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I suspect that less efficient land use and the need for large urban centres to produce most of their staples relatively nearby might conspire to create more sprawling settlements with smaller populations. I'm also not convinced that there were as many large conurbations as now - at least not as many in use at any given time.
I'm only speculating, of course, and have no idea either way. My main suspicion is that we have little evidence of what must have been large (wooden) shanty towns around the stone-built urban cores of which we see remains today. I'm obviously also not trying to claim that the population was comparable to ours. There is little doubt that most Mayan cities had relatively clearly determinable periods of flourishing that, thanks to Mayan inscriptions, can be related to political events, and that the cities whose remains we see were indeed great at different times.
That said, the scale of some ancient cities is incredible. The settlement surrounding Ankor Wat was the largest and most populous city to have ever existed, until Paris overtook it in the 1800s. The engineering and urban planning skills that went into it are amazing!
Yes, and not only Angkor, but also Bagan:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagan
Less of a megacity, but equally impressive in some ways.
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Oliver Schick
I suspect that less efficient land use and the need for large urban centres to produce most of their staples relatively nearby might conspire to create more sprawling settlements with smaller populations. I'm also not convinced that there were as many large conurbations as now - at least not as many in use at any given time.
That said, the scale of some ancient cities is incredible. The settlement surrounding Ankor Wat was the largest and most populous city to have ever existed, until Paris overtook it in the 1800s. The engineering and urban planning skills that went into it are amazing!