Ortman 2016; Whitelaw 2004). Thankfully, there are signs of a renewal of interest in rigorous population estimation (Bernardini and Schachner 2018; Chirikure et al. 2017; Hanson and Ortman 2017; Smith et al. 2019). As part of an effort to promote demographic research in the study of premodern cities, I have assembled data on the population, area, and density of each of my case studies (see below). 

References 

 Bernardini, Wesley and Gregson Schachner 2018 Comparing Near Eastern Neolithic Megasites and Southwester Pueblos: Population Size, Exceptionalism and Historical Trajectories. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 8 (4): 647-663.

 Berrey, C. Adam, Robert D. Drennan, and Christian E. Peterson 2021 Local Economies and Household Spacing in Early Chiefdom Communities. PLOS ONE 16 (5): e0252532.

 Chapman, Robert and Alison Wylie 2016 Evidential Reasoning in Archaeology. Bloomsbury Press, New York.

 Chirikure, Shadreck, Thomas Moultrie, Foreman Bandama, Collett Dandara, and Munyaradzi Manyanga 2017 What Was the Population of Great Zimbabwe (CE 1000 – 1800)? PLOS-One 12 (6): e0178335. 

 Drennan, Robert D., C. Adam Berrey, and Christian E. Peterson 2015 Regional Settlement Demography in Archaeology. Eliot Werner Publications, Bristol, CT. 

 Hanson, John W. and Scott G. Ortman 2017 A Systematic Method for Estimating the Populations of Greek and Roman Settlements. Journal of Roman Archaeology 30: 301-324. 

 Hassan, Fekri A. 1981 Demographic Archaeology. Academic Press, New York. 

 Ortman, Scott G. 2016 Why All Archaeologists Should Care about and Do Population Estimates. In Exploring Cause and Explanation: Historical Ecology, Demograhy, and Movement in the American Southweset, edited by Cynthia L. Herhahn and Ann F. Ramenofsky, pp. 103-120. University Press of Colorado, Boulder. 

 Smith, Michael E., Abhishek Chatterjee, Sierra Stewart, Angela Huster, and Marion Forest 2019 Apartment Compounds, Households, and Population at Teotihuacan. Ancient Mesoamerica 30 (3): 399-418.

 Whitelaw, Todd 2004 Estimating the Population of Neopalatial Knossos. In Knossos: Palace, City, State, edited by Gerald Cadogan, Eleni Hatzaki, and Adonis Asasilakis, pp. 147-158. British School at Athens, London.

My book, Urban Life in the Distant Past: The Prehistory of Energized Crowding, will be published in February/March, 2023, by Cambridge University Press. This provides one reason to re-start this blog. Another reason is to explore some of the issues in early and comparative urbanism that I have been working on for the past few years. The Covid-19 pandemic coincided with a general decline in blogs and an increase in the use of twitter, and I followed along with these trends. But twitter threads are a pain to put together and they have little or no staying power. I had been intending to get this blog going again for a few years now, so here we are.

I am going to start off here with some of my publications from the past few years. I last posted here in early 2019, so I'll start with that year. Once I've gone over a bunch of my papers, I'll start blogging on the themes and content of my new book.

Publications, 2019

Smith, ME  (2019)  Energized Crowding and the Generative Role of Settlement Aggregation and Urbanization. In Coming Together: Comparative Approaches to Population Aggregation and Early Urbanization, edited by Attila Gyucha, pp. 37-58. State University of New York Press, Albany.  Available Here

Members of the Social Reactors Project
at Teotihuacan, 2019

This paper is a kind of rehearsal for my book. I wrote this as my attempt to explore the theoretical and comparative foundation of the work we were doing on settlement scaling. See this past post on energized crowding. The project website has lots of information, including all of our papers:   https://www.colorado.edu/socialreactors/ Here we are on top of the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan in 2019. Great place for a workshop on urban science!!

Teotihuacan map.

Smith, ME, A Chatterjee, S Stewart, A Huster and M Forest  (2019)  Apartment Compounds, Households, and Population at Teotihuacan. Ancient Mesoamerica 30(3):399-418.  Available Here. 

This paper makes several major advances in our understanding of urbanism at ancient Teotihuacan.

