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

Energized Crowding Turns Cities into Social Reactors

What is is about cities that makes them exciting and dynamic? Things are happening in cities and people are attracted to them. As Jane Jacobs said, “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” Some cities never sleep. Cities are the setting for activities that just aren't found in smaller settlements. The more people in a city, the more activity and the more excitement. This is not just a feature of contemporary cities:  ancient cities like Teotihuacan were also bustling, dynamic, and attractive places. Architectural historian Spiro Kostof coined the term "energized crowding" to describe this aspect of urban life and society.

Energized crowding doesn't just describe the condition of life in cities - it describes the basic social forces that lead cities to grow and to transform life and society. This is the basis of the work on settlement scaling by the Social Reactors Project: me and Jose Lobo at Arizona State University, Scott Ortman at the University of Colorado, and Luis Bettencourt at the Santa Fe Institute. Check out our website. In our model, the process of energized crowding turns cities into social reactors.

As the number of people in a settlement increases, the number of potential social interactions grows at an exponential rate (see graph). As settlements grow larger, the effects of social interaction are amplified. These include positive, negative, and neutral effects. Let's start with the negative side of things. As we as individuals have to deal with more and more people, we get overloaded. Too many people, too much going on. This is called scalar stress. Some of the effects are highly negative--more people means more crime, more poverty, more social alienation. But scalar stress is offset by one of the big "nuetral" effects of growing settlement: the formation of neighborhoods. As cities grow, people adjust their activities so that they can live life on a smaller scale--the neighborhood. As I have said many times in this blog, neighborhoods are one of the very few universals of the urban experience. Here are a few posts on this (out of many.....):

• How do neighborhoods form?
• Why do all cities have neighborhoods?
• Archaeology and pink flamingos in Chicago neighborhoods

 But there are also positive effects of energized crowding. Urban economists and economic geographers have known for a long time that when businesses and industries concentrate themselves in cities, it leads to economies of scale and thus major gains in productivity. These effects are called agglomeration effects, as in this diagram:

But it turns out that the positive effects of concentration and energized crowding are not limited to the modern industrial economy. In fact, they occur in cities before the industrial revolution, whether medieval European cities, or cities in the Roman or Inka empires. This fact alone shows that these effects are not due to factories, wage labor, advanced transportation, or other attributes of modern economies. In fact, these effects arise primarily out of the very act of social interaction within the built environment.

This realization was a real breakthrough in our understanding of the nature of city size and its role in generating the social and economic properties of cities. The key paper is Bettencourt (2013). Luis derives a quantitative model that predicts characteristics of cities based on their sizes, within a given region or urban system. The beauty of the model is that its conditions are general enough to fit cities before the modern era. In fact they also should work for non-urban settlements in agricultural village societies (and they do!).

Below is my diagram of energized crowding (from Smith 2017). When population grows, leading to higher densities, energized crowding increases. This can happen from regional population growth, or it can arise from the process of people moving into cities. The three results shown here are the negative, neutral, and positive outcomes of energized crowding.

In the time since Luis's 2013 article, our group has been scouring archaeology and history for cases where we can try out the model. Scott Ortman initiated this work with his studies of the settlement in the prehispanic Basin of Mexico. We've published a number of studies, and a bunch more are in the pipeline. Scott has even found the same scaling effects in village societies. The data requirements are heavy (a sample of 30 or more settlements from a given region and time period, with population estimates and other quantitative data to scale against population). If you think you know of any such cases, please let me know!

We have found the same quantitative relationships in modern and ancient settlement systems. This suggests that the same or very similar fundamental social processes operate when humans come together in settlements, whether today or two thousand years ago. Energized crowding--which is at a much higher level in larger settlements--has measurable effects on the density of settlement, and on the levels of economic and social outputs. In this figure, Graph A shows economic output measures for the modern U.S. economy, while Graph B shows wealth output for the ancient Inka economy. Quantitatively these two graphs are nearly identical. Both exhibit "superlinear scaling," with beta coefficients of 1.13.

So, how far can we push these relationships? Are they universal? Well, not quite. Hunter-gatherer campsites show very different patterns from the agricultural societies we have studied so far. This is something we are working on now. But for most systems we have examined, we find similar patterns, and when we apply Luis's model, we conclude that energized crowding turns settlements into social reactors.

For some other posts on the scaling work, see:

•  Cities as social reactors.
• Settlement scaling and social science theory

See our project website for more information.


