Dispersed Villages Research Articles

Kiskiak: The settlement history of a dispersed village in Tidewater Virginia

Villages organized coastal Algonquian social life in the Chesapeake during the late precolonial and early colonial eras. Even so, archaeologists have only rarely attempted to interpret village or community organization in the region, relying instead on the assumption that communities overlapped closely with individual sites. This study challenges that assumption through a “non-site” assessment of survey and excavation data from Virginia's lower York River. This approach indicates that settlement along Indian Field Creek included spatially discrete but socially connected spaces that comprised the village of Kiskiak. With origins in the Mockley Phase (AD 200–900), this settlement form comes into clear view during the colonial era as a dispersed, creek-side village with domestic spaces around Indian Field Creek, community middens at its mouth, and a palisaded area overlooking the York. The dispersed village and its history in the region represent important dimensions of social life in the Native Chesapeake.

Application of a multi-criteria decision support system for assessing development potential in flood risk areas - Case study of the Warta River

The paper discusses the concept of a proprietary decision-making model that allows for determining whether the planned development in areas not protected by flood embankments and at risk of flooding can be shaped in a safe manner. The model was used to evaluate the possibility of shaping the development in flood-risk areas on the example of one of the types of Olęder villages – a dispersed village located in the floodplains of the Warta River (western Poland). So far, there has been no comprehensive evaluation method supporting proper spatial planning for flood-risk areas. The use of multi-criteria analysis methods enabled to specify the key criteria of this evaluation, which form the basis of the decision-making support system. Additionally, the elaborated method enables to determine whether the localities under study can retain their current functional nature and if there is a potential for further spatial development based on the characteristics of an Olęder village. The presented methodology can be easily adapted to other cultural areas located in countries with different levels of development, traditions, landscape or climate.

Radiocarbon dating, magnitude, and catastrophic impact of Popocatépetl's Terminal Preclassic “Lorenzo pumice” Plinian eruption and paleomagnetic age constraints on the Nealtican lava flow field (central Mexico)

The “Lorenzo pumice” (LP) fallout was produced by a Plinian (VEI = 4) eruption of Popocatépetl volcano ∼40 cal BCE during the Terminal Preclassic period. It is part of a pyroclastic sequence that consists in stratigraphic order of fall, pyroclastic density current, and lahar deposits, which in turn are partly covered by the 70 km2 andesitic-dacitic “Pedregal de Nealtican” lava flow field on the eastern slope of the volcano.The composition of the pumice varies insignificantly (SiO2 = 61.0 to 63.5 wt%) with phenocrysts of euhedral plagioclase > orthopyroxene > clinopyroxene ± olivine ± hornblende ± opaques.Sizes of lithics and the isopach map indicate an eruption column height of ∼28 km and a dispersal axis toward the ENE, where an area of ∼600 km2 that included pre-Hispanic dispersed villages was buried under >10 cm of pumice. The minimum volume for the LP fallout was calculated at ∼0.6 km3 corresponding to ∼0.2 km3 of dense rock equivalent (DRE).The short Plinian phase ended when the column collapsed abruptly, generating lethal pyroclastic density currents that were emplaced around the volcano. It was followed by periodic flooding by rain lahars that originated from the slopes of Popocatépetl and from neighboring Iztaccíhuatl, severely affecting ravines and large portions of the plains of Puebla in the east.After the cataclysmic phase, the El Ombligo vent alignment opened at ∼4000 m a.s.l. on Popocatépetl's NE upper slope from which the lavas that form the Nealtican lava flow field emanated, an effusive activity that lasted >30 years. Paleomagnetic data for these lavas and stratigraphic evidence indicate that the lava flows with a total volume of 4.2 km3 were emplaced shortly after the explosive Plinian phase and represent the degassed portion of the LP magma.This eruption had a considerable impact on pre-Hispanic settlements around the volcano, whose population exodus and relocation probably contributed to the rise of important cities in central Mexico, such as Teotihuacán, Cholula, and Cantona.