First, we create a new population estimate for Teotihuacan at its height. This is the most rigorous population figure ever calculated for the city. Past estimates, even those by Millon and Cowgill, were quite subjective and impressionistic. Our best estimate:  100,000 inhabitants.

Second, we confirm, extend, and built on the residential classification of the Teotihuacan Mapping Project. Millon's categories of low-status, intermediate-status, and high-status residences have withstood the test of time.

Third, and perhaps most exciting, we present a new method for determining how many households likely lived in each of the excavated apartment compounds. We use network methods, often called "space syntax" by archaeologists. While others have analyzed Teotihuacan residences using space syntax methods, we offer the most systematic and rigorous analysis. This was worked out primarily by Abishek Chatterjee, an electrical engineer at Intel and an online anthropology major at ASU. When I first explained what we needed to Abishek, and showed him the plans, he said "This is a network problem, and I can solve it." Well, he did! An important component was a set of new systematic plan maps of the excavated residences, made by Sierra Stewart.

Network analysis of Zacuala

In the example here, the compound known as Zacuala, there were four dwellings (that is, four housing areas, each with one household), plus a common area around the large central patio and platform.

This paper not only contributed to advances in understanding demography, housing and social organization, but it also forms the basis for continuing analysis of spatial patterns at Teotihuacan. We are hot on the trail of a new analysis of urban density, using concepts and methods from urban economics. If you compare 20th century cities studied by economists, do you think Teotihuacan was more like U.S. cities, or Soviet-block socialist cities? We will tell you.

Smith, ME and J Lobo  (2019)  Cities through the Ages: One Thing or Many? Frontiers in Digital Humanities, 6 (Special issue: Where to Cities Come From and Where are They Going to? Modelling Past and Present Agglomerations to Understand Urban Ways of Life):Article 12.  Click here.

This is another paper oriented toward providing a context for the work in settlement scaling. Whether one considers cities--across history and around the world--as one thing or as many things depends on what kinds of questions one asks, or what kinds of attributes one is examining. If you focus on political context, technology, energy use, or transport, then ancient cities were radically different from cities today. But, on the other hand, if you focus on the ways that people interact socially within the built environment--how that relates to population size and density, and on the positive outcomes from social interactions--then there seems to be only one type of city. These social interactions are fundamental for the dynamics and operation of cities and settlements through history, today and in the past.

I love this image! It is from the Social Reactors Project website:
https://www.colorado.edu/socialreactors/publications

Stay tuned for information on my urban publications since 2019. 

Social Infrastructure in Cities Today: Eric Klinenberg's “Palaces for the People”

I just finished reading Eric Klinenberg’s excellent new book, Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life (Klinenberg 2018). The book is about social cohesion and its value for life and society today. Social cohesion refers to solidarity and togetherness within a society or social group. In one definition:

“Social cohesion is defined as the willingness of members of a society to cooperate with each other in order to survive and prosper. Willingness to cooperate means they freely choose to form partnerships and have a reasonable chance of realizing goals, because others are willing to cooperate and share the fruits of their endeavours equitably. Social cohesion contributes to a wide variety of social outcomes such as health and economic prosperity” (Stanley 2003:5).

Social cohesion is a positive value in societies today, and there is a HUGE scholarly literature on the topic. Klinenberg’s primary insight is to show how the built environment can promote social cohesion. When people gather in places like libraries, parks, playgrounds, churches, or open markets, they interact with one another. These social interactions often occur with persons who may differ from one another in various ways. Social cohesion is a common outcome of these interactions. By building, protecting, and promoting such places, governments and authorities can promote the development of social cohesion, and “help fight inequality, polarization, and the decline of civic life” (to quote Klinenberg’s subtitle).

I find Klinenberg’s approach particularly attractive for two reasons. First, his emphasis on social interaction as the cause for development of social cohesion, cooperation, and community makes sense. This is an idea that goes back to the great sociologist Emile Durkheim. Durkheim argued that religion contributes to social solidarity not because people share the same beliefs,

but because their religion leads them to participate in common rituals and ceremonies. Anthropologist David Kertzer’s book, Ritual, Politics, and Power (Kertzer 1988) is an excellent study of this phenomenon, in both modern nations and the non-western small-scale societies studied by ethnographers. In Kertzer’s words, “Solidarity is produced by people acting together, not by people thinking together” (p. 76). Klinenberg puts it like this: “It’s long been understood that social cohesion develops through repeated human interaction and joint participation in shared projects, not merely from a principles commitment to abstract values and beliefs” (p.11).

