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 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.
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.
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.
What is a tell in archaeology?
Tell (archaeology) In archaeology, a tell, or tel (derived from Arabic: تَل, tall or Hebrew: תל tell, 'hill' or 'mound' ), is an artificial mound formed from the accumulated refuse of generations of people living on the same site for hundreds or thousands of years.
Why do we study settlement patterns?
Settlements and the patterns they etch on Earth's surface provide not only information on current economic, political, and social conditions, but also a historical record of past conditions. Today's settlement patterns provide information about past settlement processes and land-use patterns.
Why is settlement archaeology critical to our understanding of the past?
Why is settlement archaeology critical to our understanding of the past? Archaeologists study households by seeing how household members interact with other individuals in other households as well as how entire households interact with other households.
What is reflected in the pattern of a settlement?
Patterns of rural settlements reflect the way the houses are sited in relation to each other. The site of the village, the surrounding topography and terrain influence the shape and size of a village.
How do you describe a settlement pattern?
Settlements take on a range of shapes when they form. 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.
What can archaeology tell us about the past?
Archaeologists are interested in how people of the past lived, worked, traded with others, moved across the landscape, and what they believed. Understanding the past may help us better understand our own society and that of other cultures.
How do archaeologists identify the places with artefacts in it?
Solution. Archaeologists also look at buildings, ruins, unusual mounds or sunken spots in the land. Sometimes, archaeologists can tell where old roads or walls once stood by looking at aerial photographs. Other times they can get clues from old books, documents and maps.
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.
How does pattern of settlement affect physical features?
Answer: One of the most basic factors affecting settlement patterns is the physical geography of the land. Climate is key, because if a place is too dry, too cold or too hot, it's more difficult for large numbers of people to settle there, especially if they make their living from farming.
What is the impact of human settlement?
The impact of human settlements on the environment increases with population growth, settlement expansion, economic growth and increased consumption. All indications are that the impact of human settlements on environmental resources is increasing.
What is the meaning of settlement geography?
Referring to Stone (1960), settlement geography is. the description and analysis of the distribution of buildings by which people attach themselves to the land. Further, that the geography of settling designate the action of erecting buildings in order to occupy an area temporarily or permanently.
What are the factors affecting settlement patterns?
Where people settle is determined by the main factors such as physical environment,demographic, natural, transportation, economic and social concerns.
How many settlement patterns do you know about define them briefly?
Settlement Types There are generally three types of settlements: compact, semi-compact, and dispersed. Each is based on its population density.
Why is archaeology important to the study of history?
Archaeology provides us with the opportunity to learn about past cultures through the study of artifacts, animal bones and sometimes human bones. Studying these artifacts helps to provide us with some insight about what life was like for people who left behind no written record.
Why is archaeology an important source of information of prehistory?
Archaeology is the study of material remains of distant past. Archaeology is so important for the study of prehistory because we have no written records, only the materials like stones, metal tools, pottery, images, coins, monuments, jewelry, and figures are very helpful in the study of past.
How and why is the process of archaeology important in the study of ancient world history?
The goal of archaeology is to understand how and why human behavior has changed over time. Archaeologists search for patterns in the evolution of significant cultural events such as the development of farming, the emergence of cities, or the collapse of major civilizations for clues of why these events occurred.
Why is the work of archaeologist considered very important?
The study of archaeology satisfies the basic human need to know where we came from, and possibly understand our own human nature. Some people even believe the study of archaeology allows for cultural self-refection that will provide for a better foundation for our collective future.
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).
What is regional surface survey?
Regional surface survey has rapidly filled in the countryside with a density of sites, especially domestic settlements —an entirely unexpected result. Furthermore, the scientific plotting of finds across these sites and their laboratory study enables the archaeologist to date the periods in which people were active at these sites. Through rigorous analysis it is even possible to distinguish times when only a part of the settlement was in use or when the site was merely a temporary habitation or a nonresidential focus of rural activity.
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 does catchment analysis work?
Catchment analysis seeks to determine the types of resources accessible at increasing distances from the domestic habitations of communities that are thought to have obtained their livelihood mainly through exploiting the site's hinterland. This method may reveal that a group of sites in a particular region and period all lay in a highly rational location to maximize efficient use of particular types of land or landscape. Equally, the same locations may be revealed to have been chosen with defensive, religious, or other noneconomic factors as the primary concerns and thus perhaps were less than desirable in terms of quick access to arable fields or meadows for grazing flocks.
What is the scientific method of human behavior in space?
These are largely scientific spatial techniques adopted from geography since the 1990s, primarily a method of rapidly evolving computerized mapping called GIS (Geographic Information Systems).
How did ancient societies live?
The relationship between the way ancient societies lived (their settlement types) and how they provided for themselves (their food production) can be complex. Some people lived in settled villages while still roaming the countryside to hunt and gather food. Yet others lived a more mobile lifestyle, although they grew their own food and raised their own domesticated livestock. From Hungary to the Near East, and from North Africa to central Asia, settlement patterns were fairly similar, although the time period for their development differed.
What is the relationship between the way ancient societies lived and how they provided for themselves?
Neolithic Archaeology. The relationship between the way ancient societies lived (their settlement types) and how they provided for themselves (their food production) can be complex. Some people lived in settled villages while still roaming the countryside to hunt and gather food.
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 .
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.
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.
Is Little Thetford a nucleated village?