Airborne microplastics in urban, rural and wildland environments on the Tibetan Plateau

The concentration of airborne microplastics is largely unknown in the remote high mountain area of the Tibetan Plateau. Here we report airborne microplastic concentrations of 2.5–58.8 n/m3 in urban, rural and wildland areas across the Tibetan Plateau, with smaller (∼89% <100 µm) fragments (>80%) dominating. Polyethylene terephthalate, polyethylene, polyamide and polystyrene were the dominant polymers of airborne microplastics on the Tibetan Plateau. Distribution of airborne microplastics was positively correlated with anthropogenic activity indices, such as population density and nighttime light intensity. Although the contribution of long-range atmospheric transport is valid, dispersed villages also appear to be a source of airborne microplastics for wildland areas across the Tibetan Plateau.

Clustered and dispersed: exploring the morphological evolution of traditional villages based on cellular automaton

The spatial pattern of traditional villages can be generally divided into two main types: clustered and dispersed. In order to explore and compare the spatial evolutionary characteristics of different village patterns, and provide a reliable basis for spatial planning, a universal Cellular Automaton (CA) model was built and applied in different spatial simulations. Through model comparison, it was established that: (1) both types of villages have developed in the same cyclical changing mode of "outlying + edge-expansion", which was probably rooted in the inherent spatial sense of the ethnic group inhabiting village types; (2) the spatial growth of the clustered village was more relevant to the distribution structure of pre-existing buildings, whereas the spatial sprawl of a dispersed one was more connected to external natural factors; and (3) the development of every economic unit in a dispersed village was strictly restricted to the building area, and to the proportion of population inhabiting farmland area. Although village patterns developed under the same logical framework rooted in ethnic culture, their development tendency varied, with different dynamic mechanisms and constraints.

Alluvium and Empire: The Archaeology of Colonial Resettlement and Indigenous Persistence on Peru's North Coast

Alluvium and Empire: The Archaeology of Colonial Resettlement and Indigenous Persistence on Peru's North Coast

Emplacement of the Photovoltaic Water Pumping System in Remote Areas by a Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Method: A Case Study

Utilizing the solar energy from photovoltaic panels integrated into a water pumping system to provide electricity for dispersed villages that have no access to backup systems not only reduces the electricity grid costs and environmental pollutants but also is an innovative approach in areas with sufficient solar irradiation. Therefore, identifying and studying the feasibility of stand-alone solar power plants in various locations is the first step in using this reliable source of energy. For this reason, 93 sites in the provinces of Razavi Khorasan, Northern Khorasan, and Southern Khorasan, Iran, were chosen by the renewable energy organization engineers as regions with high potential for establishing a solar water pumping station. The goals of this research were to prioritize the 93 sites and find the perfect location for the establishment of the aforementioned station. In order to investigate and prioritize these sites, a multi-criteria decision-making method, namely, TOPSIS (technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution), has been used. Therefore, the geographical locations of the sites and the weather in these provinces have been studied; consequently, 15 important and essential criteria, including slope, solar irradiation, precipitation, wind speed, relative humidity, altitude, distance from substation, distance from grid, obtainable solar energy capacity, distance from river, population, distance from city center, distance from road, average temperature, and number of dams in the vicinity of the site, have been chosen. All the aforementioned criteria have been weighted using the Shannon entropy method, and then the sites have been prioritized using the TOPSIS method. The results indicated that Sarayan, Isk, Esfadan, and Dasht Byaz in Southern Khorasan and then Beydokht 2 in Razavi Khorasan are the top five locations and Shosef in Southern Khorasan is the least favorite location for establishing a solar pumping station. In order to achieve more reliable results, sensitivity analysis was implemented.