**DIGRESSION ALERT!!** This focus on social interactions goes far beyond cohesion and solidarity. In settlement scaling theory, face-to-face social interactions within the built environment of settlements are the primary force that generates settlement agglomeration, social change, and economic growth. Luis Bettencourt derived the quantitative model that predicts a number of quantitative attributes of settlement based on population size (Bettencourt 2013). The resulting empirical regularities of settlement size have been identified in systems from the contemporary U.S. to Medieval Europe (Cesaretti et al. 2016), to the pre-Inca Andes (Ortman et al. 2016) and even some small-scale ancient North American societies (Ortman and Coffey 2017). I’ll stop here, and refer readers to the website of the Social Reactors Project. I explore some of the issues in a recently-published paper (finally!!) that uses the concept of “energized crowding”  to discuss the outcomes of social interaction in growing settlements (Smith 2019). I’ve blogged about the scaling research in a bunch of prior posts, including: Is There a Science of Human Settlements?; Cities as Social Reactors, and My Journey in Settlement Scaling (or search for the keyword "scaling" in this blog).  This is getting beyond Klinenberg’s book, but his discussion dovetails nicely with the scaling research. **END OF  DIGRESSION**

Let me give an extended quotation from Palaces for the People that give important details:

“Social infrastructure is not ‘social capital’—a concept commonly used to measure people’s relationships and interpersonal networks—but the physical conditions that determine whether social capital develops. When social infrastructure is robust, it fosters contact mutual support, and collaboration among friends and neighbors; when degraded, it inhibits social activity, leaving families and individuals to fend for themselves. Social infrastructure is crucially important, because local, face-to-face interactions—at the school, the playground, and the corner diner—are the building blocks of all public life. People forge bonds in places that have healthy social infrastructures—not because they set out to build community, but because when people engage in sustained, recurrent interaction, particularly while doing things they enjoy, relationship inevitably grow” (p.5)

This leads into the second reason I particularly like Klinenberg’s approach—the importance of the built environment, and of the social and physical attributes of specific places that promote social cohesion. As an archaeologist, I study buildings and spaces where interactions once took place. Of course, the big problem for archaeology is that the physical remains—of a room, a building, or a formal open place—do not include the rules, norms, or practices of ancient patterns of behavior. Furthermore, archaeologists rarely encounter the furniture and other semi-fixed feature elements (Rapoport 1990) that are a crucial component of any setting for activities.

In a few cases, however, social cohesion and its physical context can be recovered archaeologically. I am thinking of well-understood historically-recent contexts where the archaeology is supplemented by written records. My student April Kamp-Whittaker is writing her dissertation on social cohesion, neighborhoods, and social dynamics at Amache, a World-War-II Japanese internment camp, and I am envious of the level of detail—both archaeological and documentary—she has to work with. Her research will make a contribution to our understanding of social cohesion, both in specific difficult conditions (an internment camp), and as a general phenomenon.

A less direct use of Palaces for the People for archaeologists is that it provides likely details and patterns for some of the contexts we study in ancient cities. For example, one might infer that premodern societies with more collective forms of governance had more, or larger, facilities of social infrastructure, compared to societies with more autocratic forms of rule. (See my post, "Ramses II vs. Pericles, or Darth Vader vs. the Rebel Alliance") This is something that is always on the minds of those of us who deal with ancient Teotihuacan. But, I’m not sure how far this can be pushed. In modern societies, civic life, social processes, and government are radically different from those of any ancient society. It requires some thought to figure out how well concepts like “social infrastructure” translate to early or nonwestern contexts. I am mulling these ideas over, and perhaps will blog about them in the near future.

Palaces for the People is Andrew Carnegie’s term for public libraries in the U.S. Carnegie funded hundreds of libraries around the country, most of which are still active today. The book has a nice contrast between Carnegie's attitude and works and those of a modern equivalent figure, Marc Zuckerberg. Klinenberg devotes a lot of space on libraries. While reading the book last week, I went to use a small branch library in rural Texas (to use the internet connection). The first thing I did was look for the public spaces, and yes, there was a big community room where local groups can meet. There is much more in this book that I don’t have space to go into. I highly recommend it. It will make you pay more attention to social infrastructure, and will help you appreciate its value and importance in society today.

