Propinquity

The propinquity principle, so important in so many ways in archaeological interpretation, is no less so in settlement system analysis. Conclusions about the use and control of resources in settlement system analysis often revolve around the least-effort principle that, other things being equal, people tend to live relatively near what they spend most of their time doing. For the preindustrial agricultural societies, often the subject of settlement system analysis, most people probably spend more time farming than anything else, so the distribution of settlement in a region with respect to the distribution of its agricultural resources and/or constructed agricultural infrastructure (such as terraces, canals, or raised fields) is often taken to reflect patterns of exploitation of agricultural resources, and the distribution of elite settlement to reflect patterns of control of agricultural resources (or the lack thereof). The same sort of propinquity argument is applied to other resources as well, as in the identification of mining, fishing, woodcutting, or other potentially specialized economic activities.

Propinquity also underlies distance-interaction principles, which are used in settlement system analysis to define communities at various scales from local to regional, following the notion that, other things being equal again, people interact more, on average, with nearer neighbors than with more distant ones. The fundamental idea is applicable to interaction of social, political, economic, religious, or any other character, and plays a major role in the study of the regional-scale centralization so important in complex social organization.