oa Do Warmer, Wetter, and More Unpredictable Environments Matter?: Differences in Institutional and Infrastructural Arrangements and Intergenerational Wealth Distributions between Premodern Cities in the Humid and Semiarid Neotropics

In the Neotropics, warm and humid environments presented challenges and opportunities for the emergence and persistence of premodern cities that were different from those in semiarid environments. We suggest that these properties contributed to shaping distinct developmental pathways for urban systems. In the warm/wet Neotropics, greater intraspecies distancing, heightened difficulties with organic storage, and increased incidence of communicable diseases conditioned the predictability of food access, thereby structuring economic relationships dissimilar in degree from those in semiarid environs. We further propose that wealth concentrations and socio-economic disparities in semiarid settings, where ecological turnovers are relatively slow, were amplified compared to warm/wet environments with more rapid turnovers. We substantiate this claim by contrasting two of the most well-reported pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cities and their respective sustaining areas: Teotihuacán in the semiarid Basin of Mexico and Tikal in the humid Central Maya Lowlands of northern Guatemala. We assess the disparities between these cities focusing on (1) settlement patterns, (2) the development of infrastructures supporting basic metabolic needs, (3) demographic growth rate profiles, (4) the interplay between prestige and subsistence economies, (5) synchronous distribution and intergenerational accumulation of wealth, and (6) the character of urban governance institutions. We conclude that biophysical environments fundamentally matter in assessing cultural identities and behaviours of premodern cities and their regional support populations through time.