Ancient and modern cities built using same mathematical pattern

Each city has its own local quirks, architecture, language and cuisine. But recently, some theoretical scientists have started to find there are universal laws that shape all urban spaces. And a new study suggests the same mathematical rules might apply to ancient settlements, too. Using archaeological data from the ruins of Tenochtitlan and thousands of other sites around it in Mexico, researchers found that private houses and public monuments were built in predictable ways. They found that these diverse ancient settlements generally showed the same increasing returns of urban scaling that’s been observed in modern cities. As cities grew in population, so did the rate at which they were able to produce monuments.

I find this stuff really exciting because it suggests that there’s something really fundamental about human interactions — and human interactions in cities — that transcends modern economies.

Archaeologist Michael Smith

Scientists surveyed 2,000 years of history, from about 500 B.C. up until the beginning of the colonial period in the 1500s. The survey spanned about 1,550 square miles containing thousands of settlements and also studied the socioeconomic productivity of these cities. The study, which was published in the journal Science Advances, is the first to apply these archaeological data, and Luis Bettencourt, who studies complex systems at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, said it would be an “astounding result” if it holds up across other sites and ancient cultures.

Science