ANTH 235,
SETTLEMENT ARCHAEOLOGY AND SPATIAL ANALYSIS
In any inquiry about the social past, the first question to
address is size or scale.
Settlement archaeology includes an array of techniques and
theories dedicated precisely to understanding these scalar
questions.
Archaeologists generally try to address spatial concerns
first in the process of decoding past human behavior.
ESTABLISHING THE NATURE AND SCALE OF
SOCIETY:
The first step is to ask: “What was the scale of the largest
social unit and what kind of society, in a very broad sense,
was it?”
polity – a politically independent or autonomous social
unit, regardless of scale (might be a city-state or a band of
foragers…).
settlement patterns – the ways in which people distribute
themselves across the landscape can be very revealing
about that culture’s structure and relationships with others.
Elman Service’s (1915-1996) four-fold classification of
societies: Bands, Tribes (or Segmentary Societies),
Chiefdoms, Early States.
Bands: small-scale societies of foragers.
Archaeology: the Paleolithic.
 World population at 12,000 BCE was ca. 10 million
(100% foragers)
 World population in 1960 CE was 3 billion
(0.001% foragers)
 World population in 2005 CE exceeded 6 billion
(virtually no foragers)
 World population in 2011 CE is projected to be 7
billion! See:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/08/12/world
.population/index.html
 World population in 2050 CE will be over 9 billion!
See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/4297169.stm
Tribes (also called Segmentary Societies): typically
settled farmers in a village context.
Archaeology: the early Neolithic.
Chiefdoms: societies that operate on the principle of
ranking.
Archaeology: the later Neolithic and early Metal Ages.
Early States: preserve many of the features of chiefdoms,
but the ruler has explicit authority to establish laws and
enforce them through the use of a standing army.
Archaeology: complex societies or “civilizations,”
generally beginning in the Bronze Age.
This rather simple social typology must be used with
caution. You must not infer that all societies naturally
or inevitably “evolve” through each of these stages on
their way to becoming “civilized”! They do not!
SETTLEMENT PATTERNING:
Possible site categories include (ascending scale):





hamlet
dispersed village
nucleated village
local center
regional center
Central Place Theory (Walter Christaller, 1933).
Basic tenet: In a uniform landscape, the spatial patterning
of settlements would be perfectly regular, forming
interconnecting hexagons.
Site Hierarchies. Sites are organized in rank order by size.
These are but two of many potential models for explaining
the distribution of human settlements across given
landscapes…
How do we bridge the gap between archaeological remains
and the societies those remains represent? The two most
commonly proposed approaches are:
 middle range theory (e.g., ethnoarchaeology,
experimental archaeology)
 analogy
Many archaeologists say the most reliable source of
information about the structure of past societies is the
pattern associated with their physical distribution across the
land’s surface…
Digital Elevation Model (DEM) displaying later prehistoric (mostly
Iron Age) settlement patterns, Mid Argyll, Scotland*
*A dun is a type of hill-fort well known to archaeologists, while a crannóg is
a wooden platform erected on shallow loch floors (below). Understandably,
few remains of crannógs have been found by archaeologists.
Reconstructed crannóg on Loch Tay in the central highlands of Scotland; see
http://www.crannog.co.uk/, especially if you’re planning a trip to Scotland.
First Midterm Grades (n=14); Mean = 88.6
102
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