Settlement Scaling in Archaeology—Not Just Modern, Not Just Urban

The fact that cities become more efficient, innovative and productive as they grow in population has been known for decades, but until very recently it was assumed that these properties were unique to modern capitalist economies. Three developments have cast significant doubt on this view. First, urban economists and economic geographers have had to make increasing use of insights from history and anthropology to account for features of contemporary cities. Second, a mathematical theory that predicts contemporary patterns has been developed, but it relies on very general properties of human networks embedded in space, not the specific properties of capitalism. Third, archaeological studies have discovered that many scaling properties of modern cities are also apparent in pre-modern and even non-urban settlement systems. These developments point toward a new way of framing human societies as complex networks, new avenues for the study of social evolution, and a new conception of the archaeological record as a repository of experiments in social and economic development. In this session we introduce settlement scaling theory to archaeologists, present a series of case studies from around the world, and critically assess its current strengths and weaknesses.