ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
The persistence of ancient settlements and urban sustainability.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 75 citations in OpenAlex.
- Urban survival, population dynamics and historical transitions in Thessaloniki (316 BC-AD 1500).Archaeological and anthropological sciences · 2026Article
- Maya Postclassic persistence in the Birds of Paradise Wetland Fields, Belize.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Modeling the rise and demise of Classic Maya cities: Climate, conflict, and economies of scale.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Five thousand years of inequality in the Carpathian Basin.Science advances · 2025Article
- Housing inequality and settlement persistence are associated across the archaeological record.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Ancient levantine demography follows ecological stochasticity.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Mesoamerican urbanism revisited: Environmental change, adaptation, resilience, persistence, and collapse.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Integration of urban science and urban climate adaptation research: opportunities to advance climate action.npj urban sustainability · 2023Review
- Division of labor, specialization and diversity in the ancient Roman cities: A quantitative approach to Latin epigraphy.PloS one · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We propose a dedicated research effort on the determinants of settlement persistence in the ancient world, with the potential to significantly advance the scientific understanding of urban sustainability today. Settlements (cities, towns, villages) are locations with two key attributes: They frame human interactions and activities in space, and they are where people dwell or live. Sustainability, in this case, focuses on the capacity of structures and functions of a settlement system (geography, demography, institutions) to provide for continuity of safe habitation. The 7,000-y-old experience of urbanism, as revealed by archaeology and history, includes many instances of settlements and settlement systems enduring, adapting to, or generating environmental, institutional, and technological changes. The field of urban sustainability lacks a firm scientific foundation for understanding the long durée, relying instead on narratives of collapse informed by limited case studies. We argue for the development of a new interdisciplinary research effort to establish scientific understanding of settlement and settlement system persistence. Such an effort would build upon the many fields that study human settlements to develop new theories and databases from the extensive documentation of ancient and premodern urban systems. A scientific foundation will generate novel insights to advance the field of urban sustainability.
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Registered trials
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