Dispersed Settlement Pattern Research Articles

Les prospections ACO en vallée de Somme.

ACO is a multy-period field survey carried out by the Universities of Amiens, Cambridge and Oxford in the valley of the Somme. This interim report summarises the aims and research design of the project, and reports on the seasons held in September 1991 and September 1992. The aims are to assess how complete and how representative a record of the ancient landscape is provided by aereal photography ; to investigate the transformation of the late prehistoric landscape into the Roman one, and to date the end of this classical landscape ; to investigate the links between the transformation of rural space and the growth and decline of Samarobriva. The method is to survey four designated transects, each one kilometre wide and ten in length, running north-south, at equidistant distances (ten kilometres) from Amiens, giving a sample of the landscape and of the structures (native farms, villae) known by R. Agache records. The fields are surveyed on a twenty metres grid, the aim being to assess variations in the density of artefacts distributions, rather than to identify and to delineate sites as such. After the identification and datation of the finds, a computerised archive is created, which will provide the basis of the final report. It is difficult to draw conclusions after only two seasons, where just over 300 ha. have been surveyed, in a project planned to last over five seasons. It seems that the number of previously unknown sites is very small ; there are indications that some native farms remained occupied well into the Ilnd century at least, some villae into the IVth century and possibly beyond ; it seems that the dispersed settlement pattern continued to structure the landscape, in spite of the development of urbanisation. But we must stress the provisional nature of these findings.

Metropolitan Agriculture: Farming in the City's Shadow

Abstract Metropolitan areas officially defined by the U.S. Census Bureau now encompass 16 percent of land area in the United States, including 29 percent of all farms and almost 20 percent of harvested cropland. Agriculture has adapted to the urbanizing environment through the working of smaller farms, more intensive production, a focus on high-value crops and livestock, and greater off-farm employment. Such adaptations are further advanced in older metro counties than in newer ones. This article shows how the more dispersed settlement pattern in newer metropolitan areas, emerging environmental and lifestyle trends, and recent developments in agricultural policy and the agricultural economy favor the survival of metro farming.

Neolithic settlement patterns in temperate Europe: Progress and problems

The study of settlement patterns must be accompanied by careful evaluation of the processes of formation of the archaeological record and of its recovery. A selective review is offered of Neolithic case studies from central and western Europe, from theLinearbandkeramik culture (fifth millennium bc) to Denmark and Britain (fourth and third millennia bc). The emphasis of the study is upon dispersed settlement patterns. Possibilities of specialization and hierarchy are discussed. Settlement studies should be further exploited for the “system,” or social rules and contexts, that may be inferred from the patterning of settlements.

Mural Painting in Western Kenya

with murals. This article focuses on the historical and artistic growth of this 20th-century tradition. Western Kenya is a fertile upland plateau that slopes gently to the eastern shores of Lake Victoria. The Baluyia,' a Bantu-speaking agricultural people, gradually settled in Western Province during the last five hundred years. They comprise at least eighteen subgroups, which, until this century, were autonomous political units tied together by a recognition of shared social and cultural values. The Baluyia have a dispersed settlement pattern, and each homestead is sited on the highest portion of a family's land holding.2 The traditional residential compound includes one or more houses, granaries, shrines, and cattle pens, all protected by an enclosure of bushes. Circular in plan, houses consist of a wooden framework, mud walls, and a coneshaped thatched roof. They vary in size according to the needs and the wealth of the occupants, and in proportion and roof contour among the subgroups. The traditional round-plan house has been partially supplanted in this century by square-plan houses introduced by missionaries and colonial officials. At present, in most Baluyia communities there is a mix of types, including round-plan houses with mud walls and thatched roofs, square-plan houses with mud walls and thatched or corrugated-iron roofs, and square-plan houses with brick or cinder-block walls and corrugated-iron or ceramic tile roofs. It is the round- and square-plan mud-wall types that may receive the murals discussed here. Mural traditions are not unknown in

THE USE OF ANALYTICAL METHODS OF MATHEMATICAL STATISTICS FOR IDENTIFYING RURAL PLACES WITH GROWTH PROSPECTS: (with particular reference to Kaliningrad Oblast)

One of the key objectives in the rural development program for the Nonchernozem Zone of the RSFSR is the consolidation of rural settlement in larger places. An example of the dispersed settlement pattern is Kaliningrad Oblast, which has a total of 1,527 rural places ranging from fewer than 5 to more than 2,000 inhabitants, with a total rural population of 195,529 (1970 census). The author shows that growth prospects are dependent on a combination of five factors—geographical setting and level of development; population; fixed assets in agriculture; nonfarm fixed assets; availability of services—and, using correlation analysis, identifies 283 places with prospects of future growth, ranging from 32 in the 51–100 size class to one of more than 2,000 population. The preservation of some small rural places is termed inevitable because many serve as outlying settlements for livestock subdivisions of collective and state farms, and dairy and beef cattle represents a characteristic type of farming in Kaliningrad Oblast.

Changes in Family and Household Organization in an Overseas Japanese Pioneer Community

This paper examines family and household structure in a Japanese pioneer community in eastern Bolivia. The emphasis is upon the effects of the ecological shift from intensive irrigation agriculture and the nucleated rural settlement pattern of the homeland to extensive shifting agriculture and a dispersed settlement pattern in Bolivia on family and household organization The “traditional” Japanese family system, which is apparently rapidly breaking down in Japan itself as a result of urbanization and industrialization, is briefly described, and data are presented on the structure of household units in the pioneer community. These data indicate a rather surprising persistence of the traditional system, and it is conluded that this system is proving remarkably adaptive to the exigencies of the frontier situation.

Hutterite Colonization in Alberta

Abstract This paper discusses the impact of Hutterian migration to Alberta in regards to the Communal Property Act and the evolution of the Hutterian settlement pattern. The Hutterites arrived in Alberta in 1918 and by 1940 had established thirty-one colonies, clustered primarily in the Lethbridge area. The sect's political and economic beliefs have been unpopular. Legislative action in the form of the Communal Property Act, and the establishment of the Communal Property Control Board has resulted in a dispersed settlement pattern. The legislative action initiated in the 1940s has had the perverse function of causing a hardship on the individual farmer of southern Alberta.

Fluorescent street lighting a possibility but filament lamps still the best

Recent work in the international field of energy history emphasizes the diversity that defines industrialization around the world, and even within different energy sectors of the same country. Energy history is a newly emerging field in Canada, and one where recent preliminary research now makes it possible to venture into the area of comparative energy studies. This paper provides a preliminary reconnaissance of the emergence of modern lighting in Canada, situating its history within the country’s larger idiosyncratic transition from the organic to the mineral energy regime. Canadians have always been among the world's highest energy consumers per capita, and they made a relatively late transition to the industrial regime. The country’s cold environment, its dispersed settlement patterns, the persistence of a distinct rural political economy supported by an abundance of energy from the organic regime, as well as the absence of cheap coal in Central Canada, help to explain the country’s distinctive characteristics. The history of lighting, however, is an exception within Canadian energy history: locally available, petroleum-based illuminating oil and stateowned hydroelectricity were adopted relatively early, comprising an exception within Canada’s late-modernizing trend: lighting, and not heat or power, led the country’s transition to the modern energy regime.