Urban scaling arrives in archaeology
Urban population dynamics The first application of the methods of urban scaling to archaeological data was published last week ( Ortman et al. 2014) . This should be the first of a series of archaeological applications of urban scaling research, a trend that has the potential to revolutionize scholarly understanding of the basic processes of urbanization. While some of the discussion is pretty technical, the basic results and their implications are clear. The population sizes and areas of a large sample of ancient settlements conform to the expectations of urban scaling power laws as identified for contemporary cities. Yes, I said settlements. Not just cities, but smaller settlements as well, all conform to the scaling model. I discussed the scaling research on modern cities in Wide Urban World last fall , based mainly on Bettencourt (2013). in PLOS-one ( Superlinear scaling (Bettencourt 2013) To summarize briefly, the relationships between the sizes of contemporary cities, and various...