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.  .

Ortman, Scott G., Andrew H.F. Cabaniss, Jennie O. Sturm, and Luís M. A. Bettencourt
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 (1): e1400066.

Ortman, Scott G. and Grant D. Coffey  2015    Universal Scaling: Evidence from Village-Level Societies. SFI Working Paper, vol. 15-10-044. Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe. 

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.  .

Smith, Michael E.  2017    The Generative Role of Settlement Aggregation and Urbanization. In Coming Together: Comparative Approaches to Population Aggregation and Early Urbanization, edited by Attila Gyucha. State University of New York Press, Albany.

My journey in settlement scaling

I am posting today from beautiful Santa Fe, NM. I am here to attend a meeting of our working group on settlement scaling in the ancient world. Our article on scaling at Inka sites was accepted by the Journal of Archaeological Science, and it was posted online yesterday (Ortman et al. 2016):

Mantaro region, Peru

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

This paper is a particularly important step in our long-term objective of exploring the application of settlement scaling theory in the ancient world. To explain why, let me step back to 2013, when I first got involved with this project. I was invited to the Santa Fe Institute in summer 2013 to explore the notion that urban scaling theory should be applicable to ancient cities. Luis Bettencourt and Jose Lobo had been working on scaling in contemporary cities for some time, and Scott Ortman had begun to explore an application to the pre-Spanish Basin of Mexico. They were interested in how an expert in ancient cities would react to this research. I knew nothing of scaling when first invited, so I tried to read up on the topic before my visit to Santa Fe.

It was fascinating to me that the quantitative expression of many urban attributes could be predicted by city size in groups or systems of cities in the modern world. Many key economic features are amplified in urban settings, to a greater extent in larger than smaller cities. In economic geography, these changes associated with large cities are called "agglomeration effects." My reading of economic geography and urban economics in 2013 led me to think that agglomeration effects and quantitative regularities in contemporary city systems were due to processes in the contemporary economy. That is, these regularities were produced by the globalized capitalist economy.

I went up to the Santa Fe Institute ("SFI") in 2013 ready to argue that these scaling regularities should NOT apply to ancient cities. Ancient economies were not capitalist: wage labor was limited or non-existent, land was not a commodity, and the whole structure and functioning of the economy in ancient state societies was radically different from the contemporary situation (the advanced economy of imperial Rome may be a partial exception, though). "You guys are barking up the wrong tree" was the essence of my message for the scaling folks at SFI.

Within a couple of hours of my arrival at SFI, however, Luis, Jose and Scott had convinced me that the scaling regularities were NOT dependent upon the capitalist economy. Luis had just published his paper in Science (Bettencourt 2013). This paper presents a quantitative model that predicts, rather precisely, the scaling regularities observed in city systems today. But the model is not based on wage labor, firms, private property, industrial production, or other attributes of the modern capitalist economy. Instead, it is based on the way individuals move and interact within the confines of the urban built environment. Networks of individuals, interacting socially and exchanging information, were the foundation of Luis's model.

If Luis is correct (and I have since come to accept that he is), then there is no logical reason why premodern cities should not exhibit the same regularities found in modern city systems. I found this possibility quite exciting, and immediately set out to explore it further. This first meeting was on a Monday, and I was scheduled to give a public lecture at SFI on Tuesday. The theme of that lecture was the way ancient cities differed form modern cities, and how that implied urban scaling should not work in the ancient world! I had to scramble to revise my slides and lecture. That talk was later turned into a paper, coauthored with Jose, about the similarities and differences between ancient and modern cities (Smith and Lobo n.d.).

Anyway, logic suggested that the processes underlying Luis's 2013 model should also have operated in cities before capitalism. Furthermore, there was no reason why these processes should not apply to smaller, non-urban settlements. That is, village systems should exhibit the same scaling regularities. I started working in two directions to explore the possibility that scaling would apply to ancient and nonurban systems of settlement. First, I had to convince myself that this was indeed the case. The scaling framework implies (but evidently does not require) that in any urban system, people were able to move around easily, from the countryside into cities, and between cities. Yet many people in anthropology and history believed that peasants were typically tied to their fields and did not move as much as people do today. So I looked into the extent of geographical mobility in the ancient world, and found that movement was more prevalent and extensive than many had thought. This was published in World Archaeology (Smith 2014).

