Key Takeaways: Settlement Patterns
- The study of settlement patterns in archaeology involves a set of techniques and analytical methods to examine the cultural past of a region.
- The method allows examination of sites in their contexts, as well as interconnectedness and change across time.
- Methods include surface survey assisted by aerial photography and LiDAR.
What is a settlement pattern?
A settlement pattern is the distribution of human activities across the landscape and the spatial relationship between these activities and ... Access to the complete content on Oxford Reference requires a subscription or purchase.
What is an archaeological settlement pattern study?
Conducting regional survey means you can investigate the evolution of communities, and that's what archaeological settlement pattern studies do today. Archaeologists refer to both settlement pattern studies and settlement system studies, sometimes interchangeably.
What do patterns of rural settlement indicate about rural settlement?
Patterns of rural settlement indicate much about the history, economy, society, and minds of those who created them as well as about the land itself.
How did pre-European settlement patterns affect the United States?
Although the land that now constitutes the United States was occupied and much affected by diverse Indian cultures over many millennia, these pre-European settlement patterns have had virtually no impact upon the contemporary nation—except locally, as in parts of New Mexico.
What is the 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 are the 3 types of settlement patterns?
There are generally three types of settlements: compact, semi-compact, and dispersed.
What are the 4 settlement patterns?
Some examples of settlement patterns include, nucleated settlements, linear settlements and dispersed settlements.
What is the importance of settlement pattern?
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.
What are the 5 types of settlement patterns?
There are 5 types of settlement classified according to their pattern, these are, isolated, dispersed, nucleated, and linear.
What are 2 main types of settlement?
Settlements can broadly be divided into two types – rural and urban.
What are the main types of settlement?
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.
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 are the factors that influence the settlement pattern?
1 Physical Environment. One of the most basic factors affecting settlement patterns is the physical geography of the land. ... 2 Transportation Systems. Settlement patterns have always been affected by the technology available to settlers, and especially by methods of transportation. ... 3 Economic Concerns. ... 4 Government Policies.
What are the benefits of settlement?
Advantages of SettlementYou decide the outcome. ... A settlement brings the dispute to an end so you can put the complaint behind you and move on.Settlement is usually much faster, with less steps than the hearing process.Settlement talks are confidential.More items...
What are the features of settlement?
Settlements come in all different shapes, sizes and locations. The function of a settlement can be identified by looking at its shape, size, site and situation....These functions included:port.market town.resort.
What are the main types of settlement?
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.
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 the different types of human settlements?
Human settlements can broadly be divided into two types – rural and urban. Rural settlements: Rural settlements are most closely and directly related to land. They are dominated by primary activities such as agriculture, animal husbandry, fishing etc. The settlements size is relatively small.
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 are the patterns of rural settlement?
Patterns of rural settlement indicate much about the history, economy, society, and minds of those who created them as well as about the land itself. The essential design of rural activity in the United States bears a strong family resemblance to that of other neo-European lands, such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina, or tsarist Siberia —places that have undergone rapid occupation and exploitation by immigrants intent upon short-term development and enrichment. In all such areas, under novel social and political conditions and with a relative abundance of territory and physical resources, ideas and institutions derived from a relatively stable medieval or early modern Europe have undergone major transformation. Further, these are nonpeasant countrysides, alike in having failed to achieve the intimate symbiosis of people and habitat, the humanized rural landscapes characteristic of many relatively dense, stable, earthbound communities in parts of Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America.
What are the characteristics of American settlement?
Another special characteristic of American settlement, one that became obvious only by the mid-20th century, is the convergence of rural and urban modes of life. The farmsteads—and rural folk in general—have become increasingly urbanized, and agricultural operations have become more automated, while the metropolis grows more gelatinous, unfocused, and pseudo-bucolic along its margins.
What is the impression of the settled portion of the American landscape, rural or urban, is one of disorder and inco?
The overall impression of the settled portion of the American landscape, rural or urban, is one of disorder and incoherence, even in areas of strict geometric survey. The individual landscape unit is seldom in visual harmony with its neighbour, so that, however sound in design or construction the single structure may be, the general effect is untidy. These attributes have been intensified by the acute individualism of the American, vigorous speculation in land and other commodities, a strongly utilitarian attitude toward the land and the treasures above and below it, and government policy and law. The landscape is also remarkable for its extensive transportation facilities, which have greatly influenced the configuration of the land.
How did pre-European settlements affect the United States?
Although the land that now constitutes the United States was occupied and much affected by diverse Indian cultures over many millennia, these pre-European settlement patterns have had virtually no impact upon the contemporary nation—except locally, as in parts of New Mexico. A benign habitat permitted a huge contiguous tract of settled land to materialize across nearly all the eastern half of the United States and within substantial patches of the West. The vastness of the land, the scarcity of labour, and the abundance of migratory opportunities in a land replete with raw physical resources contributed to exceptional human mobility and a quick succession of ephemeral forms of land use and settlement. Human endeavours have greatly transformed the landscape, but such efforts have been largely destructive. Most of the pre-European landscape in the United States was so swiftly and radically altered that it is difficult to conjecture intelligently about its earlier appearance.
