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One of the reasons that Teotihuacan, located in the Basin of Mexico near presentday Mexico City, is such an important Precolumbian site is because it is the earliest in date in the New World to exemplify V. Gordon Childe’s “urban revolution ” (1950), a signi¤cant milestone of cultural evolution and human history. One of the dramatic impacts of urbanization on humans is a different lifestyle resulting directly from the higher densities and absolute numbers of people present in one settlement. It also creates an important dynamic between a city and the rural hinterland that supports it and creates most generally a contrast between conditions of life in the city versus that in rural settlements. The effect of the increase in density and numbers in the urban environment is to place humans in contact with a wide diversity of individuals having different economic specializations and levels of wealth, different ethnic backgrounds, and different social standings. These aspects of the “urban revolution” are all present at Teotihuacan (for the evidence, see Berlo 1992; Cowgill 1997; Millon 1981). In addition, the inability to know everyone in the settlement intimately, as is possible in villagebased societies, makes urban living and interaction more impersonal in ways that must be adapted to by individuals and families. Studying the adaptation of humans to their social and physical environments is one of the basic problems of anthropology; Teotihuacan provides the opportunity to study it in an early urban society in the New World. Teotihuacan is also the type of urban settlement called the preindustrial city, that is, an urban society dependent primarily on human and animal sources of energy (Sjoberg 1960) rather than on the inanimate sources and complex tools of more recent industrial societies. Before the eighteenth century in Europe, there were only preindustrial cities, and they have been the most common urban environments for humans. They obviously vary by geography; culture; and history of settlement, ®orescence, and decline. Cross-culturally, preindustrial cities can have several political and economic functions (Fox 1977; Sanders and Webster 1988). Therefore, they cannot be considered a uniform type of community. 14 Mortality through Time in an Impoverished Residence of the Precolumbian City of Teotihuacan A Paleodemographic View Rebecca Storey Another aspect of urbanization that appears to have cross-cultural similarities is the complex relationship between a city and its sustaining area or hinterland (see van der Woude et al. 1990a). Cities typically are made up of nonagricultural specialists and laborers and thus must import food, fuel, and building supplies, mostly from nearby rural areas. Also, cities often dominate their hinterland socially and politically, but especially with preindustrial technologies, are quite dependent on them for necessities of life and migrants. Fortunately, the detailed Basin of Mexico settlement surveys make the study of the demography of the rural/urban continuum possible for Teotihuacan, especially given the high-quality rural survey data that can be compared to our urban population data for the city (Goren®o, this volume). Teotihuacan is distinctive because, as Goren®o discusses, the local population was de¤nitely highly concentrated (up to 75 percent) in the urban area. Thus, Teotihuacan has always been thought to have contained signi ¤cant numbers of farmers as residents, and because this is not the most convenient arrangement for agricultural production, this concentration has been thought to be somewhat coercive (see Millon 1981). As to how much territory was under Teotihuacan’s direct control, there is debate, but probably it did not extend too far beyond the Basin of Mexico, perhaps over one-half million to one million people (Cowgill 2001). The transportation system based largely on human portage would have limited both the area of provisioning and the people who could be controlled. The city’s prestige was far-®ung in Mesoamerica and certainly exceeded its political control. However, the impression given by the settlement studies is how dominant Teotihuacan was in its hinterland. Nevertheless, we can ask what kinds of similarities are present in most preindustrial cities, and, furthermore, what are the demographic and health patterns and risks to which the people must adjust among those similarities? Health and demography are informative about human adaptation, so similarities in health patterns and risks would indicate that urban living presented similar challenges everywhere. Teotihuacan provides a good cross-cultural test for preindustrial cities because of its evolution in a very different culture and environment than preindustrial cities in the Old World. The similarities in health and demography between Teotihuacan and preindustrial cities in Europe...

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