Provisioning an Early City: Spatial Equilibrium in the Agricultural Economy at Angkor, Cambodia

Abstract

A dominant view in economic anthropology is that farmers must overcome decreasing marginal returns in the process of intensification. However, it is difficult to reconcile this view with the emergence of urban systems, which require substantial increases in labor productivity to support a growing non-farming population. This quandary is starkly posed by the rise of Angkor (Cambodia, 9th–fourteenth centuries CE), one of the most extensive preindustrial cities yet documented through archaeology. Here, we leverage extensive documentation of the Greater Angkor Region to illustrate how the social and spatial organization of agricultural production contributed to its food system. First, we find evidence for supra-household-level organization that generated increasing returns to farming labor. Second, we find spatial patterns which indicate that land-use choices took transportation costs to the urban core into account. These patterns suggest agricultural production at Angkor was organized in ways that are more similar to other forms of urban production than to a smallholder system.

How can research on past urban adaptations be made useful for sustainability science?

“…The quantitative analysis of adequate and representative samples is the gold standard in producing scientifically rigorous and useful results from archaeological and historical data. This approach is now flourishing in archaeology (Klassen et al, 2022; Kohler et al, 2017; Ortman et al, 2020; Turchin et al, 2018), but most of the work lies outside of the realm of urban sustainability issues. This approach needs to be applied to sustainability issues.…”

“…Closer to the concerns of urban sustainability research, Peter Peregrine (2020) has used statistical methods to model archaeological and historical data on social responses to climate change. At the level of individual regions and cities, Klassen et al (2022) investigate spatial equilibrium, a fundamental model in urban economics, at ancient Angkor in relation to food production, showing that the basic spatial constraints on urban movement and activity are quite similar in the past and the present.…”

How can Research on Past Urban Adaptations be Made Useful for Sustainability Science?

“…The quantitative analysis of adequate and representative samples is the gold standard in producing scientifically rigorous and useful results from archaeological and historical data. This approach is now flourishing in archaeology (Klassen et al, 2021;Kohler et al, 2017;Turchin et al, 2018), but most of the work lies outside of the realm of urban sustainability science. This approach needs to be applied to sustainability issues.…”

“…Closer to the concerns of urban sustainability research, Peter Peregrine (2020) has used statistical methods to model archaeological and historical data on social responses to climate change. On the level of individual regions and cities, Klassen et al (2021) investigate spatial equilibrium, a fundamental model in urban economics research today, at ancient Angkor in relation to food production, showing that the basic spatial constraints on urban movement and activity are quite similar in the past and the present.…”

Low-Density Urbanisation: Prestate Settlement Growth in a Pacific Society

“…Despite their promise, these new approaches to urbanisation are data intensive and capturing the settlement data necessary for analysis remains a challenge-particularly for low-density settlements. The expansion of lidar based surveys is rapidly increasing settlement data with recent research in the low-density settlement systems of Mesoamerica (Smith et al, 2021) and Southeast Asia (Klassen et al, 2022) able to use large geospatial databases and urban science methods to investigate ancient settlement dynamics.…”