Department of Classics, University of Reading, Reading, Berkshire, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2020 Feb 27;15(2):e0229580. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0229580. eCollection 2020.
Despite the recent flurry of interest in various aspects of ancient urbanism, we still know little about how much traffic flowed in and out of ancient cities, in part because of problems with using commodities as proxies for trade. This article investigates another approach, which is to estimate these flows from the built environment, concentrating on transport infrastructure such as city gates. To do this, I begin by discussing a new model for how we would expect this kind of infrastructure to expand with population, before investigating the relationship between the populations of sites and the total numbers and widths of city gates, focusing on the Greek and Roman world. The results suggest that there is indeed a systematic relationship between the estimated populations of cities and transport infrastructure, which is entirely consistent with broader theoretical and empirical expectations. This gives us a new way of exploring the connectivity and integration of ancient cities, contributing to a growing body of general theory about how settlements operate across space and time.
尽管最近人们对古代城市主义的各个方面产生了浓厚的兴趣，但我们仍然不太了解古代城市的交通流量有多少，部分原因是使用商品作为贸易代理存在问题。本文探讨了另一种方法，即从建筑环境来估计这些流量，重点关注城门等交通基础设施。为此，我首先讨论了一个新的模型，说明我们预期这种基础设施会如何随着人口的增长而扩张，然后研究了遗址的人口与城门的总数和宽度之间的关系，重点关注希腊和罗马世界。结果表明，城市的估计人口与交通基础设施之间确实存在系统关系，这与更广泛的理论和经验预期完全一致。这为我们探索古代城市的连通性和整体性提供了一种新的方法，有助于形成关于定居点如何在空间和时间上运作的一般性理论。