Bettencourt, Luís M. A.

2013 The Origins of Scaling in Cities. Science 340: 1438-1441.

Cesaretti, Rudolf, Luís M. A. Bettencourt, Jose Lobo, Scott Ortman, and Michael E. Smith

2016 Population-Area Relationship in Medieval European Cities. PLOS-One 11 (10): e162678.  http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0162678.

Kertzer, David I.

1988 Ritual, Politics, and Power. Yale University Press, New Haven.

Klinenberg, Eric

2018 Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life. Crown, New York.

Ortman, Scott G. and Grant D. Coffey

2017 Settlement Scaling in Middle-Range Societies. American Antiquity 82 (4): 662-682.

Ortman, Scott G., Kaitlyn E. Davis, José Lobo, Michael E. Smith, Luis M.A. Bettencourt, and Aaron Trumbo

2016 Settlement Scaling and Economic Change in the Central Andes. Journal of Archaeological Science 73: 94-106.  http://bit.ly/2aHXpGk.

Rapoport, Amos

1990 Systems of Activities and Systems of Settings. In Domestic Architecture and the Use of Space: An Interdisciplinary Cross-Cultural Study, edited by Susan Kent, pp. 9-20. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Smith, Michael E.

2019 TheGenerative Role of Settlement Aggregation and Urbanization. In Coming Together:Comparative Approaches to Population Aggregation and Early Urbanization,edited by Attila Gyucha, pp. 37-58. State University of New York Press, Albany.

Stanley, Dick

2003 What Do We Know about Social Cohesion: The Research Perspective of the Federal Government's Social Cohesion Research Network. The Canadian Journal of Sociology ' Cahiers canadiens de sociologie 28 (1): 5-17.

Forbes publishes an error-filled article on Teotihuacan

This tweet came through yesterday, advertising an article in Forbes:

Geologists have mapped a secret tunnel and chamber found beneath an Aztec Pyramid: http://on.forbes.com/6015EBVRt 

Geophysical prospection work recently uncovered a tunnel/chamber deep underneath the Pyramid of the Moon at Teotihuacan. This is potentially exciting news; the most spectacular finds at Teotihuacan in the past decade are from another tunnel, excavated by Sergio Gomez under the Feathered Serpent Pyramid at the site. Indeed,t some of these objects are part of the current exhibit of Teotihuacan art, "Teotihuacan: City of Fire, City of Water" now at the Phoenix Art Museum.

A big problem with the Forbes article is that it calls Teotihuacan an Aztec site. Oops. As is well-known, Teotihuacan was abandoned and in ruins centuries before the Aztecs came on the scene. Several us us posted complaints on twitter, including Caroline Dodds-Pennock. Then I got an email from Alex Knapp, Associated Editor for Science at Forbes, asking just what was wrong with the article. I replied by sending him this list:

(1) Error in the title:  This is not an “Aztec” pyramid, as claimed. It was built and abandoned long before the Aztec period.

(2) Error in the first sentence: In contrast with the text, Teotihuacan was not an important center “during the Aztec empire.” It flourished a thousand years before the Aztec empire.

(3) Misleading date in the second sentence: Technically, the claim that Teo monuments “predate the Aztec empire by at least 300 years is correct. With the same logic, you could claim that the Romans preceded the United States by at least 300 years. This is technically correct, but misleading.  Teotihuacan flourished from AD 100 to 600.  Aztec society dates to AD 1100-1521, and the Aztec empire dates to AD 1428 – 1519.

(4) Error in second paragraph, the Moon pyramid does not “appear taller” than the Sun pyramid, as claimed. See photo.

(5) Misleading statement, last paragraph: “The origin of the tunnel system - and the city – remains mysterious.” The term mysterious is frequently taken by the public to mean that some feature is too advanced or complicated for mere mortals to have devised, and thus one must invoke aliens. It is a common term on “Ancient Aliens” and pseudo-scientific internet sites that claim ancient cities were built by aliens. Archaeologists have data on the origins of the city, and this particular tunnel has not been sufficiently studied to reconstruct its chronology. There is nothing mysterious about the city or the tunnel.

