Settlement FAQs

a little history of the world patterns of settlement

by Lucious Zemlak Published 3 years ago Updated 2 years ago
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Full Answer

How did the shape of early settlements affect settlement patterns?

The shapes of early settlements were influenced by the surrounding landscape. They were also shaped by other factors such as who owned the land and whether the land was good for building on or not. Some examples of settlement patterns include, nucleated settlements, linear settlements and dispersed settlements.

What is settlement pattern in archaeology?

Updated March 08, 2017. In the scientific field of archaeology, the term "settlement pattern" refers to the evidence within a given region of the physical remnants of communities and networks. That evidence is used to interpret the way interdependent local groups of people interacted in the past.

Can you identify these settlement patterns from the air?

You can see the different settlement patterns complete with illustrations and defintions. Best identified from the air, we look at: linear settlements, nucleated settlements and dispersed settlements. Read on to see if you can identify these settlements from the air too.

When did settlement archaeology take off?

This aspect of settlement archaeology really took off in the first half of the twentieth century in Europe, as in many other regions of the world, and for interesting reasons is still relevant today.

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What are settlement patterns in history?

In the scientific field of archaeology, the term "settlement pattern" refers to the evidence within a given region of the physical remnants of communities and networks. That evidence is used to interpret the way interdependent local groups of people interacted in the past.

What is history of settlement?

It is the study of settlement in regions of old civilization, the analysis · of the facts that led to the full development of the areas, that will provide.

What are the 4 types of settlement patterns?

Rural settlement patterns refer to the shape of the settlement boundaries, which often involve an interaction with the surrounding landscape features. The most common patterns are linear, rectangular, circular or semi-circular, and triangular.

What are the 3 settlement patterns?

Population settlement patterns can be separated into to three distinct patterns: Linear. Clustered (or nucleated) Scattered.

What are the 5 types of settlements?

There are 5 types of settlement classified according to their pattern, these are, isolated, dispersed, nucleated, and linear.

What is settlement pattern?

settlement patterns. Definition English: A settlement pattern refers to the way that buildings and houses are distributed in a rural settlement. Settlement patterns are of interest to geographers, historians, and anthropologists for the insight they offer in how a community has developed over time.

What is importance of settlement?

The function of a settlement helps to identify the economic and social development of a place and can show its main activity. Most large settlements have more than one function though in the past one function was maybe the most important in defining the success and growth in importance of the settlement.

What is the most common type of settlement pattern in the world?

Dispersed, linear and nucleated are the most common. A dispersed pattern is where isolated buildings are spread out across an area, usually separated by a few hundred metres with no central focus. It is typically an area containing buildings rather than a single settlement.

What are types of Class 7 settlements?

Settlements can be permanent or temporary.Temporary Settlement. Settlements which are occupied for a short time Eire called temporary settlements. ... Permanent Settlement. Under permanent settlements, people build homes to live in.

What are settlement types?

Rural settlements in India can broadly be put into four types: • Clustered, agglomerated or nucleated, • Semi-clustered or fragmented, • Hamleted, and • Dispersed or isolated.

What are different types of settlements?

The four main types of settlements are urban, rural, compact, and dispersed. Urban settlements are densely populated and are mostly non-agricultural. They are known as cities or metropolises and are the most populated type of settlement. These settlements take up the most land, resources, and services.

What is an example of a settlement?

An example of a settlement is when divorcing parties agree on how to split up their assets. An example of a settlement is when you buy a house and you and the sellers sign all the documents to officially transfer the property. An example of settlement is when the colonists came to America.

What is a settlement?

1 : a formal agreement that ends an argument or dispute. 2 : final payment (as of a bill) 3 : the act or fact of establishing colonies the settlement of New England. 4 : a place or region newly settled. 5 : a small village.

What is called a settlement?

A settlement is a colony or any small community of people. If a bunch of people build houses on the moon together, they'll have the first lunar settlement. A settlement is also the resolution of something such as a lawsuit. One kind of settlement is a place where people live.

What is an example of settlement?

An example of a settlement is when divorcing parties agree on how to split up their assets. An example of a settlement is when you buy a house and you and the sellers sign all the documents to officially transfer the property. An example of settlement is when the colonists came to America.

What is the meaning of settlement in geography?

Settlement: is a place where people live. A settlement may be as small as a single house in a remote area or as a large as a mega city (a city with over 10 million residents). Site: is the actual location of a settlement on the earth and is composed of the physical characteristics of the landscape specific to the area.

What is a settlement pattern?

A settlement pattern re fers to the shape of the settlement as seen from above. The shapes of early settlements were influenced by the surrounding landscape. They were also shaped by other factors such as who owned the land and whether the land was good for building on or not. Some examples of settlement patterns include, nucleated settlements, linear settlements and dispersed settlements .

Why did early settlers form villages?

