Confronting scales of settlement hierarchy in state-level societies: Upper Mesopotamia and Central Anatolia in the Middle Bronze Age

Abstract

In this article, I adopt a long-established method known as rank-size analysis to detect particular settlement patterns in the Khabur Triangle (KT) and central Anatolia (CA) during the Middle Bronze Age. Archaeologists must be particularly careful when applying rank-size analysis to a given study area as the results can change at a different spatial scale. With these premises in mind, in this work, I first show the results produced by performing rank-size analyses on the two whole study areas and assess comparatively any difference in the observed patterns between them. Second, I break down each study area into smaller window analyses in order to detect how settlement size distributions change at a more local scale. The results show that at a larger regional scale, both central Anatolia and the Khabur Triangle in the Middle Bronze Age are characterized by fragmented politically landscapes of competing independent polities loosely integrated. By contrast, at smaller local scales central Anatolia and the Khabur Triangle show a different picture. In central Anatolia settlement systems appear more nucleated in large centres dominating their surrounding rural hinterlands and strong political and economic centralization is evident at Kültepe and Boğazköy. On the other hand, in the Khabur Triangle settlement primacy is less accentuated and the polities are more loosely integrated. These examples demonstrate the advantage of using rank size analysis at different spatial scales for having a complete understanding of the dynamics behind the observed empirical data.