Surveys have set the current research agenda in many regions, generating new data and new hypotheses for further research. But much is changing about settlement pattern studies. The region-centered approach to settlement studies is breaking down in the face of new survey data on the macroregional scale. Effective theory building now requires that we model the effects of not one, but multiple interacting regions on local settlement systems. Older theories of culture change must now account for the variation in settlement patterns over successively larger spatial scales up to the macroregion, or be discarded.
Regions and Macroregions
Archaeological study of the macroregion is an extension of studies of social structure from household to regional levels. The region is the basic unit of analysis for settlement pattern studies (usually the physiographic boundary of a river valley). Macroregions are two or more contiguous regions that cross regional or cultural boundaries. Macroregions are the minimal unit of analysis needed to understand early civilizations and are measured in thousands of square kilometers rather than hundreds as in the typical regional survey. These data needs force archaeologists to undertake decades-long and multigenerational survey projects, making student training and future job prospects a significant concern.
Data Requirements
With the continued growth of the survey database, the contemporary era has faced new challenges in managing the enormous data flow from the cumulative regional studies. Geographic Information Systems has become a basic part of the surveyor’s analytical repertoire for database management. Remote sensing has moved beyond air photographs to include declassified and commercial satellite images. Regardless of the format in data presentation, the essential empirical contribution of regional surveys is comparable data on site size through time for all sites visible on the surface (including the data flow from initial site visit to final settlement pattern map). Related concerns are the comparability of regional data sets and the growing body of unpublished survey data.
Measuring Hierarchy
Of the varied approaches to regional survey data, the study of settlement hierarchies is fundamental to making cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary comparisons. Hierarchy is one way to measure changes in complexity such as urban emergence. This includes studies of horizontal complexity (or heterarchy) for sites occupying the same hierarchical level. Other typical measures of hierarchy are degrees of urbanization, regional system scale, rank-size, and centralization. The application of central-place models in archaeology has been especially productive of new ideas about ancient settlement patterns, and is preferable to making impressionistic inferences from maps. Although many spatial approaches have built-in assumptions that were not necessarily true in the past (e. g., market economies), the observed differences in settlement hierarchies are measuring something real that must be explained.
World History
