Archaeology and evolutionary anthropology are disciplines that have made important contributions to our understanding of the evolution of cities across time and space. In this paper we apply recent research in construction methods to explore a key aspect of the ecology of ancient cities, namely who built the houses and public monuments of the past and how the processes of construction were organised. Civic houses are often thought to have been built by householders; but we show that this is an unlikely explanation, using one well-documented city in north Greece, Olynthos. House construction gives us a unique insight into the ways that cities of the past were created. We present OIKoS (Olynthos Integrated Kostings System), a method that applies archaeological energetics analysis, offering a fully parametric and city-scale reconstruction of an ancient settlement using Rhinoceros 3D and Grasshopper. OIKoS enables rapid generation and evaluation of construction scenarios at city-scale. OIKoS has the potential to extend beyond classical archaeology, offering a scalable model relevant to heritage science, architectural history, and digital urban studies. Our research enables us to show that many more people were involved in the construction of the houses of a major civic centre than have been estimated as the total number of householders. House engineering offers a new way of understanding the emergence of ancient cities. Comparative evidence from a range of contemporary sites in the eastern and western Mediterranean provides further nuances for understanding the different activities that contributed to city building.
Archibald et al. (Sun,) studied this question.