Early settlers forming villages would often live together for safety, for friendship, and to share services. These early settlements would take on distinctive patterns based on the shape of the land around them. Here we can see some examples of different settlement patterns.

What is a dispersed settlement?

Dispersed settlements are ones where the houses are spread out over a wide area. They are often the homes of farmers and can be found in rural areas. Example of a dispersed settlement: Brülisau, Switzerland is an example of a linear settlement. Brülisau in Switzerland is an example of a dispersed village.

What is an example of a dispersed village?

Brülisau in Switzerland is an example of a dispersed village.

Is Little Thetford a nucleated village?

Little Thetford in England is an example of a nucleated village.

What is the relationship between a settlement and its immediate landscape?

We can make a useful distinction in most cases between the relationship of a settlement to its immediate landscape and its relationships with neighboring and more distant settlements. By the 1930s, and increasingly in later decades, archaeologists and geographers investigated the location of domestic and other sites with respect to the qualities of their surrounding physical landscapes. The focus was on geology and soils, with the aim of testing whether past peoples selected habitation places because of the proximity of certain types of cultivable or grazing land and mineral or other resources. By the later 1960s a series of studies by human geographers and anthropologists had suggested that the characteristics of landscape exploitation by humans around settlements were similar to those of the territorial behavior of many animal species. Moreover, such exploitation was constrained by the economics of daily travel to fields or pastures remote from home.

How were rural settlements serviced?

During the course of the twentieth century, geographers found that clusters of rural farming and stockbreeding settlements in medieval and early modern times were serviced by regularly spaced "central places" that provided administrative and commercial functions . In some elaborate state societies these service centers might be ordered in hierarchies, each level with its own spatial logic. The fundamental idea behind the study of the extent of territory exploited from individual farming settlements without service roles, that travel time is a major consideration for daily work in the fields (the "friction of distance"), is also important for focal communities. Take the examples of market towns and Roman forts. In the former case it can be shown that peasants prefer markets that are accessible within a day's return to their homes, a two- to three-hour journey each way, thus producing rural towns at intervals of 20–30 kilometers or less. The same intervals might be reproduced in military control centers, allowing a fort under attack to be reached by a relieving force from adjacent bases that lay within a day's march.

What is excavation and total surface and subsurface prospection?

Excavation and total surface and sub-surface prospection, together with the reassessment and renewal of anthropological and historical models for intrasettlement analysis (social and economic, symbolic, and religious activities) continue to enrich understanding of the nature of life within past settlements. This encourages cross-cultural comparisons and contrasts, with reliable empirical and theoretical foundations, for human settlement behavior.

What is central place theory?

This neatly brings us to the "central place" theories in archaeological settlement studies . Developed in the first half of the twentieth century by geographers, this concept goes well beyond the simple observations that most rural settlements cluster around market towns where various important services are available and that such foci tend to be within easy reach of most rural dwellers. Some geographic theorists, inspired by the desire to find a set of human behavioral laws and mathematical patterning comparable to the laws of physics and the geometry of many aspects of the natural world, have suggested that there is a detectable tendency toward highly elaborate and overlapping regular designs in the layout and spacing of district and regional foci of political and economic control. It has become apparent, however, that the extremely complex geometry that illustrates the theoretical schemes for central places by such human geographers as Christaller, Loesch, and others rarely agrees with geographical reality. It is therefore not very surprising that although settlement archaeologists have tried to find parallels in premodern societies, they have found that archaeological central places are spread in a regular pattern over past landscapes only in very simple terms.

What is the purpose of settlement archaeology?

Some researchers turn to settlement archaeology in the search for cross-cultural regularities —preferably with a very exact or even mathematical form, in the light of a global science of human settlements. The internal form of domestic settlements (intrasite study) should express in constructed space the workings of the social group it housed. The analysis of settlement systems across the landscape (intersite study) should reveal strong, regular settlement patterning correlated with quantifiable environmental variables and with the attempt to define rather abstract laws of human motion in space (e.g., site catchment analysis, discussed below) and a patterning of a geometric kind reflecting a very ordered spatial patterning of human settlements at the regional scale (locational analysis inspired by developments in human geography).

How to analyze past settlement sites?

Analysis of past settlement sites generally relies on combining various methodologies. Very rarely are such sites totally excavated, especially if they are larger than single farmsteads. Thus, inferences are made by linking windows of detailed information from dug sectors (if available) with wider site coverage, utilizing surface artifact survey, aerial photos, and a battery of geophysical and geochemical techniques. The primary aim is to define the boundaries of domestic activity and its varying character across the site and in each period of occupation. A secondary aim is to define the forms of economic activity carried out at the site. Third, and usually most difficult, is the attempt to reconstruct the social organization and mentalities or worldviews of the site's residents.

What is the study of settlements?