Environmental risk buffering in Chinese Neolithic villages: Impacts on community structure in the Central Plains and the Western Liao Valley

Much of the literature on the role played by environment in complex society development focuses on temporal correspondence between climate change and human social change. Many such studies fall into a series of traps: the unwarranted assumption that correlation equals causation; failure to evaluate the statistical significance of the association; simplistic characterization of climate change's human impact or of the nature of human social change itself; and focusing on a spatial scale too large to intersect with the human decision-making processes where social change begins. Here we compare decisions made about buffering agricultural risk by Neolithic farmers in two regions of northern China. Hongshan farmers in the Western Liao Valley chose to cope with agricultural risk at the individual household level and lived in scattered farmsteads and dispersed villages, while Yangshao farmers in the Central Plains chose cooperation and interdependence between households living in large compact villages. These decisions were clearly rooted in the particular environmental conditions of the two regions and had far-reaching and unanticipated consequences for the two long-term trajectories of complex society development. The forces that shaped the trajectories of the Western Liao and the Central Plains differently fit a pattern that is global in scope. Examining the decisions made by Neolithic farmers in response to an essentially static feature of their environments contributes more to our understanding of the dynamics of long-term human social change (and the environment's role in it) than attempting to correlate social changes to particular climate changes.

Making urbanisation compact and equal: Integrating rural villages into urban communities in Kunshan, China

China’s rapid economic development has urbanised a great number of rural villagers since the late 1970s. One of the significant challenges is that urbanisation entails incorporating autonomous villages into integrative cities. Village-led rural industrialisation safeguards villagers’ interests, but it gives rise to a fragmented industrial landscape and piecemeal farmland in the context of high-density small-area village settlements. Suboptimal land utilisation consumes more land resources than necessary to meet urbanisation needs and thus deteriorates environmental integrity. Townships have been leading industrialisation in the rural areas after the demise of collective manufacturing in the Yangtze River Delta. Actively pursued by the municipal and township governments, agglomeration of industrial land in Kunshan occurs during the transition of industrial ownership, which results in integrated urban built-up areas. Agglomeration of dispersed village settlements (where villagers are no longer engaged in farming) into compact urban quarters ensues, facilitated by the collective land rent arising from urbanisation. A new problem of inequality in entitlement to landed benefits between villages arises. Fair distribution of land rent as the benefit of urbanisation among villages calls for coordination at a higher level than the village.

Understanding the Multilevel Foundation of Social Trust in Rural China: Evidence from the China General Social Survey

ObjectiveIn recent years, there has been a fast‐growing body of literature on the sources of social trust. However, empirical studies focusing on non‐Western societies are rare. To fill the gap, this study is intended to explore both the individual and contextual sources of social trust in rural China.MethodsThis study uses hierarchical linear models to analyze the multilevel foundations of social trust based upon a unique two‐level data set from the China General Social Survey (CGSS) conducted nationwide at both the individual and village level in rural China.ResultsThe results indicate that Chinese villagers markedly differentiate between the particularized and generalized forms of trust. While particularized trust is strongly influenced by both personal experiences and subjective orientations, generalized trust is closely associated with one's basic values (i.e., norms of civility). Moreover, both types of trust are very unevenly distributed in rural China, and geographically dispersed villages tend to strongly constrain the development of social trust.ConclusionGiven the complex nature of social trust, these results suggest that more sophisticated studies should be introduced to map how its forms and magnitudes vary across localities.

Misplaced Home and Mislaid Meat: Stories Circulating Among Ethiopian Immigrants in Israel