(6) Error, last paragraph: “Archaeologists attributed the foundation of Teotihuacan to various Mesoamerican cultures, like the Toltec, Zapotec, Mixtec, and even Maya.” I know of no archaeologist who has ever claimed any of these cultures as the founders or source of Teotihuacan. Prior to 1941, some archaeologists speculated that Teotihuacan was a Toltec site (that is, built by the historical Toltecs). But after 1941, it was recognized that The Toltec capital was Tula, not Teotihuacan, and that Tula rose to prominence 400 years after the fall of Teotihuacan. The other suggestions are ridiculous.

(7) Misleading statement, last sentence: “Then the Aztec took over the abandoned ruins.” The Aztecs were aware of the ruins, and they even built some towns on the site of the ancient city. But they did not “take over” the ruins, in the sense of establishing an official presence, or regulating the ruins, or claiming them as belonging to the Aztec state or empire.

(8) Error, last sentence: the Aztecs “rebuilt the old temples and expanded the preexisting tunnel-system.” The Aztecs did not rebuild the temples of Teotihuacan. As for the tunnels, we don’t know yet whether the Aztecs used or modified them.

We'll see what happens.

Thinking about the art of Teotihuacan

This post consists of an outline of themes and topics that relate to the art of Teotihuacan. It is focused on the objects in the exhibit, Teotihuacan: City of Water, City of Fire, currently at the Phoenix Art Museum. This is not a guide to the exhibit. Instead, I describe some of the main themes, gods, contexts, media, and rituals, all found in the objects at the exhibit. For more information about Teotihuacan, see an earlier post on this blog, "Resources on Teotihuacan."  I am an archaeologist, not an art historian, and I am a relative newcomer to Teotihuacan research. If you find errors or problems in the list, or if you have suggestions or reactions, please feel free to email me.

Themes and categories in the exhibit, “Teotihuacan: City of Water, City of Fire”

Dr. Michael E. Smith, Arizona State University,  October 6, 2018

Major Themes in the exhibit

1.       Religion and ritual (most items relate to these)

2.       Wealth and prosperity (the overall impression of all the objects, and the city)

3.       Foreign connections (see especially the Zapotec stela and urn from Oaxaca)

4.       Urbanization (city size, economic activities, housing, domestic ritual)

5.       Aztec heritage (gods and other elements from Teotihuacan were later used by the Aztecs)

The Main Gods:

1.       Storm god (goggle eyes, fangs and curled upper lip, holding lightning bolts), Rain, storms, fertility; also, military might and battle.

2.       Old fire god (sculptures, an old man sitting cross-legged with a receptacle for a hat).

3.       Feathered serpent (pretty obvious).

Contexts:

·       The tunnel under the Feathered Serpent Pyramid (objects near the entrance)

·       Pyramids:

o   Pyramid of the Sun

o   Pyramid of the Moon

o   Feathered Serpent Pyramid

·       Civic complexes:

o   Xalla

o   Plaza of the Columns

·       Residences

Media:

·       Mural paintings (fresco technique)

·       Large stone sculptures (of basalt, andesite)

·       Masks, statues, and other objects of fine-grained stone

·       Jewelry and small objects

·       Almenas (roof ornaments: geometric, animal-form, and storm-god images)

·       Stucco-painted ceramic vessels (fresco technique; vessels from domestic offerings)

·       Other ceramic vessels

·       Ceramic figurines

·       Shell and animal bones

·       Obsidian cores

Rituals:

·       Offerings

·       Incense

·       Scattering

·       Sacrifice

For more information, see my prior post.  Or check out the Twitter feed of the ASU lab at Teotihuacan:  https://twitter.com/asuteolab, or mine: https://twitter.com/MichaelESmith.

Classic Maya Urban Demography

Two factors conspire right now to emphasize to me the importance of ancient Maya urban demography. First, I finished reading David Webster’s new book, The Population of Tikal (Webster 2018). Second, today I returned from a Working Group of the Social Reactors Project at the Santa Fe Institute , where our focus was on Maya cities and settlements. Needless to say, we talked a lot about population.

One of the most important things one can know about a city or settlement is its size. How many people lived there? Over what area? (and, consequently, What was the density and how did it vary?) These are fundamental observations in many disciplines that study cities and settlements, from urban history to urban economics, to urban geography. In chapter 3 of my current book, Urban Life in the Distant Past, I make the case for the importance of knowing the sizes of cities in the past (Smith n.d.).