A central concept in the scaling model is the notion that interactions among individuals, and the exchange of information that takes place, is one of the driving forces of social and economic change. This idea came out of economics. But if such interaction is so crucial, then why hadn't I heard about this in anthropology and sociology? After all, these fields are devoted to the study of how individuals interact and exchange information. Again, I had to convince myself that this concept made sense in terms of how anthropologists and sociologists understand society. I had to make sure this wasn't another case of economists making up silly things about individuals and their behavior in order to preserve the purity of their models. Lo and behold, this concept of the generative role of social interactions is in fact quite common in the other social sciences. Perhaps it was my own ignorance that had prevented me from seeing this, or perhaps issues are simply not framed this way in anthropology and sociology. So I wrote a paper on this, which is now in press in an edited volume (Smith n.d.). I focused on architectural historian Spiro Kostof's concept of "energized crowding" in cities as a good label for the basic processes involved.

So, I have now convinced myself that the scaling framework fits with what we know of societies and cities in both ancient times and in the nonwestern world. They say that converts make the biggest fanatics, so maybe that explains my excitement about scaling. But my enthusiasm is based to a major extent on the second direction of my work scaling: the empirical study of quantitative patterns in ancient settlement systems. This work is truly a group effort. Our new paper on Andean scaling is a good example.

Since our first session in 2013, we have been scouring archaeology and history for datasets that can be used for scaling. The data requirements are actually somewhat stringent for past urban systems. Even where we have decent population figures for an urban system, it is hard to measure economic productivity or the other variables we want to scale against population. We had a couple of working groups, with colleagues invited to Santa Fe.

Scott has taken the lead in most of the archaeological cases. Beyond his initial forays into the Basin of Mexico settlement pattern data (Ortman et al. 2014, 2015), Scott has found the scaling regularities in a couple of samples of North American village societies (Ortman and Coffey 2015). He and his students took the lead with the Andean data in our new paper; I mainly contributed some contextual and framing information. I made sure we emphasized that the Inca were one of the few large-scale ancient state societies that did not have markets, money, or commercial exchange. The fact that we find, again, the same scaling regularities in a society with a non-commercial economy is simply astounding; this is one of the major points of significance for the new paper.

My student Rudy Cesaretti was our RA on this project a year ago, and he took charge of a study of scaling in medieval European towns (Cesaretti et al. 2015). This is a great dataset with fantastic results. I wish PLOS-One would get off their duff and complete the review! Rudy is now working on a paper that uses data from Henry VIII's beard tax to show superlinear scaling! I want to be a co-author just so I can add "Henry VIII" and "beard tax" to my CV! I took the lead in applying the scaling methods to the question of plaza size at Mesoamerican settlements. We included a sample of Aztec-period sites (Smith 2005), and Alanna Ossa contributed data from her own research on plazas in the Mixtequilla area of Veracruz (Ossa 2014), and we found some published data on the Palenque region. When we scaled plaza size against population, we got statistically regular results, but they don't match any known scaling coefficient. Oops. What is going on? And now Scott's post-doc, Jack Hanson, has produced the first scaling paper on Roman cities (still in preparation, I think).

 

We now have a good conceptual foundation, and empirical results supportive of Luis's scaling model are piling up. We will have a symposium at the 2017 meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Settlement scaling is expanding through the historical and archaeological records. Resistance is futile. I'll bet if we scaled the size and structure of ships like the Borg collective and the Enterprise against their population, we would not be surprised by the results.

I would guess that many people remain dubious about this enterprise. Personally I am baffled and amazed at our results. Wow, where does all this cross-cultural and cross-historical regularity come from? As my ASU colleague Charles Perreault has pointed out, there is nothing in our background in anthropology that would have predicted these results, or that can explain them. So, go read some of these works and see for yourself why a growing number of scholars are getting excited about settlement scaling.

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

2015 Population-Area Relationship in Medieval European Cities. SFI Working Paper, vol. 15-10-036. Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe.  .

Ortman, Scott G., Andrew H.F. Cabaniss, Jennie O. Sturm, and Luís M. A. Bettencourt

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 (1): e1400066.

Ortman, Scott G. and Grant D. Coffey

2015 Universal Scaling: Evidence from Village-LevelSocieties. SFI Working Paper, vol. 15-10-044. Santa Fe Institute, SantaFe. .

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 theCentral Andes. Journal of Archaeological Science 73: 94-106.  .