Misplaced Home and Mislaid Meat:Stories Circulating Among Ethiopian Immigrants in Israel Hagar Salamon (bio) I have been listening to stories that wander between Ethiopia and Israel for almost twenty-five years. The Beta Israel, Ethiopian Jews now living in Israel, have been the focus of my ethnographic research, and it is to their stories that I often turn to explore the complexity of their experience. Here, when attended to carefully, it is possible to discern changing personal and collective conceptions of the dramatic passage from Ethiopia to Israel. These conceptions are articulated in different expressive forms, which are often coded and indirect. In fact, as I came to learn, the more the experience touches upon core, embodied senses of being, the more these articulations seek an outlet in shared, non-personal and even commonly produced forms of expression. One such form is the humorous story. Reflecting the Ethiopian immigrants' encounter with life in Israel through comical stagings, these stories encode some of the more fundamental vulnerabilities of this group's dramatic passage. The following pages present two clusters of stories centered on the lost home and the lost self. These two primary, existential anchors are simultaneously disguised and revealed in the humorous stories through metaphorical devices. The sense of loss entailed in the experience of migration is miniaturized and metaphorized via key idioms. Prominent among them is the image of a slaughtered animal placed in someone else's apartment. Elucidating such images, which are often laden with contradictions, requires progressively expanding contextualization, which draws on concrete and symbolic cultural associations. Most of the stories I heard over the years from Ethiopian Israelis were not humorous: among them were stories of fierce longing for the villages from which they came, tales of internal relations between the groups making up Beta Israel, and many stories of the complex and contradictory relationships existing between them and their non-Jewish neighbors, particularly the Christians against whom their own unique identity was forged. In many of those stories I discerned the recurrent image of animals and meat-among them references and allusions to the intimate proximity with domestic animals, the care and breeding of livestock, and the communal slaughtering and eating of lambs, goats, and cows. The centrality of these images as a constituting organizing idiom in the world of the group is expressed both at the level of everyday practices and at the more abstract level of ritual and expressive forms of culture.1 Unlike the prominent place and elaboration of the meat idiom in stories about rural Ethiopia, the home and the surrounding landscape were so familiar, intimately known, and embodied that they remained undeserving of comment, perhaps beneath the surface of awareness. This internalized mapping is a shared experience in rural Ethiopia, and among the Beta Israel it was particularly vital, because of their need to maintain kinship [End Page 165] and religious ties between dispersed villages. It seems that this knowledge was so constitutive of a person's lived experience that the coordinates of the environment and the home were hard-wired into one's sensible being. Against this embodied, taken-for-granted sense of home location in the stories about life in Israel, this knowledge becomes an explicit absence. The stories to be discussed here constitute a new chapter in the cultural and folkloric elaboration of the meat idiom in the context of the search for the lost home. In these stories I repeatedly encountered the image of a person, or of slaughtered meat, trying to reach the right home. When these stories are framed in humorous forms, they provide both tellers and listeners with a working-through of the trauma. The various narrative incarnations2 will therefore serve in this article as an interpretative tool with which to conceptualize the experience of migration and the pain and injury it entailed. From Ethiopia to Israel Originally, the Beta Israel (Falashas)3 lived in rural, northwestern Ethiopia. The community was scattered between more than five hundred small villages where people lived in close proximity to their Christian and Muslim neighbors. While in Ethiopia, the Beta Israel saw themselves as a distinct religious group, identifying strongly with the Torah (Orit, the...

Archaeology and Ethnohistory on the Spanish Colonial Periphery: Excavations at the Templo Colonial in Nicoya, Guanacaste, Costa Rica

Archaeological and historical investigations were carried out in the town of Nicoya, Costa Rica, between 1989 and 1991. The town is of historical interest as having been reported as the largest indigenous chiefdom along the northwest coast when the Spanish first reconnoitered the region in 1519. The settlement quickly become incorporated into the spanish colonial empire and persisted as a pueblo de Indios for close to 300 years. Excavations within and outside the purported colonial-age church in Nicoya failed to produce any evidence for a nucleated indigenous community, but they did uncover a colonial-age cemetery outside the church as well as several inhumations within the church presbytery. Archaeological and historical evidence also suggests that the church was rebuilt at least once in the past and that the current structure probably dates to the mid-19th century. This research indicates that indigenous Nicoya was not a single nucleated settlement, as has been generally held by archaeologists and historians. The Spanish more likely encountered a number of dispersed villages under the political leadership of a chief named Nicoya, and the current town of Nicoya is the result of a 16th-century reduccion (forced resettlement) of these villages. Finally, the interpretation of the church’s history based on historical documents and archaeological investigations is contrasted to contemporary understanding of Nicoya’s history. The divergent histories provide additional insight into the important role the church structure plays in the lives and identities of the townspeople.

