Although there has been considerable scholarly discussion of the relationships between the infrastructure and social and economic conditions of settlements and their estimated populations, there has been virtually no investigation of the extent to which it is possible to detect similar relationships within settlements, aside from some very preliminary work on Pompeii. The aim of this article is therefore to build on earlier work and investigate whether this is indeed the case by focusing on three other sites: Delos, Herculaneum, and Ostia. The results show that there are almost identical relationships between the numbers of rooms and the total ground floor footprints of the residential units within these settlements, despite their different social and economic contexts. This demonstrates, for the first time, that these effects are not just confined to one site and that we may be dealing with a relatively widespread phenomenon.

The site of Cuyuxquihui has long been considered a key Postclassic site in the immediate region of the Classic period capital of El Tajín. This report provides an outline of what we know of Cuyuxquihui and discusses the historical and cultural relationships between that site and El Tajín as evidenced in the archaeological record. The architectural style, the role of public sculpture, and the importance of the ballgame were considerably transformed at the later site when compared to the Late Classic capital. The more important transformations include changes to the ballgame cult, including the construction of a single masonry ball court at Cuyuxquihui, far from the ceremonial center, unlike the multiple masonry courts in the center of El Tajín. Nor is there evidence for the yoke/hacha/palma portable sculpture complex at Cuyuxquihui, a complex central to ballgame ritual at El Tajín. The Cuyuxquihui site plan owes something to the later period of El Tajín in its emphasis on terracing, while the scale of Cuyuxquihui is much smaller. This essay attempts to better define these transformations as part of an emerging Postclassic elite strategy to remake the region’s political geography after the decline of El Tajín.

Despite its record among early twentieth-century explorers and being one of the first sites excavated in southwestern Petén, Guatemala, Altar de Sacrificios has eluded Maya scholarship for much of the last half-century. This article aims to redefine Altar’s position on the ancient Maya geopolitical landscape and reconsider its role in socioeconomic exchange during the Classic period (ca. AD 200–900). We report new findings from a unmanned aerial system survey of the Upper Usumacinta Confluence Zone, contextualizing our results with other remote sensing surveys across the Maya lowlands. By examining the size, form, and distribution of settlement across this fluvial landscape, we characterize variable patterns of settlement density and organization in relation to shifting river channels and potential land use practices associated with Altar’s Classic period occupation. Synthesizing these patterns and population estimates with data from other well-documented settlements across the Maya lowlands, this study highlights the diversity of this ancient urban tradition and contributes to broader discussions on Maya urbanization—especially the connections between cities and more rural zones of human habitation.

Neighborhood centers at Teotihuacan provide important information about the city’s urban organization and systems of governance beyond central administrative complexes. They served multiple social functions, with evidence from some spaces consistent with ritual activities and others with residences for district elites. Yet precise uses can be difficult to discern because architecture and associated materials often present evidence of both, along with possible civic or administrative functions. Interdisciplinary investigations are necessary to probe expected patterns for more domestic activities versus civic-ceremonial ones. After first investigating apartment compounds, the Proyecto Arqueológico Tlajinga Teotihuacan (PATT) turned to understanding the construction history and uses of elevated platform complexes in the district’s neighborhood center. In comparison with nearby apartments, these complexes were elaborately made and decorated. Their larger courtyards and patios could accommodate group ceremonial activities, but portions of complexes may have also served as residences for intermediate elites, evidence of which is stronger for the earliest construction phase. We combine excavation and artifact analysis with geophysical prospection and floor and artifact chemistry to compare platform complexes with a baseline residential pattern from excavated apartments in order to elucidate what spaces served more community versus domestic functions.

Mohenjo-daro was a major city of the Indus Civilisation (c. 2600–1900 BC), with excavations revealing evidence for public infrastructure, civic amenities and hundreds of residences. Archaeologists traditionally assume that urbanism is accompanied by economic stratification, but, at Mohenjo-daro, qualitative evidence of inequality is absent. Drawing on early excavation data, the authors here calculate Gini coefficients of residence area, providing a quantitative proxy of economic inequality. Their results indicate that Gini coefficients, and thus inequality, declined over time, coinciding with increased prosperity and the development of the city’s street plan, indicating that governance likely helped limit economic inequality.

In the fifteenth century, Portuguese economic migrants frequented the African coasts to trade in gold and captives. From the seventeenth century onwards, African trade attracted other French, English, and Dutch migrants, who, individually or grouped together in trading companies, settled on African coasts as part of a global trading economy based on the circulation of goods, ideas, knowledge, know-how, and techniques. These exchanges fostered a cultural and racial melting pot in the trading cities of Gorée and Saint-Louis. Indeed, the union between Europeans and the women of Senegambia fostered the birth of a new Afro-European social class that served as an intermediary for commercial activities and technological dialogue. In the second half of the eighteenth century, thanks to their wealth from the slave economy, Afro-Europeans contributed to the urban transformation of the towns of Gorée and Saint-Louis, replicating Provençal houses built using European and local techniques and materials. Following the prohibition of the slave trade by the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the royal French administration embarked on a slow process of urban transformation in Saint-Louis, the first French city in West Africa, attempting to construct public and military buildings and impose a European-style urban planning.

While modern scholarship defines Etruscan Veii as a symbol of success, it interprets its later transformation into a small Roman town as a failure. Yet both written and archaeological records reveal that Veii’s Roman community invested in urban life, albeit on a smaller scale. This article argues that such developments are better understood through the lens of resilience than through binary categories of ‘success’ and ‘failure’. It invites broader reconsideration of how archaeologists apply these labels—often reflecting modern biases more than past realities—when studying historical settlements.

This article presents an analysis of the relationship between urbanization as an ongoing process and economic development in medieval (c. AD 1250–1400) southern and midland England. It is proposed that understanding the distribution of pottery through network analysis provides a means of comprehending the role played by affective material relations in these processes. Rather than seeing pottery distributions as reflecting an overarching economic context, the author investigates how relations with pottery, and between pottery and other commodities, generated distinctive and situated modes of urban life. He proposes that the medieval economy was a patchwork rather than a coherent system. The study draws on Deleuze’s concept of the ‘virtual’ to examine how economic emergence and urbanization are open-ended and difference-making processes.

Despite contemporary relevance in understanding how cities historically overcame demographic, social and economic constraints imposed by the lack of clean, fresh water, the value of estimating aqueduct delivery rates and their potential relationship with population size in the Roman Empire remains uncertain. Here, the authors use settlement scaling theory to examine recent statistics for city size and aqueduct capacity, revealing a systematic but sublinear relationship between these variables, whereby water supply increased at a slower rate than population size. Far from merely ostentatious displays of power, aqueducts were carefully planned to ensure an adequate supply of clean and fresh water.