Ossa, Alanna

2014 Plazas in Comparative Perspective in South-Central Veracruz from the Classic to the Postclassic period (A.D. 300-1350). In Mesoamerican Plazas: Arenas of Community and Power, edited by Kenchiro Tsukamoto and Takeshi Inomata, pp. 130-146. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.

Ossa, Alanna, Michael E. Smith, José Lobo, and Scott Ortman  (n.d.)  The Size of Plazas in Mesoamerican Cities: A Quantitative Analysis and Social Interpretation. (paper under review)

Smith, Michael E.

2005 City Size in Late Postclassic Mesoamerica.Journal of Urban History 31: 403-434.

2014 Peasant Mobility, Local Migration, andPremodern Urbanization. World Archaeology 46 (4): 516-533.

n.d.   The Generative Role of Settlement Aggregation and Urbanization. In Coming Together: Comparative Approaches to Population Aggregation and Early Urbanization, edited by Attila Gyucha. State University of New York Press, Albany.

Smith, Michael E. and José Lobo

n.d.   Cities through the Ages: One Thing or Many? (unpublished ms).

Settlement Scaling: Continuities from Villages to Cities

I used to make a big deal about definitions of urbanism, and how to distinguish cities from other settlements. This is a worthwhile effort, useful for many purposes. But I now find that overemphasizing the distinction between, say, villages and cities can get in the way of understanding some of the major social dynamics of these settlements. Key dimensions of social life show remarkable similarities between villages and cities. For years I questioned the similar notion that major differences characterized rural and urban life, based on my excavations at Aztec sites (Smith 2008, 2016). In some settings around the world, rural and urban lifestyles and social conditions are radically different, but in others—such as Aztec-period Morelos, Mexico—they are quite similar. But my topic here is more general: what are some of the similarities or continuities between social life in villages and cities? This question relates closely to research on settlement scaling.

Our research group on settlement scaling (AKA “urban scaling”) now has a project name and a website—the Social Reactors Project: Human Settlements andNetworks in History. I have been thinking a lot lately about how the work in scaling relates to other research issues and themes in archaeology and the social sciences more generally. This is the first of several posts about the social and scientific context of this research. These are exploratory posts—me thinking aloud about connections between research domains—and not reports of well-established (and published) ideas. I welcome feedback, particularly if I say something dumb.

One of the remarkable empirical findings of the work on settlement scaling is that village settlement systems exhibit some of the same quantitative regularities as do contemporary (and historical/ancient) urban systems. See the project website or previous posts (here,  or here) on this. This finding is predicted from the “social reactors” perspective on scaling. The actions of large numbers of people gathered in specific places have predictable quantitative outcomes in key social domains. The foundation of the social reactors approach is a mathematical model based on the number of people who interact socially within a given built environment. This model is presented in Bettencourt (2013). But does the finding of continuities between village and urban systems make sense from other perspectives? My answer is yes. Here I will focus on two areas: neighborhood formation; and the process of settlement aggregation. Recent research in these areas supports the scaling results by showing how settlement size plays a similar role in both village and city settlement systems.

The universality of neighborhoods

I have claimed for a number of years now that the division of urban residents into neighborhoods is one of the few universals of cities around the world and through history (Smith 2010, 2012). A few years ago I got a bunch of undergraduates together to test this idea by investigating whether neighborhoods existed in what we called “semi-urban settlements” (Smith et al. 2015). These are settlements that are not true cities, but do have large numbers of people gathered together, often for a short period of time. The idea was that if semi-urban settlements exhibit neighborhood organization, this would support the claim that neighborhoods are universal traits of cities.

Each student took one or more types of semi-urban settlements, and looked at maps and read reports to look for the division of the settlement into spatial zones that had some social significance. We identified a total 17 types of semi-urban settlement, of which 11 had enough information to evaluate the presence or absence of neighborhoods. Ten of those eleven settlement types did indeed show neighborhood organization (only disaster camps lacked neighborhoods). Here is the total list of semi-urban settlements we looked at:

Sometimes of these settlements are created forcibly by authorities for their own purposes (“force” in the table), and in other cases the settlements are created by necessity. And in still other cases, the settlements are created by the individual actions of residents ("volunteer" in the table). The fact that ten out of the eleven settlement types we studied show clear neighborhood organization supports the contention that neighborhoods are a universal feature of urban, and urban-like settlements. In other words, when settlement reach a certain size, neighborhood organization—whether imposed or generated by residents—is inevitable.