Little Thetford in England is an example of a nucleated village.
Summary
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated.
Cite this Record
Settlement Patterns in Archaeology. K. C. Chang. Addison-Wesley Modules in Anthropology ,1. Reading, MA: Unknown. 1972 ( tDAR id: 153114)
How many tells have been found in ancient Israel?
Upwards of 5,000 tells have been detected in the area of ancient Israel, (including the area covered by modern Israel and Palestine) and Jordan. Of these Paul Lapp calculated in the 1960s that 98% had yet to be touched by archaeologists.
What does the word "khirbet" mean?
The Arabic word khirbet or khirbat ( خربة ), meaning 'ruin', also occurs in the names of many archaeological tells, such as Khirbet et-Tell (lit. 'heap of ruins'). Tell is first attested in English in 1840 in a report in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society. Variant spellings include tall, tel, til, and tal.
What is the meaning of Akkadian?
The Akkadian form corresponds to Sumerian DUL (which can also refer to a 'pile' of any material, like grain), but it is not known whether the similarity reflects a borrowing from that language, or if the Sumerian term itself was a loanword from an earlier Semitic substrate language.
How tall is Tell Barri?
Tell Barri, northeastern Syria, from the west; this is 32 meters (105 feet) high, and its base covers 37 hectares (90 acres) The Citadel of Aleppo, northern Syria, on top of a tell occupied since at least the third millennium BC. Tel Megiddo. In archaeology, a tell or tel (borrowed into English from Arabic: تَل , tall, 'mound' or 'small hill'), ...
What is Tel Megiddo?
In archaeology, a tell or tel (borrowed into English from Arabic: تَل , tall, 'mound' or 'small hill'), is an artificial topographical feature, a species of mound consisting of the stratified debris from the accumulated refuse of generations of people who once formed a settlement and dwelt on the same site.
Where are the Toumbas of Macedonia and Magoulas of Thessaly?
The Toumbas of Macedonia and the Magoulas of Thessaly are the local names for tell sites in these regions of Greece.
When was Bulgaria's eneolithic?
Northeastern Bulgaria has a rich archaeological heritage of eneolithic tells from the 5th millennium BCE.
What do archaeologists look for in a site report?
In addition to primary historical documents, archaeologists will look for site reports that other archaeologists have written about this area. These reports will describe what the archaeologist found in this area during any previous investigations. These older site reports can help guide the new research. The State Historic Preservation Office maintains documentation files for all the recorded archaeological sites in each state. This will include previous archaeological research reports about sites in the state.
How do archaeologists record the exact location of all artifacts and features on a site?
They establish a datum point, or fixed reference point for all measurements. Then they superimpose a rectangular grid over the whole site. They measure each square in the grid and assign it a number. These squares are often referred to as units. This system allows the archaeologist to create a precise map and to record the exact location of all the features and artifacts on the site.
How do archaeologists determine the location of an archaeological site?
It helps determine where archaeologists look for sites based on factors like distance from water, ground steepness, soil type, and other factors that influence where people settle or perform certain tasks. The methods used to find sites will depend on the kind of research questions that the archaeologist is trying to answer. If there are plans for highway or housing construction, archaeologists may need to know of any archaeological sites on the property. First they will check if there were any previous surveys in the area and, if so, what the results were. If there are no previously recorded sites, the archaeologist will conduct an archaeological survey.
What is preservation collection?
Preserving Collections. The methods used by archaeologists to gather data can apply to any time period, including the recent past. One archaeologist in the U.S. has become known for his study of the garbage discarded by the people of Tuscon, Arizona in the 1970s! This "garbology" project proved that even recent artifacts can reveal a lot about ...
What field of study do archaeologists use?
Archaeologists also rely on methods from other fields such as history, botany, geology, and soil science.
Why do archaeologists collaborate with descendants?
Archaeologists today collaborate with descendants to better understand the cultural traditions of their pasts. Archaeologists working on the 19th-century Levi Jordan Plantation in Texas interviewed descendants. They included both descendants of the plantation owners and of the enslaved plantation workers as part of their research. These archaeologists wanted to include the voices and perspectives of all the past peoples who lived and worked there. At Castle Rock Pueblo in southwestern Colorado, archaeologists used oral history. Through the oral traditions of modern Puebloan people, they learned about the past culture of their Anasazi ancestors.
Why are archaeological collections preserved?
Archaeological collections are also preserved for use in museum exhibits so that the public may benefit from the archaeological research that unearthed them. This way, we can all connect to the work that archaeologists do.
Anthropological Underpinnings
History of Settlement Pattern Studies
- Settlement pattern studies were first conducted using regional survey, in which archaeologists systematically walked over hectares and hectares of land, typically within a given river valley. But the analysis only truly became feasible after remote sensing was developed, beginning with photographic methods such as those used by Pierre Paris at Oc Eobut now, of course, using sat…
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…
Selected Sources
- Curley, Daniel, John Flynn, and Kevin Barton. "Bouncing Beams Reveal Hidden Archaeology." Archaeology Ireland32.2 (2018): 24–29.
- 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....
- Curley, Daniel, John Flynn, and Kevin Barton. "Bouncing Beams Reveal Hidden Archaeology." Archaeology Ireland32.2 (2018): 24–29.
- 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....
- 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/...
- 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…
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...
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. Particularly in western Europe, beg…
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 …
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…