The archaeology of settlements has grown progressively in its scope and methodology over the long history of the discipline, so that the modern study possesses a wide range of topics and approaches. The general public is still naturally fascinated by images and reconstructions of monumental, nondomestic sites, such as burial mounds, temples, and fortified centers, which were the main focus of pioneer research into archaeological landscapes during the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries a.d. Even in those times, however, more everyday insight into the landscapes and settlements of ordinary people came with unusual archaeological discoveries, such as the wonderfully preserved, volcanically sealed small Roman town of Pompeii or similarly preserved, but water-sealed Swiss prehistoric lake villages.

What was the land the king bestowed on him?

In return for his fief all a prince had to do was to take his lords of the manor and his peasants with him into battle to fight for the king, if there was a war.

What are the strange buildings in Babylon?

These are tall, broad towers made up of terraces piled one on top of another,with formidable ramps and steep, narrow staircases. Right at the very top was a temple dedicated to the moon, or one of the other plan- ets. People came from far and wide to ask the priests to read their fortunes in the stars, and brought offerings of great value. These half-ruined ziggurats can still be seen today, poking out of the rubble mounds,with inscriptions telling how this or that king built or restored them. The earliest kings in this region lived as long ago as 3000 , and the last around 550 . The last great Babylonian king was Nebuchadnezzar. He lived around 600  and is remembered for his feats of war. He fought against Egypt and brought a vast number of foreign captives home to Babylon as slaves. And yet his truly greatest deeds were not his wars: he had huge canals and water cisterns dug in order to retain the water and irrigate the land, so that it became rich and fertile. Only when those canals became blocked with silt and the cisterns filled with mud did the land become what it is today: a desert wasteland and marshy plain with,here and there,one of those hills I mentioned. So, whenever we are glad that the week is nearly over, and Sun- day is coming round again, we must spare a thought for those hills of rubble in that hot and marshy plain, and for those fierce kings with their long, black beards. For now we know how it all fits together. ,  ... 21

Why did people paint pictures of animals on cave walls?

walls of caves? Just for decoration? That doesn’t seem likely, because the caves were so dark. Of course we can’t be sure, but we think they may have been trying to make magic, that they believed that painting pictures of animals on the walls would make those animals appear. Rather like when we say ‘Talk of the devil!’ when someone we’ve been talking about turns up unexpectedly.After all, these animals were their prey,and without them they would starve. So they may have been trying to invent a magic spell. It would be nice to think that such things worked. But they never have yet. The Ice Age lasted for an unimaginably long time. Many tens of thousands of years, which was just as well, for otherwise these people would not have had time to invent all these things. But gradually the earth grew warmer and the ice retreated to the high mountains, and people – who by now were much like us – learnt, with the warmth,to plant grasses and then grind the seeds to make a paste which they could bake in the fire, and this was bread. In the course of time they learnt to build tents and tame animals which until then had roamed freely around. And they followed their herds, as people in Lapland still do. Because forests were dangerous places in those days, home to large numbers of wild animals such as wolves and bears,people in several places (and this is often the case with inventors) had the same excellent idea: they built ‘pile dwellings’ in the middle of lakes, huts on stilts rammed deep in the mud. By this time they were masters at shaping and polishing their tools and used a different, harder stone to bore holes in their axe-heads for handles. That must have been hard work! Work which could take the whole of the winter. Imagine how often the axe-head must have broken at the last minute, so that they had to start all over again. The next thing these people discovered was how to make pots out of clay, which they soon learnt to decorate with patterns and fire in ovens, although by this time, in the late Stone Age, they had stopped painting pictures of animals.In the end,perhaps six thou- sand years ago (that is, 4000 ), they found a new and more con- venient way of making tools: they discovered metals. Not all of them at once, of course. It began with some green stones which 8      

What did the Christian rulers do in 1479?

He turned to Spain. There, in 1479, the rulers of two Christian kingdoms had been united by marriage and were engaged in a mer- ciless campaign to expel the Arabs – who,as you know,had ruled in Spain for more than seven hundred years – not only from their wonderful capital, Granada, but from their kingdom altogether.

What is a body preserved in this manner called?

A body preserved in this manner is called a mummy. And today, after thousands of years, these mummies are still intact. A mummy was placed in a coffin made of wood,the wooden coffin in one of stone,and the stone one buried, not in the earth, but in a tomb that was chiselled out of the rock.

Where did the Phoenicians live?

