[E014]Ancient and modern cities built using same mathematical……

Ancient and modern cities built using same mathematical pattern

Each city has its own local quirks[怪事; 趣事], architecture, language and cuisine[烹调法]. But recently, some theoretical[ 理论的；理论上的；假设的；推理的] scientists have started to find there are universal laws that shape all urban spaces. And a new study suggests the same mathematical rules might apply to ancient settlements, too. Using archaeological[考古学的；[古] 考古学上的] data from the ruins of Tenochtitlan[特诺奇提特兰] and thousands of other sites around it in Mexico, researchers found that private houses and public monuments were built in predictable ways. They found that these diverse ancient settlements generally showed the same increasing returns of urban scaling[城市规模] that’s been observed in modern cities. As cities grew in population, so did the rate at which they were able to produce monuments.

I find this stuff[东西；材料；填充物；素材资料] really exciting because it suggests that there’s something really fundamental about human interactions[人际互动] — and human interactions in cities — that transcends[胜过，超越] modern economies.

Archaeologist Michael Smith

Scientists surveyed 2,000 years of history, from about 500 B.C. up until the beginning of the colonial period[殖民地时期] in the 1500s. The survey spanned about 1,550 square miles containing thousands of settlements and also studied the socioeconomic productivity[社会经济生产力] of these cities. The study, which was published in the journal Science Advances, is the first to apply these archaeological data, and Luis Bettencourt, who studies complex systems at the Santa Fe Institute[圣菲研究所] in New Mexico, said it would be an “astounding[令人震惊的；令人惊骇的] result” if it holds up across other sites and ancient cultures.