Ortman Scott G, Cabaniss Andrew H F, Sturm Jennie O, Bettencourt Luís M A
Department of Anthropology, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309-0233, USA. ; Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA.
Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA. ; Department of Classics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA.
Sci Adv. 2015 Feb 20;1(1):e1400066. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.1400066. eCollection 2015 Feb.
A key property of modern cities is increasing returns to scale-the finding that many socioeconomic outputs increase more rapidly than their population size. Recent theoretical work proposes that this phenomenon is the result of general network effects typical of human social networks embedded in space and, thus, is not necessarily limited to modern settlements. We examine the extent to which increasing returns are apparent in archaeological settlement data from the pre-Hispanic Basin of Mexico. We review previous work on the quantitative relationship between population size and average settled area in this society and then present a general analysis of their patterns of monument construction and house sizes. Estimated scaling parameter values and residual statistics support the hypothesis that increasing returns to scale characterized various forms of socioeconomic production available in the archaeological record and are found to be consistent with key expectations from settlement scaling theory. As a consequence, these results provide evidence that the essential processes that lead to increasing returns in contemporary cities may have characterized human settlements throughout history, and demonstrate that increasing returns do not require modern forms of political or economic organization.
现代城市的一个关键特性是规模收益递增——即许多社会经济产出的增长速度快于其人口规模的增长速度这一发现。近期的理论研究提出，这种现象是嵌入空间的人类社会网络所具有的一般网络效应的结果，因此不一定局限于现代定居点。我们研究了墨西哥前西班牙时期盆地的考古定居点数据中规模收益递增现象的明显程度。我们回顾了此前关于该社会中人口规模与平均定居面积之间定量关系的研究，然后对其纪念性建筑的建造模式和房屋大小进行了综合分析。估计的标度参数值和残差统计结果支持了这样的假设，即规模收益递增是考古记录中各种社会经济生产形式的特征，并且与定居点标度理论的主要预期相符。因此，这些结果提供了证据，表明导致当代城市规模收益递增的基本过程可能在人类历史上的定居点中一直存在，并且表明规模收益递增并不需要现代形式的政治或经济组织。