On Reorganisation of Co-Operative Credit Societies

Present Position: 1.The agricultural credit system in India to day is in a bad shape. 2. The commercial banks, which accounted for the larger part of the term loans to agriculture, have reduced their advances, despite the stipulation about priority sector lending. Bad debts and high cost of administering relatively small amount of loans to large numbers located in dispersed villages are the major reasons for this. They are able to meet the stipulation about priority sector lending through deposits with NABARD, which is a convenient, trouble-free and profitable venue. That the state governments misuse a large part of this money is not a matter of concern to the commercial banks.

School Mayors of Iran: Learning Social Participation in an Unfavorable Environment

Children, Youth and Environments 15(2), 2005 School Mayors of Iran: Learning Social Participation in an Unfavorable Environment Parviz Piran Allameh Tabatabaee University/ Swiss Academy for Development Teheran, Iran/ Bern, Switzerland Citation: Piran, Parviz. (2005). “School Mayors of Iran: Learning Social Participation in an Unfavorable Environment.” Children, Youth and Environments 15(2): 299-318. Comment on This Article Abstract This paper discusses the School Mayors project in Iran, which has over the last decade aimed to provide a formal context within which young people could learn to participate in collective undertakings with a view to encouraging civic responsibility and a greater understanding of democratic processes. The project, which covers over 1000 schools, takes place in a social context where participation, even for adults, faces many obstacles. The school mayors, deputy mayors and city-school councils, democratically elected by students, have implemented with the support of student working groups, activities ranging from school improvements and support for weaker students to involvement in their communities. Their formal “jurisdiction” covers not only the schools they represent, but also the radius of 500 meters around their school, making these student bodies part of the formal governance structure of the city. Keywords: schools, local governance, community involvement, Iran© 2005 Children, Youth and Environments School Mayors of Iran: Learning Social Participation in an Unfavorable Environment 300 Introduction The School Mayors of Iran is a project that was first implemented experimentally in 1994. For centuries, social participation in Iran had been intentionally neglected and discouraged by those in power, with extreme costs for the society at large. By the end of the Iraq – Iran war (1980-1988), many researchers working in similar areas shared this view with the author, but discussions only took place among intellectuals and had no impact in real life. In light of a real and urgent need for change, the author designed a program entitled Citizen Centered Cities, hoping to influence then-current processes among officials and general public. The program consisted of 12 projects, all of which in one way or another dealt with sustainable development and had participation as a core concept. One of those projects was School Mayors of Iran which targets students in elementary, intermediate and high schools. The objectives of this project, broadly speaking, have been to provide a formal context within which children and young people could learn to participate in collective undertakings which would encourage civic responsibility and a greater understanding of democratic processes. Presently the project covers over 1000 middle schools all over Iran, and has also served as the model for student councils which are now in operation in all Iranian schools. Background Some background on Iran seems necessary, especially for readers living in societies where issues of citizenship with its rights and obligations, and the rule of law, are to a large extent resolved and taken for granted. Iran has had many centuries of authoritarian political rule. This situation encouraged the author, with the help of dozens of intelligent and energetic young students, to analyze over 300 history texts in order to find answers for a number of important questions: Why does an authoritarian political structure persist in Iran despite a good number of social movements, numerous uprisings, a few revolutions and the constant protest of various social groups? How has this political structure limited participation in all domains of social life, leading to a non-participatory mindset and the expectation that government should be responsible for even the most trivial issues? How can this be changed? This analysis contributed to the development of a geo-strategic and geopolitical explanation of Iranian society, which is described here in brief. Security has been the most influential factor in Iranian life. This is an arid country, which led to both a nomadic way of life and a dispersed village population. Nomadic tribal communities experienced periodic droughts which endangered their existence, leaving them no choice but to attack settled communities. Villages, unable to defend themselves, looked to outside forces for protection. Insecurity was the prime reason for the emergence of a centralized government with a standing army. Cities developed as the seats of centralized and despotic regimes (see Ashraf 1974, 43). Thus, the three components of...

