New evidence for a division of labor in the ancient world

In a recent paper published in Journal of the Royal Society Interface, Social Reactors Project researchers present evidence that the division of labor expanded with city size in the ancient Roman world in the same way it expands in contemporary cities. The data for this analysis derive primarily from the archaeological record, namely, the sizes and population densities of Roman cities, and mentions of professional associations, known in the ancient world as Collegia, in the stone inscription record of the Roman world. This work presents the first archaeological evidence that functional differentiation bears a systematic relationship to the demographic scale of strongly-interacting social networks. This work suggests an additional way in which the settlement scaling framework dissolves differences between the industrialized urban systems of the present and smaller agrarian systems of the past. The paper is open access and can be accessed here.