Abstract
We present a spatial interaction entropy maximizing and structural dynamics model of settlements from the Middle Bronze Age (MBA) and Iron Ages (IA) in the Khabur Triangle (KT) region within Syria. The model addresses factors that make locations attractive for trade and settlement, affecting settlement growth and change. We explore why some sites become relatively major settlements, while others diminish in the periods discussed. We assess how political and geographic constraints affect regional settlement transformations, while also accounting for uncertainty in the archaeological data. Model outputs indicate how the MBA settlement pattern contrasts from the IA for the same region when different factors affecting settlement size importance, facility of movement, and exogenous site interactions are studied. The results suggest the importance of political and historical factors in these periods and also demonstrate the value of a quantitative model in explaining emergent settlement size distributions across landscapes affected by different socio-environmental causal elements.
Highlights
In the Middle Bronze Age (2000e1600 BC; MBA), large settlements arose in northeast Syria in the region of the Khabur Triangle (KT)
‘Large’ is taken here to refer to sites whose size is an order of magnitude higher (i.e., 10 times) than other sites: for each dataset, we identify a set of L such sites (L is 19 and 6 for MBA and Iron Ages (IA) respectively) and, for each simulation, record the number of these which appear in the top L simulated sites, when ranked;
All simulations are run for 3000 ticks, with step size dt as 0.01; in all cases this was sufficient for the site sizes to reach a steady state
Summary
In the Middle Bronze Age (2000e1600 BC; MBA), large settlements arose in northeast Syria in the region of the Khabur Triangle (KT). The distribution of settlement sizes in this region was relatively broad; numerous small and medium sized sites arose, while few sites became very large These structures reflect the rise of kingdoms that briefly integrated this region within larger states, while at other times the region was politically fragmented. One millennium later in the KT, the political and settlement picture in the Iron Age (1200e600 BC; IA) were very different when the large territorial Neo-Assyrian state dominated the landscape Other nearby surveys (Algaze, 1989; Wilkinson and Tucker, 1995; Ball, 2003) have been left out of the analysis, as these are not as continuous with the others
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