what makes permanent settlements possible in such a landscape

What is the significance of house and settlement plans?

At the individual site level, house and settlement plans are studied as reflections of ancient ways of seeing or categorizing the social world.

What is the history of settlement archaeology?

In the 1960s a new form of settlement archaeology developed in the United States, which was to be transported and elaborated in most countries of Europe in the 1970s and 1980s—the regional surface field survey.

What do we know about archaeological landscape?

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.

What is a good book to read about settlement and territory?

"Settlement and Territory." In Companion Encyclopedia of Archaeology. Edited by Graeme Barker and Annie Grant, pp. 505–545. London: Routledge, 1999. ——. "Iron Age Europe in the Context of Social Evolution from the Bronze Age through to Historic Times."

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

How to analyze past settlement sites?

What is excavation and total surface and subsurface prospection?

What is central place theory?

What is the purpose of settlement archaeology?

How does catchment analysis work?

How were rural settlements serviced?

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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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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.

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.

Intrasettlement Archaeology

Intersettlement Archaeology

Total Landscape History

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...

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