SETTLEMENT SYSTEM ANALYSIS

Abstract

The term ‘settlement system’ signified a major conceptual breakthrough to some writers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as studies of settlement patterns came into their own. Since then, ‘settlement system’ has often been contrasted with ‘settlement pattern’, although the distinction between the two has become somewhat fuzzy over time. An initial emphasis on ‘settlement pattern’ as a static arrangement of archaeological sites on a landscape in contrast to ‘settlement system’ as a more dynamic set of inter-relationships between sites has given way to the vaguer notion that ‘settlement pattern’ refers to the observable distribution of archaeological evidence of human activities across a landscape, and to the analysis that identifies patterning in this distribution, whereas the interpretation of that patterning of evidence in terms of the activities of living, breathing human beings is ‘settlement system’ analysis. In language more fashionable several decades after the inception of settlement studies, we might well define settlement system analysis as focused on the study of the social landscape comprised of the diversity of interactions which define and constitute human communities at various scales.