Degrees of wellbeing between urban populations ocupying the wet subtropics vs more arid settings

What is it about?

The case studies focus on the ancient Neotropical record from the semiaird Basin of Mexico and the grand city of Teotihuacan as opposed to that of the Central Maya Lowlands of the Yucatan Peninsula and the sizable city of Tikal. These are two of most studied archaic cities in the archaeological record, providing evidence of significant differences between highly orthogonal and dense urbanism vs less controlled and less dense order.

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Why is it important?

The piece suggests that the humid subtropics tend to accommodate a greater sense of wellbeing among a large portion of their urban sustaining populatons than apparent from many semiarid cities given their often presumed environmental and social limitations . The relatively recent advent of Western dominance of socioeconomic and poliitcal controls and its gravitation toward "technological breakthroughs" has distanced the world from several basic environmental realities. The effects of unintended consequences and less interrupted "path dependencies" in decision making through time are lessons that may be revisited from the archaeological record here.

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