Residential scaling, domestic architecture, and the housing stocks of Pompeii, Delos, Herculaneum, and Ostia

Journal article

Although there has been considerable scholarly discussion of the relationships between the infrastructure and social and economic conditions of settlements and their estimated populations, there has been virtually no investigation of the extent to which it is possible to detect similar relationships within settlements, aside from some very preliminary work on Pompeii. The aim of this article is therefore to build on earlier work and investigate whether this is indeed the case by focusing on three other sites: Delos, Herculaneum, and Ostia. The results show that there are almost identical relationships between the numbers of rooms and the total ground floor footprints of the residential units within these settlements, despite their different social and economic contexts. This demonstrates, for the first time, that these effects are not just confined to one site and that we may be dealing with a relatively widespread phenomenon.

Authors: Hanson, JH; Wittmann, M

• Publication status: Accepted
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Journal: Journal of Roman Archaeology
• Acceptance date: 2026-06-03
• EISSN: 2331-5709
• ISSN: 1047-7594
• Language: English
• Keywords: complex systems; settlement scaling; residential scaling; domestic architecture; housing stock; urbanism