Settlement scaling theory, agent based models, and ancient trade
0John William Hanson
Over the last few years, there has been a great deal of excitement about the possibility of using agent based models to shed new light on fundamental aspects of the ancient economy. One of the limitations of existing models, however, is that they do not take sufficient account of the effect of the scale on patterns of production and consumption. This contrasts with recent work on complex systems, which suggests that there is a consistent relationship between the sizes of settlements and levels of specialisation and diversification in contemporary settlements, including relative numbers of individual crafts and trades. This includes the specific observation that the numbers of individuals involved in retail tends to scale sublinearly, while the numbers involved in creative sectors scales superlinearly. In this talk, I will offer a new agent based model of traders in ancient cities (developed in collaboration with Tom Brughmans), which allows us to investigate the effects of assuming different scaling factors for the first time. This reveals one or two surprises about the roles of traders in ancient cities, which contribute to our view of the links between urbanisation and economic development.