But the universality of neighborhood organization goes beyond this. In reviewing my notes, I see that apart from some brief mentions here and there (Smith 2010, 2011), I never published my findings on rural neighborhoods. So, here is a brief summary. In many traditional settlement systems, neighborhood-like spatial clusters are found in rural areas. In my paper on Classic Maya neighborhoods, I show that these rural settlement clusters are functionally equivalent to urban neighborhoods, and that they are the kind of unit that serves as an urban neighborhood in low-density tropical cities, such as the Classic Maya or the Khmer (Smith 2011).

Here are two examples of named social groups that serve as neighborhoods in both urban and rural settings: the Aztec calpolli, and the north African darb. The calpolli was a group of Aztec households with common economic activities. In rural areas, nobles owned the farmland, but decisions on how to divide up plots was made by the calpolli, whose members lived together in a village. Only calpolli members had direct access to land. In urban areas, a calpolli was an urban neighborhood whose members often had similar economic specialization. Each calpolli had a temple and a school. For discussion, see: Smith and Novic (2012); for a non-technical account, see my new book (Smith 2016:chapter 7).

In traditional north African societies, the darb is a unit similar to the calpolli—a neighborhood in urban centers, and a village or village section in rural areas. In rural areas, the darb:

“functions as an intermediate structure between the family and the village. It was once described to me as the ‘middle branch’ (al-far’ al-wasat). It is primarily the place where events pertaining to the individual take on a public or communal significance. (Saad 1998:115).

In urban settlements, the darb is a neighborhood (typically called a “quarter” in English-language descriptions), a social division of a town or city (Eickelman 1974). For more examples of rural neighborhoods, see my discussion of highland Maya rural neighborhoods (Smith 2011). See also Anthony Kaye’s discussion of rural neighborhoods in the slave communities of the antebellum southern U.S. (Kaye 2002, 2007a, 2007b).

The implication of these cases is that when human settlements reach a certain size, the residents will create neighborhoods, whether they live in an urban center or in a rural area, in a city or in a village. Unless, of course, the neighborhoods have been pre-established by the builders or authorities. Two obvious questions—How large a population is required to trigger neighborhood formation? and, How big are neighborhoods?—cannot be answered with current information. Years ago, when I started working on neighborhoods, I tried to track neighborhood size, but the data are just too scattered and I gave up.

Settlement aggregation

When I first learned about Luis Bettencourt’s scaling model, and realized that it predicted similar quantitative patterns for village settlements as for cities, I was skeptical. One of my concerns focused on the nature of population movements in the two kinds of settings. The fact that people can move around, into and out of cities and regions, seemed important for the development of the scaling regularities. I don’t think such movement is an absolute requirement of the formal model, but for some settlements to grow larger than others, people have to be able to move around. Thus I was curious about two processes. First, did people in the past really move around very much? Or were farmers and peasants “tied to the land,” as in traditional models? Second, was the process of village aggregation—people moving into villages—similar to the process or urbanization (in the sense of people moving into cities)?

To answer these questions, I reviewed the published literature on spatial mobility and village aggregation in premodern societies. In brief, the evidence supports the scaling model, in that mobility and movement could be substantial in the past, and village aggregation was quite similar to rural-to-urban migration. The journal World Archaeology was just assembling a special issue on past migration and mobility, so I published the paper there (Smith 2014).

I was amazed at the extent of spatial mobility in late medieval and early modern European villages. Robin Osborne (1991) had reviewed the literature earlier, and I updated his analysis. In a famous example published by Peter Laslett, censuses were taken in two 17^th century villages twelve years apart. In the second enumeration, only 38% of the original residents were still in the villages! While the mobility rate may have been particularly high in Britain for structural reasons, there are many examples of considerable social turnover in peasant settings around the world.

In looking at aggregation processes, studies of three different domains coincide in identifying defense as one of the key drivers of such movement. First, most archaeologists agree that the basic cause for the aggregation of population into early villages was the need for defense (Bandy and Fox 2010; Birch 2013). Second, the same factor is identified for the nucleation of settlement in rural parts of the developing world (Silberfein 1989). And third, defense was one of the predominant drivers of urbanization before the modern era in many regions (Adams 1981; Flannery and Marcus 2012). In other words, movement into town, or into the village, was in many cases caused by the same forces—the need for defense and protection.

