Archaeology offers an unparalleled material record of urban dynamics, spanning thousands of years and operating in varied environmental and cultural contexts. The diverse perspectives provided by the archaeological record can yield new insights into our global urban future, providing insights into urban responses to external and internal shocks and similarities or differences in urban form, population densities, socioeconomic organisation, and spatial layouts between different traditions.
Such comparative research and cross-temporal utility, however, requires large-scale, multidisciplinary, interoperable quantitative data. Urban archaeology has often focused on defining cities based on certain ‘traits’ (e.g. city walls, population density, writing), yet these definitions can hinder comparison and lead to a fragmentation of data, varied standards, and regional focus. This is further exacerbated by a lack of Open Science and engagement with contemporary urban scientists.
To address these issues, a team led by researchers from the Department of Coevolution of Land Use and Urbanisation (DLU) at theMax Planck Institute of Geoanthropology have designed and launched URBank – a global hub for aggregating and analysing urban data. URBank is hosted at the Max Planck Institute of Geaonthropology and developed in collaboration with leading urban archaeologists, historians, urban studies scholars, and Earth system scientists ( https://urbank.earth ).
As Patrick Roberts, director of the DLU puts it, “URBank is a long-term sustainable project and database that represents a fundamentally different approach to combining and studying data relating to the urban past.” Combining the latest advances in archaeological urban theory, URBank has a data model which aims to encapsulate cities as not just points on a map, but as the products of dynamic processes and networks.
“Each city in URBank can be thought of as existing at the centre of a web of connected elements – roads, houses, administrative buildings, land use, dates,” says Chris Carleton, senior scientist within the DLU. “This enables ‘the city’ to be studied from a variety of different angles and quantitative insights into particular urban parameters to be compared across space and time.”
URBank continues to evolve and is designed to adapt to new questions and datasets. The project welcomes contributions and collaborations, developing data structures and theoretical approaches that connect archaeology to contemporary challenges. Researchers interested in linking their urban data to URBank should get in touch with at the contact information provided on this page.
Antiquity
Making comparative archaeological and historical urbanism rigorous and open access through the URBank data platform
6-Feb-2026