Urban and Transport Scaling: Northern Mesopotamia in the Late Chalcolithic and Bronze Age

Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-018-9400-4 Urban and Transport Scaling: Northern Mesopotamia in the Late Chalcolithic and Bronze Age Mark Altaweel 1 & Alessio Palmisano 1 # The Author(s) 2018 Abstract Scaling methods have been applied to study modern urban areas and how they create accelerated, feedback growth in some systems while efficient use in others. For ancient cities, results have shown that cities act as social reactors that lead to positive feedback growth in socioeconomic measures. In this paper, we assess the relationship between settlement area expressed through mound area from Late Chalcolithic and Bronze Age sites and mean hollow way widths, which are remains of roadways, from the Khabur Triangle in northern Mesopotamia. The intent is to demonstrate the type of scaling and relationship present between sites and hollow ways, where both feature types are relatively well preserved. For modern roadway systems, efficiency in growth relative to population growth suggests roads should show sublinear scaling in relation to site size. In fact, similar to modern systems, such sublinear scaling results are demonstrated for the Khabur Triangle using available data, suggesting ancient efficiency in intensive transport growth relative to population levels. Comparable results are also achieved in other ancient Near East regions. Furthermore, results suggest that there could be a general pattern relevant for some small sites (0–2 ha) and those that have fewer hollow ways, where β, a measure of scaling, is on average low (≈ < 0.2). On the other hand, a second type of result for sites with many hollow ways (11 or more) and that are often larger suggests that β is greater (0.23–0.72), but still sublinear. This result could reflect the scale in which larger settlements acted as greater social attractors or had more intensive economic activity relative to smaller sites. The provided models also allow estimations of past roadway widths in regions where hollow ways are missing. Keywords Hollow ways . Ancient roads . Mesopotamia . Near East . Bronze Age . Late Chalcolithic . Tells . Mounds . Settlement . Scaling . Urban geography . Land use . Landscape Mark Altaweel and Alessio Palmisano contributed equally to this work. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-0189400-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Mark Altaweel 1 Institute of Archaeology, University College London, London, UK Altaweel and Palmisano Introduction Urban scaling has been a major research topic not only for those interested in modern urbanism (Bettencourt et al. 2010; Bettencourt 2013; Batty 2013; Schläpfer et al. 2014) but also those studying the past (Ortman et al. 2014, 2015; Cesaretti et al. 2016; Ossa et al. 2017; Smith 2018). Urban scaling work builds on theory that frames human settlements as social reactors (Bettencourt 2013), where generally bigger cities create social interaction opportunities that result in greater socioeconomic outputs per capita (e.g., incomes, transport networks, technological innovations). These outputs scale relative to the population of the city. Several past studies have demonstrated systematic power law regularities between population size and socioeconomic outputs (e.g., Pumain et al. 2006; Bettencourt et al. 2007, 2010; Batty 2008; Samaniego and Moses 2009). Other earlier anthropological work has looked at issues of system scaling and complex organization, where larger systems have been argued as creating conditions for greater social complexity and evident qualitative change to social structures (e.g., Carneiro 1967, 2000). Intensification of interactions and feedbacks can help create ever larger and more socially complex societies (Johnson and Earle 2000). Power law relationships are also found in non-urban societies and their dwelling areas (Wiessner 1974). While works on scaling could potentially investigate social transformations, scaling can also inform how population affects other urban systems, including those that have economic implications (e.g., wealth, transport network, household consumption, water supply system). There are three kinds of urban scaling between population size and the magnitude of socioeconomic outputs: (1) linear, where the output has the same growth rate as population; (2) superlinear, where the output grows at a higher rate than population, and (3) sublinear, where the output increases at a lower rate than population. For factors such as innovation and wealth, cities have shown a pattern expressed by superlinear power exponents at around 1.15 (Bettencourt et al. 2010), while systems such as transport are typical of economies of scale that reflect efficiency accommodating increasing populations, making them sublinear (Bettencourt et al. 2007). For ancient urban systems, the challenge has been to find relevant measures that can be easily compared to population in a similar manner for modern systems that can demonstrate such power law relationship. Work by Ortman et al. (2014, 2015) demonstrate socioeconomic relationships that are similar between modern societies and past New World settlements (e.g., population and residential settled area, public construction rates). However, relative few proxies from different archaeological settings have been used (e.g., estimated settlement area, area of public plazas and monuments, number of inscriptions; see Cesaretti et al. 2016; Hanson and Ortman 2017; Hanson et al. 2017; Ossa et al. 2017). This work represents an exploratory analysis into the scaling relationship between settlement area and remnants of past interurban roadway systems. Such a focus has not been conducted before and, therefore, our results are a preliminary assessment. One area where data afford an opportunity to compare relationships between proxies for urban population and other measures is the Near East i (Fig. 1). Particularly in northern Mesopotamia, mounded Late Chalcolithic (LC) to Bronze Age (ca. 4200–1200 BCE) sites, such as those studied from different surveys, are often clearly visible on satellite imagery along with remnants of Urban and Transport Scaling: Northern Mesopotamia in the Late... Fig. 1 Map of the study area and of the key sites analyzed. The inset shows the Khabur Triangle (KT) illustrated in Fig. 2 ancient roads, termed hollow ways (Wilkinson 1993; Fig. 2). This provides an opportunity to understand how interurban road networks and roads that connected agricultural areas relate and scale to mound area. In effect, if mound area reflects a proxy for population, then the relationship between mounds and hollow ways can inform on how past road systems were affected by and related to population. This also informs how agricultural landscapes and settlements interacted. That relationship, represented in a developed model, could be used to forecast characteris (...truncated)