Conclusion

These considerations of neighborhood formation and premodern settlement aggregation lend support to the social reactor model of settlement scaling. While the idea that village systems exhibit the same quantitative properties as urban systems may seem strange at first, it becomes more comprehensible when we focus on population size and its implications. If we get too hung up on defining urbanism and highlighting differences between urban and non-urban contexts (yes, guilty as charged…..), this can blind us to some remarkable similarities in these two kinds of settings. The key factor uniting them is the role of population size in generating certain kinds of processes and outputs.

While it is possible to claim that the data on neighborhoods and aggregation processes support the scaling model, it is also possible to turn this around and claim that the scaling results support the models from neighborhood and aggregation analysis. But I think the most productive approach is to point out that research in these three distinct domains (and probably others as well) all point to similar conclusions: Many social processes transcend the traditional urban / non-urban distinction; these all involve the consequences of the numbers of people who live or work (and interact) in a settlement; and, human settlement dynamics are remarkably similar around the world and through history.

Stay tuned for more exploration of the context of settlement scaling. Next topic: scaling and social science theory.

REFERENCES

Adams, Robert McC.

1981 Heartland of Cities: Surveys of Ancient Settlement and Land Use on the Central Floodplain of the Euphrates. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Bandy, Matthew S. and Jake R. Fox

2010 Becoming Villagers: The Evolution of Early Village Societies. In Becoming Villagers: Comparing Early Village Societies, edited by Matthew S. Bandy and Jake R. Fox, pp. 1-16. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.

Bettencourt, Luís M. A.

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

Birch, Jennifer

2013 Between Villages and Cities: Settlement Aggregation in Cross-Cultural Perspective. In From Prehistoric Villages to Cities: Settlement Aggregation and Community Transformation, edited by Jennifer Birch, pp. 1-22. Routledge, New York.

Eickelman, Dale F.

1974 Is there an Islamic City? The Making of A Quarter in a Moroccan Town. International Journal of Middle East Studies 5: 274-294.

Flannery, Kent V. and Joyce Marcus

2012 The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Kaye, Anthony E.

2002 Neighborhoods and Solidarity in the Natchez District of Mississippi: Rethinking the Antebellum Slave Community. Slavery and Abolition 23: 1-24.

2007a        Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.

2007b        Neighborhoods and Nat Turner: The Making of a Slave Rebel and the Unmaking of a Slave Rebellion. Journal of the Early Republic 27 (4): 705-720.

Osborne, Robin

1991 The Potential Mobility of Human Populations. Oxford Journal of Archaeology 10 (2): 231-252.

Saad, Reem

1998 Hegemony in the Periphery: Community and Exclusion in an Upper Egyptian Village. In Directions of Change in Rural Egypt, edited by Nicholas S. Hopkins and Kirsten Westergaard, pp. 113-129. American University in Cairo Press, Cairo.

Silberfein, Marilyn

1989 Settlement Form and Rural Development: Scattered Versus Clustered Settlement. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 80 (5): 258-268.

Smith, Michael E.

2008 Aztec City-State Capitals. University Press of Florida, Gainesville.

2010 TheArchaeological Study of Neighborhoods and Districts in Ancient Cities. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology29 (2): 137-154.

2011 ClassicMaya Settlement Clusters as Urban Neighborhoods: A Comparative Perspective onLow-Density Urbanism. Journal de laSociété des Américanistes 97 (1): 51-73.

2012 The Role of Ancient Cities in Research on Contemporary Urbanization. UGEC Viewpoints (Urbanization and Global Environmental Change) 8: 15-19.

2014 PeasantMobility, Local Migration, and Premodern Urbanization. World Archaeology 46 (4): 516-533.

2016 At Home with the Aztecs: An ArchaeologistUncovers their Domestic Life. Routledge, New York.

Smith, Michael E., Ashley Engquist, Cinthia Carvajal, Katrina Johnston, Amanda Young, Monica Algara, Yui Kuznetsov, and Bridgette Gilliland

2015 NeighborhoodFormation in Semi-Urban Settlements. Journalof Urbanism 8 (2): 173-198.

Smith, Michael E. and Juliana Novic

2012 Neighborhoods andDistricts in Ancient Mesoamerica. In The Neighborhood as a Social and SpatialUnit in Mesoamerican Cities, edited by Marie Charlotte Arnauld, Linda R.Manzanilla, and Michael E. Smith, pp. 1-26. University of Arizona Press,Tucson.