Webster’s book reviews past population estimates for Tikal (and other Maya sites and regions). These are judged to have been too high, largely on the basis of comparative studies of regional population densities of early states in other parts of the world. “By overestimating Classic Maya populations, we have created problems that do not exist” (p. 3):

1.       Why were Maya populations so large and dense compared to other early states

2.       How could the landscape support so many people,

3.       How can we explain the huge population drop with the Classic Maya collapse?

But wait, how can you compare an urban density at Tikal to a regional density for other regions? Isn’t that a comparison of apples and oranges? Those familiar with David Webster’s past work will get this right away: The Maya did not have cities, and therefore the concept of urban population density is moot!  “I prefer not to call any part of this landscape a ‘city’.” (p. 35). OK, maybe instead of “urban” we should call inner Tikal, “The area close to the pyramids that had a higher density than the outlying areas.” But this would still cast doubt on many of Webster’s comparisons.

Another problem I have with the new book is that much of the quantitative data are presented within the text, and not in tables. Yes, there are a few data tables with some pertinent information. But I get confused, for example, when he gives a population estimate for Tikal of 10,000 (p. 52, paragraph 2), an area estimate of 452 square km (p.52, paragraph 7), and an overall density of “100-175 people per sq. km” (same paragraph). Huh? 10,000 people divided by 452 sq km is a density of 22.1 persons per sq km. One of these figures must be off.

I must admit that this is a pet peeve: If you use quantitative data, put them in a table! I struggled throughout the book with this. Yes, there are a couple of tables with data. But where making detailed comparisons and analyses of population and density data throughout the book, the figures are only found in the text, not in tables. Putting quantitative data into the text but not in a table makes it difficult for readers to re-use or analyze the data.

I’ll stop here, this is not a book review. The book is fun to read, like most of David Webster’s work, and I learned a lot. But the basic quantitative treatment, and the lack of a good conceptual framework for urbanism, or for regional settlement variation, limits the value of the book.

Our working group on Maya settlement included my colleagues in the Social Reactors Project, plus Jerry Sabloff, Bernadette Cap, Adrian Chase, Julie Hoggarth, and Heather Richards-Rissetto. Sarah Klassen, who works on urban issues at Angkor, also participated. See a short description of the session here.

Instead of giving a report of our workshop on Maya settlement, I’ll just mention a few key points.

First, we have found data on several regional settlement systems where area scales with population in a superlinear fashion. That is, larger sites are LESS DENSE than smaller sites; This is the opposite of all other agricultural societies we have studied (see our papers here). So, Maya settlement differs from other agricultural societies in ways that remain hard to pin down. We have a paper in the works, and plans for more collaborations and research in the future.

Second, some Maya settlements are very much like settlements in other areas, and some are very different. Not too surprising, I guess, but we discussed some of the patterns.

Third, Angkor looks very different from the Maya cities. It had a very dense urban core, with planned orthogonal neighborhoods surrounding major temples, surrounded by a large sprawling area of temples, houses, and reservoirs, In comparison, Maya urban cores seem only slightly higher in density than their outer neighborhoods. I’m starting to wonder about the usefulness of Roland Fletcher’s (2009; 2012) concept of “low-density urbanism” as a category that includes the Classic Maya and Angkor.

Fourth, we discussed the use of LiDAR for analyzing the sizes and layouts of Maya cities.

We spent some time comparing Tikal and Caracol. My view is that Caracol was a large, integrated urban center, while Tikal was a much smaller city of ca. 16 sq km. (I know the Chases will agree about Caracol, but I’m not sure of their views of Tikal). A key question – indeed, one of our targeted themes at the working group – is the nature of settlement boundaries. I don’t see any evidence for clear boundaries at Tikal. However, there does seem to be a drop-off in density beyond the central 16 sq km mapped by Carr and Hazard, which favors bounding the city there (see table).

Whereas Caracol has various features that seem to signal a spatial and social integration over a large area (causeways, replicated patterns of civic architecture pointing to the integration of different areas, and a continuous stretch of agricultural terracing). Outside of the core area, Tikal lacks these things. All those areas beyond several km from downtown Tikal – these must have been rural areas, the hinterland of the city of Tikal. This is a provisional analysis. I want to analyze the density patterns objectively (kernel density analysis), to see whether there is indeed a zone of declining density (well, more precisely, I want a student to do this…). We should do such analyses for all of the Maya (and other!) sites that are well mapped. Intra-urban density distributions are a big unknown for ancient cities, but we now have the data and methods to work on this question.

