Persistence as Sustainability? Exploring Urban Longevity in Southwest Asia and Egypt - Dataset

The concept of settlement persistence, the duration of occupation of a settlement, has gained traction in archaeology as a way of articulating analyses of past societies in relation to sustainability science. Here we compare the durations of large settlements across Southwest Asia and the Nile Delta from 10,000 to 1000 years BP to investigate the drivers of persistence, and therefore sustainability. We find some regional differences in mean persistence, although these are muted, and that larger sites are more persistent than smaller ones. Persistence also decreases over time. Finally, we compare urban persistence to polity persistence, using the MOROS dataset on polity durations. We find that in our region cities are more persistent than polities, but that the distribution of the datasets is similar. Our results suggest there may be regularities in the mortality profiles of more-than-human systems such as cities and states, which merit further attention.