Where is checkerboard pattern found?
A systematic rectangular layout, rather less rigorous in form, also appears in much of Texas and in those portions of Maine, western New York and Pennsylvania, and southern Georgia that were settled after the 1780s.
Where did the rectangular layout originate?
A systematic rectangular layout, rather less rigorous in form, also appears in much of Texas and in those portions of Maine, western New York and Pennsylvania, and southern Georgia that were settled after the 1780s.
How were townships laid out?
Townships were laid out as blocks, each six by six miles in size, oriented with the compass directions . Thirty-six sections, each one square mile, or 640 acres (260 hectares), in size, were designated within each township; and public roads were established along section lines and, where needed, along half-section lines. At irregular intervals, offsets in survey lines and roads were introduced to allow for the Earth’s curvature. Individual property lines were coincident with, or parallel to, survey lines, and this pervasive rectangularity generally carried over into the geometry of fields and fences or into the townsites later superimposed upon the basic rural survey.
What is a pattern in a settlement?
Patterns refer to the shape of a settlement, not its density. It's easier to define the compact or semi-compact settlements, as the dispersed settlements are usually too spread out to define a shape. There are many more patterns, but the most common rural settlement patterns are:
Where are linear settlements found?
Linear: These settlements are built in a line of houses. Often, they are found in a long valley, but they can also stretch out along a roadway or riverbank.
What is a semi compact settlement?
Semi-compact types are clusters of houses, also called hamlets, not as tightly placed as compact settlements, but showing a clear grouping and boundary. Dispersed settlements are scattered throughout the rural landscape with farmers building homes directly on their farmland.
What are the factors that make up a dispersed settlement?
Dispersed settlements are the result of many different factors, including the needs of the farm to have permanent attendants, open grasslands, hilly terrains, and relative security that raiders will not attack it. Patterns refer to the shape of a settlement, not its density.
What type of settlements are built around a lake?
We also find this in settlements built all at once. Circular or semi-circular: These types of settlements are often built partway around or completely surrounding a lake or large pond. Circular settlements are also built for defense with a protective wall around the perimeter.
Which settlement has the highest density of population?
Compact settlements have the highest density of population. They have homes stacked together, often touching at the sides or stacked in multi-family buildings. Streets tend to be narrow between the rows of homes. We often find this type of arrangement in highly fertile floodplains.
What are cultural factors?
Cultural factors, including how people traditionally use the land, ideas of ownership, the crops they choose to grow, social hierarchy, and transportation availability.
How do informal settlements behave?
Informal settlements behave very dynamical over space and time and the number of people living in such housing areas is growing worldwide. The reasons for this dynamical behavior are manifold and are not matter of this article. Nevertheless, informal settlements represent a status quo of housing and living conditions which is from a humanitarian point of view in the most cases below acceptable levels. Therefore, reliable spatial information about informal settlements is vital for any actions of improvement of these living conditions. Since remote sensing data is a well suited data source for mapping and monitoring we demonstrate a methodology to detect informal settlements (favelas) from QuickBird data using an object based approach. On the one hand we therefore use experiences and adapt them which were already made by Hofmann, P. (2001) regarding the image segmentation of an IKONOS scene of Cape Town. On the other hand we resort to a general ontology of informal settlements which we then transfer to a fuzzy-logic rule base which acts as basic classifier of the generated segments. This basic rule base is than extended in a way that features of segregation given by the ontology (namely neighborhood) are applied to the extraction method as an iterative process (i.e. a knowledge based region growing). Finally, we assess the results of the simple and iterative method by comparing them with the results of a manual mapping.
What is the challenge of living in slums?
A worldwide consensus on poverty has acknowledged slums and the living conditions of slum dwellers as a major challenge faced by humanity. Formulation of appropriate policies and intervention programs to improve the living conditions and secure the well being of slum dwellers requires a strong knowledge base that clearly defines, identifies, and signifies the main points of commonalities and diversities among these slum areas which are commonly unavailable in many cities in developing countries. The current research provides an overview of slum challenge in Cairo governorate, Egypt. It further develops a physical deprivation index that allows the ranking of small geographic areas accordingly to their levels of physical deprivation. Using four of the basic GIS layers for the governorate of Cairo and the principle component analysis, an index of physical deprivation for these small areas “mantiqas” is constructed. The proposed index is a composite index of four main dimensions characterizing physical attributes, sources of pollutions, available services and security of each mantiqa. Validation tests of the index revealed the ability of the proposed index to capture slums identified by the current governmental official list of slums in addition to other areas that were as equally deprived but not included in the official list of slums.
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 li…
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, subsurfac…
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…
