This is one of those datasets that no one besides an academic with a very narrow research question is likely to find useful. It's not reflective of what we understand about the extent of historical urbanism today, it's just a synthesis from two earlier, systematically flawed datasets into a machine readable form. It misses a lot, like the entirety of ancient urbanism in North Mexico/the American southwest, Numidia, Axum, large urban centers in central Asia, etc. The authors were aware of many of these shortcomings when they published this, but didn't want to add additional shortcomings from omissions beyond what the original datasets had.
> The authors were aware of many of these shortcomings
Soft sciences are rife with "yeah I'm aware of the problems with the thing I'm doing, but I'll do it anyway. I've presented a disclaimer, that should be enough to cover my ass".
> Soft sciences are rife with "yeah I'm aware of the problems with the thing I'm doing, but I'll do it anyway. I've presented a disclaimer, that should be enough to cover my ass"
It's not to cover one's ass but communicate limitations. If you think the hard sciences don't do this, I've got a cosmic distance ladder to sell you.
Think of it like Unicode. The Unicode Consortium’s job isn’t to create character encodings. Instead, it’s to unify encoding that already in common usage. If the encoding that is
In standard usage for a language is missing something, or there’s an issue with it, they’re not going to fix that.
