If you think about cities throughout the course of human history, they are very different in terms of their culture, architecture and governance. However, according to new research many of the dynamics of cities have been constant.

Earlier research has shown that, in the case of modern cities, efficiencies and productivity grow with population. The population, for example, will always outpace the development of infrastructure. The availability of goods and services outpace the population. In other words demand never exceeds supply.

This phenomenon, called “urban scaling” has proved to be mathematically predictable.

Researchers at Santa Fe Institute (SFI) and the University of Colorado-Boulder set out to discover whether urban scaling applies only to modern cities or whether the predictable pattern is constant for historical cities as well.

In 2013, Luis Bettencourt lead investigator of SFI’s Cities, Scaling, and Sustainability research program, gave a talk on urban scaling theory. Scott Ortman, assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at CU Boulder, noted that the trends described by Bettencourt were not exclusive to modern urban areas. Their discussion launched a research project on urban scaling in ancient cities.

The team examined archeological data from the Basin of Mexico (now Mexico City).

In the 1960s, before its recent population boom, surveyors examined all of the areas ancient settlements, which span 2000 years and four cultural eras all prior to the arrival of European settlers in the Americas.

Most notably, Mexico City was the capital of the Aztec Empire. Then called Mexico-Tenochtitlan, the city is believed to have been home to a population of some 350,000 people by 1519. By comparison the city of London had a population of 80,000 at that time.

Using the data on pre-Columbian Mexico city, the researchers analyzed hundreds of ancient temples and houses to estimate urban populations and population density. The team also examined the size and rates of construction of buildings and monuments as well as the intensity of use.

“It was shocking and unbelievable. We were raised on a steady diet telling us that, thanks to capitalism, industrialization, and democracy, the modern world is radically different from worlds of the past. What we found here is that the fundamental drivers of robust socioeconomic patterns in modern cities precede all that,“ said Ortman in a statement.

The team’s results have been published in the new American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) open-access journal Science Advances this month.

The team found that, consistently, the larger a settlement was the more productive and efficient it was.

“Our results suggest that the general ingredients of productivity and population density in human societies run much deeper and have everything to do with the challenges and opportunities of organizing human social networks,” said Bettencourt.

While the team is excited by their results, they acknowledge that the Mexico City study is only one step in a lengthy process. The next step for the researchers will be to examine patterns from ancient sites in Europe, China and Peru to determine whether the urban scaling pattern continues to hold true. The team will also look at the factors that caused urban settlements to emerge, grow and eventually collapse.