This  table shows a bit of density data. I was having trouble finding the information, buried in Webster’s text, so I got the Maya figures from a nice table in a paper by Barbara Stark (Stark 2014). Note the drop of 50% in density beyond the central 16 sq km. Teotihuacan figures are from a paper now under review (Smith, et al. n.d.).

I think it would help if archaeologists could agree on a series of zones over which to calculate population density. Density is, in fact, a very complex phenomenon for modern cities, with lots of relevant measures (Campoli, and MacLean 2007; Dovey, and Pafka 2014). But for archaeology, it is best to concentrate on straight population density (persons per hectare), calculated over one of several spatial units (depending on available data and on research questions). I suggest five relevant units, as follows:

1.   Regional density, 1: Large area. For a large zone including several urban centers. E.g., the southern Maya lowlands. Useful for large-scale comparisons (of the type Webster makes with other regions).

2.   Regional density, 2: Urban hinterland. Density over the hinterland of a city. E.g., Copan Valley. Useful to compare settlement in, say, the Copan Valley with the Belize River Valley.

3.   Urban density: whole city (all of Tikal or Caracol, or Teotihuacan). This is probably the most useful measure for urban comparisons. Of course, one must first identify the boundaries of the urban settlement….. We discussed this at SFI, and I am working on some methodological guidelines.

4.   Epicenter density: The population density of residences clustered around the ceremonial core. Not sure if this should include the civic areas or not. I am less confident in this unit, compared to the others.

5.   Neighborhood density: Density of a delimited neighborhood or zone. This is useful for several reasons: (1) To compare neighborhoods within a city; (2) To generate density data where whole-site information is not available. For example, consider Mohenjo-daro. Several neighborhoods have been completely excavated, but the residential patterns of the entire site are not clear.

If you were looking for solid data or conclusions about Maya urban demography here, I am sorry to disappoint you. This field is in its infancy. Culbert and Rice (Culbert, and Rice 1990) was a crucial work, but there has been very little work since then. Webster’s new book is a step in the right direction, but we need many more such analyses (with lots of data in tables!). But I am more optimistic now than I’ve been for some time now. The session at SFI made some progress, and I see some good research coming out of these and other archaeologists in the near future. I am itching to work on settlement delineation at a variety of sites, using quantitative spatial methods. And, finally, I know that a number of prominent Mayanists agree that urban demography is important, and I look forward to more work in the near future.

References

 Campoli, Julie and Alex S. MacLean  (2007)  Visualizing Density. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Cambridge, MA.

Culbert, T. Patrick and Don S. Rice (editors)  (1990)  Precolombian Population History in the Maya Lowlands. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.

Dovey, Kim and Elek Pafka  (2014)  The Urban Density Assemblage: Modelling Multiple Measures. Urban Design International 19:66-76.

 Fletcher, Roland  (2009)  Low-Density, Agrarian-Based Urbanism: A Comparative View. Insights (University of Durham) 2:article 4.

Fletcher, Roland  (2012)  Low-Density, Agrarian-Based Urbanism: Scale, Power and Ecology. In The Comparative Archaeology of Complex Societies, edited by Michael E. Smith, pp. 285-320. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Smith, Michael E.  (n.d.)  Urban Life in the Distant Past: Archaeology and Comparative Urbanism. (book in progress).

 Smith, Michael E., Abhishek Chatterjee, Sierra Stewart, Angela Huster and Marion Forest  (n.d.)  Apartment compounds, households, and population at Teotihuacan  (paper under review).

Stark, Barbara L.  (2014)  Ancient Open Space, Gardens, and Parks: A Comparative Discussion of Mesoamerican Urbanism. In Making Ancient Cities: Space and Place in Early Urban Societies, edited by Kevin D. Fisher and Andy Creekmore, pp. 370-406. University Press of Colorado, Boulder.

 Webster, David  (2018)  The Population of Tikal: Implications for Maya Demography. Archaeopress, Oxford.

Urban toilet at Mohenjo-daro