Men who travelled far and wide across the seas, bartering and trading in every land. They lived quite near the Jews, in the ports of Tyre and Sidon, cities much larger and more powerful than Jerusalem, and quite as noisy and bustling as Babylon.And in fact,their language and their religion were not unlike those of the peoples of Mesopotamia, though they didn’t share their love of war. The Phoenicians (for this was the name of the people of Tyre and Sidon) made their con- quests by other means. They sailed across the seas to unknown shores,where they landed and set up trading posts.The wild tribes living there brought them furs and precious stones in exchange for tools, cooking pots and coloured cloth. For Phoenician crafts- manship was known throughout the world – indeed, their artisans had even helped in the construction of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. Most popular of all their goods was their dyed cloth, especially the purple,which they sold throughout the world.Many Phoenicians stayed in their trading posts on foreign shores and built towns. Everywhere they went they were welcomed, in Africa, Spain and in southern Italy,on account of the beautiful things they brought. Nor did they ever feel cut off from home, because they could write letters to their friends in Tyre and Sidon, using the wonder- fully simple script they had invented, which we still use today. It’s true! Take this ‘B’, for example: it is almost identical to the one used by the ancient Phoenicians, three thousand years ago, when they wrote home from distant shores, sending news to their fam- ilies in those noisy, bustling harbour towns. Now you know this, you’ll be sure not to forget the Phoenicians. 30      

Who is the translator of New Haven and London?

NEW HAVEN AND LONDON TRANSLATED BY CAROLINE MUSTILL

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Anthropological Underpinnings

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Settlement pattern as a concept was developed by social geographers in the late 19th century. The term referred then to how people live across a given landscape, in particular, what resources (water, arable land, transportation networks) they chose to live by and how they connected with one another: and the term is still a current …
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Patterns Versus Systems

  • Archaeologists refer to both settlement pattern studies and settlement system studies, sometimes interchangeably. If there is a difference, and you could argue about that, it might be that pattern studies look at the observable distribution of sites, while system studies look at how the people living at those sites interacted: modern archaeology can't really do one with the other.
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New Technologies

  • Although systematic settlement patterns and landscape studies are practiced in many diverse environments, before modern imaging systems, archaeologists attempting to study heavily vegetated areas were not as successful as they might have been. A variety of means to penetrate the gloom have been identified, including the use of high definition aerial photography, subsurfa…
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Selected Sources

  1. Curley, Daniel, John Flynn, and Kevin Barton. "Bouncing Beams Reveal Hidden Archaeology." Archaeology Ireland32.2 (2018): 24–29.
  2. Feinman, Gary M. "Settlement and Landscape Archaeology." International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences(Second Edition). Ed. Wright, James D. Oxford: Elsevier, 2015. 654–58, doi:10....
  1. Curley, Daniel, John Flynn, and Kevin Barton. "Bouncing Beams Reveal Hidden Archaeology." Archaeology Ireland32.2 (2018): 24–29.
  2. Feinman, Gary M. "Settlement and Landscape Archaeology." International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences(Second Edition). Ed. Wright, James D. Oxford: Elsevier, 2015. 654–58, doi:10....
  3. Golden, Charles, et al. "Reanalyzing Environmental Lidar Data for Archaeology: Mesoamerican Applications and Implications." Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports9 (2016): 293–308, doi:10.1016/...
  4. Grosman, Leore. "Reaching the Point of No Return: The Computational Revolution in Archaeology." Annual Review of Anthropology45.1 (2016): 129–45, doi:10.1146/annurev-anth…

Intrasettlement Archaeology

  • Analysis of past settlement sites generally relies on combining various methodologies. Very rarely are such sites totally excavated, especially if they are larger than single farmsteads. Thus, inferences are made by linking windows of detailed information from dug sectors (if available) with wider site coverage, utilizing surface artifact survey, aerial photos, and a battery of geophys…
See more on encyclopedia.com

Intersettlement Archaeology

  • We can make a useful distinction in most cases between the relationship of a settlement to its immediate landscape and its relationships with neighboring and more distant settlements. By the 1930s, and increasingly in later decades, archaeologists and geographers investigated the location of domestic and other sites with respect to the qualities of their surrounding physical la…
See more on encyclopedia.com

Total Landscape History

  • So far we have examined the internal plans of settlements, the way their occupants moved out to exploit a site's environment, and the dependency relationships between central places and the lesser rural communities they serviced. But also, how does one find, map, date, and interpret the vestiges of past settlements? It might seem relatively simple....
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Major Themes in The Evolution of European Settlement Systems and Landscape Use

  • One can highlight several themes in the development of settlement analysis, at the present time, some of which show the influence of abundant results from intensive field survey and the rise of micro-analysis of the landscape. In terms of intrasettlement studies, attention is being drawn to the material evidence that might help us recognize certain forms of internal social organization …
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Bibliography

  • Aston, Michael, and Christopher Gerrard. "'Unique, Traditional, and Charming': The Shapwick Project, Somerset." The Antiquaries Journal79 (1999): 1–58. Bintliff, John L. "Going to Market in Antiquity." In ZuWasser und zu Land: Verkehrswege in der antiken Welt.Edited by Eckart Olshausen and Holger Sonnabend, pp. 209–250. Stuttgarter Kolloquium zur historischen Geogra…
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