Hi, we're here from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes.

I'm Cody Gough.

And I'm Ashley Hamer.

Today you learn what ancient cities can teach us about modern cities from UCLA Professor Monica L. Smith. We'll also answer a listener question. in is helping us learn about ancient cities and what researchers are finding

could lead to smarter city planning in the future. We're going to dig into the

details in the third and final edition of our Sunday Cities mini series

with Monica L. Smith.

She's an archaeologist and a professor in the Department of Anthropology at UCLA, and she's the

author of a new book called Cities, The First Six Thousand Years. I asked her how technology has changed the way we've been able to study

cities from history and here's what she told us.

Well there are a couple of ways that technology has changed our ability to analyze ancient settlements.

One of them is a technology called LIDAR, which is an aerial scanning radar where you can actually see through vegetation to look at the

range of architecture around a city. It's been particularly important for

places in the jungle like the Maya cities which we used to think of were just a kind

of ceremonial center with pyramids and a temple but now with this LIDAR

technology we realize that those cities are completely surrounded by suburbs in ways that are very

reminiscent of modern cities.

Another way that technology has changed what we do is that we can now do big data archaeology. We can look at how cities are similar and different

across the planet by looking at things like the sizes of houses or the sizes of streets or the amount of

construction material that's required for building a city wall.

Now we can put all these things in databases and try to compare to see how fast cities are growing in different kinds of

environments, which then lead us to be able to address human environmental issues,

...