A systematic method for estimating the populations of Greek and Roman settlements

Abstract

The last few years have seen a growing interest in the urbanism of the Greek and Roman world. This has led to a consensus of sorts about some of its vital statistics, such as the sizes of the populations of the most important settlements and the size of the overall urban population, the urbanization rate (i.e., the share of individuals that lived in urban, rather than rural, contexts), and the total population. A good example comes from W. Scheidel in the Cambridge economic history of the Greco-Roman world. According to him, it is likely that c.1.5 million people lived in the 5 largest cities of the Greco-Roman world by the 2nd c. A.D. These included Rome, which is usually agreed to have had a population of about 1 million; Alexandria, which might have had c.500,000; Antioch, which could have had at least 150,000; and Carthage and Ephesus (Scheidel does not give explicit figures for those).

More Real Than Ideal: Household and Community Diversity at Metapontum, South Italy

“…For sites where urban housing is available, techniques assessing the representativeness of small samples such as the EESB can help further empirically ground studies of urban scaling by providing settlement-specific views of household heterogeneity, sizes of co-resident groups, and potential implications for urban social networks. Hanson and Ortman's (2017) study of urban scaling in the Classical Mediterranean already noticed this, and they have moved the research program in a more empirically-grounded direction by incorporating information on a site-by-site level rather the application of regional rules as in previous demographic studies of the Aegean (Muggia, 1997;Hansen, 2006bHansen, , 2008. For the study of individual cities and the untangling of their tightly-correlated developmental trajectories that tie together area, population, wealth, and resource consumption, it is necessary to break down our data to the smallest empirical analytical units possible, as homogeneity confounds our object of study.…”

“…Metapontum itself frequently merits inclusion in quantitative urban demographic studies of the Classical Mediterranean because some basic statistics of the city's grid have been made accessible. Hansen (2006b) calculated the average urban house size as 215 m 2 for his study of the demography of the Greek political system, while Hanson and Ortman (2017) calculated a total density of 214 people per ha based on Carter (2006) estimate of around 3,000 houses in 70 ha for their study of urban scaling. It is this last study of urban scaling I wish to focus on in considering the impact of empirical methods for the study of households.…”

“…For the study of individual cities and the untangling of their tightly-correlated developmental trajectories that tie together area, population, wealth, and resource consumption, it is necessary to break down our data to the smallest empirical analytical units possible, as homogeneity confounds our object of study. Hanson and Ortman (2017) have already proposed and implemented one means of doing this, and I hope the present work will be an extension to assess how we can use small datasets of houses and other sparsely excavated material entities to expand our knowledge of ancient cities.…”

“…Statistical tests and calculations based on small samples can extend current methods for the quantitative study of ancient urbanism by providing a more detailed empirical record unique to individual cities such as Metapontum. It is hoped that this method will aid studies that attempt to put ancient Mediterranean urbanism into quantitative comparative frameworks like urban scaling (Hanson and Ortman, 2017). The EESB enables urban scaling theory to proceed at the level of populations as it was originally framed (Bettencourt, 2013), and in general gives the diversity of ancient cities the chance to speak for themselves within large-scale studies.…”

Methods of Palaeodemography: The Case of the Iberian Oppida and Roman Cities in North‐East Spain

“…The size of the family has been and still is a fundamental topic in any demographic study, whatever the region or period under study. However, for the purpose of this article – as set out in Table , we have a sample large and uniform enough to state with confidence that, when dealing with pre‐industrial societies, the most acceptable inhabitants/household ratio seems to be somewhere between four and six individuals per household (Hanson and Ortman , 305). In order to avoid a constant repetition of mathematical operations (calculations using four, then five and then six individuals), the figure of four inhabitants per household will be used for two practical reasons: first, it is the same number that Carreras () used in his calculations for Roman Spain and therefore will facilitate comparison between the two studies (see below).…”