類型比較を通してみた砺波平野における村落構成の共通原理 : 砺波散居村における居住特性の分析 その5

In this study we made clear the spatial composition of villages in the Tonami Plain by comparison among a dispersed village, a row shaped village and a street village. We realized that for all villages the direction in which water flowed was a primary regulating factor relating to things from housing to the homesteads and village composition. There were also farm lands directly connected to the homesteads in all villages. We defined the unit as "living field". The relationship between a watercourse and a living field was the same in all types of villages. The watercourses flowed along the boundaries of the living field. It meant the three villages were based on the same model.

街路村における街路と水路の中心性と屋敷構えとの関係 : 砺波散居村における居住特性の分析 その4

In this study we made clear the spatial composition of street villages in the Tonami Plain by a case study of "Masuyama." We got to know that the plan of the house and the arrangement of buildings in the homesteads were totally different from those of a dispersed village. We also clarified that the direction of watercourse was a primary regulating factor relating from the house plan to the village composition in both villages. All the elements in street villages were more strictly regulated by watercourses than in a dispersed village. We considered the difference derived from that the watercourse was the only source of water supply in street villages.

列状村の集落空間とその水系・ミチへの連関 : 砺波散居村における居住特性の分析 その3

In this study we made clear the spatial composition of a row shaped village in the Tonami Plain by a case study of "Higashi-kaihotsu" which has been classified into "a row shaped village" in our first report. We got to know that the arrangement of buildings in the premises was different from that of a dispersed village. We clarified the reason from the viewpoint of the relationship between the configuration of buildings and village composition. In addition, all the elements in the premises in a row shaped village were more strictly regulated by streets and watercourses than in a dispersed village. We considered it was caused by the location of a row shaped village which frequently suffered floods scince its establishment.

村落と屋敷の対応関係からみた散村の構成原理 : 砺波散居村における居住特性の分析 その2

In this study we made clear the spatial composition of a dispersed village in the Tonami Plain by a case study of "Tenshou" which has been classified into "a dispersed village with boundaries not clearly defined" in the former report. We compared compositions of the premises, roads and watercourse networks in terms of the readjustment of arable land. We came to understand that different levels of composition elements of the village were all strongly connected. In addition, the direction in which water flowed was a primary regulating factor relating to things from housing to the whole village composition.

Geoarchaeology of an Aztec dispersed village on the Texcoco piedmont of Central Mexico

Analysis of the microstratigraphy, geomorphology, and soils within an Aztec site in the piedmont of Texcoco provides information on the ecological context of the dispersed village during the Late Aztec phase (A.D. 1350–1520). Two erosional phases are identified, the first in the period between A.D. 500 and 1000, and the second in the 1600s. The two erosional events are correlated with the transition from dispersed settlements, with relatively high population density, to nucleated settlements marking a decline in population. Land reclamation by Aztec settlers is attested by the remains of the semiterracing system of metepantli and rock-faced terraces, which are features discussed in the context of anthropogenic soils identified within the site. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Geoarchaeology of an Aztec dispersed village on the Texcoco piedmont of Central Mexico

Analysis of the microstratigraphy, geomorphology, and soils within an Aztec site in the piedmont of Texcoco provides information on the ecological context of the dispersed village during the Late Aztec phase (A.D. 1350–1520). Two erosional phases are identified, the first in the period between A.D. 500 and 1000, and the second in the 1600s. The two erosional events are correlated with the transition from dispersed settlements, with relatively high population density, to nucleated settlements marking a decline in population. Land reclamation by Aztec settlers is attested by the remains of the semiterracing system of metepantli and rock-faced terraces, which are features discussed in the context of anthropogenic soils identified within the site. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.