In my research focused on early farmers of Europe, I have often wondered about a curious pattern through time: Farmers lived in large, dense villages, then dispersed for centuries, then later formed cities again, only to abandon those as well. Why?
Archaeologists often explain what we call urban collapse in terms of climate change, overpopulation, social pressures, or some combination of these. Each likely has been true at different points in time.
But scientists have added a new hypothesis to the mix: disease. Living closely with animals led to zoonotic diseases that came to also infect humans. Outbreaks could have led dense settlements to be abandoned, at least until later generations found a way to organize their settlement layout to be more resilient to disease. In a new study, my colleagues and I analyzed the intriguing layouts of later settlements to see how they might have interacted with disease transmission.
