Using Cultural Algorithms to generate models for archaic urban centers: The Monte Alban example

Although urban centers are taken for granted today, they have only been in existence for a relatively short period of time, several thousand years. In this paper the emergence of archaic or ancient urban centers is viewed as a Cultural Evolutionary process. The focus here is on one of the earliest urban centers in Meso-America, Monte Albán. The paper examines the first phase of settlement at this site, Monte Albán Ia, using tools from complex systems and data mining to construct structural-functional building blocks. These building blocks are then employed by a Cultural Algorithm to evolve structural functional models of the ancient urban center. The population of the Cultural Algorithm was a set of urban planning agents, each of whom competed to build up a high level model of the site from the building blocks. The best model is compared with existing models of modern cities in order to identify similarities and differences between ancient and modern cities. The resultant comparison suggests that early Monte Albán exhibited a sector-based model that is characteristic of some modern cities.