Nucleated Villages Research Articles

Population growth and its spatial distribution as factors in the deforestation of Nang Rong, Thailand

Frontiers constitute a major source of global land cover change hot spots, with forests and grasslands being converted into agricultural uses. As such, frontiers provide an opportunity to see how people manipulate the land and their lives in the context of social, cultural and environmental constraints. This paper examines frontier settlement and land cover change in Nang Rong district, Northeast Thailand for the last half century. It uses a Cellular Automata (CA) model to explore the land cover consequences of alternative patterns of settlement in a setting where people establish dwelling units in nucleated villages and work agricultural plots that surround villages. Forested land around the center of a village is converted into agricultural uses in an inverse relationship to the distance from the village center, but frequently modified by biophysical conditions. Land at the center of the village may be reforested after the village is established as a source of shade as well as fruit and other products. Model variation in land cover change is more sensitive to the spatial reach of village households than their temporal reach, suggesting the important role that technology plays in how villagers travel to their fields (walking versus motorized transit).

Beyond Villages and Open Fields: The Origins and Development of a Historic Landscape Characterised by Dispersed Settlement in South-West England

POLLEN EVIDENCE has, to date, made little contribution to our understanding of the origins and development of the medieval landscape. Compared to the prehistoric period, relatively few long palaeoenvironmental sequences provide a continuous record for the past two millennia, and those that have been analysed are mostly located in upland locations that lay beyond areas settled during this period. The nine sequences reported here from central Devon and the edges of Exmoor start to redress that imbalance. They suggest substantial clearance of woodland in lowland areas and the upland fringe by the Late Iron Age, and that the incorporation of this region into the Roman world had little impact on patterns of landscape exploitation. In a region that lay beyond the main area of Romanisation, it is not surprising that the 5th century saw little discernible change in management of the landscape. These palaeoenvironmental sequences suggest that around the 7th–8th centuries, however, there was a significant change in the patterns of land-use, which it is suggested relates to the introduction of a regionally distinctive system of agriculture known as 'convertible husbandry'. This may also have been the context for the creation of today's historic landscape of small hamlets and isolated farmsteads set within a near continuous fieldscape, replacing the late prehistoric/Romano-British/post-Roman landscape of small, enclosed settlements with only very localised evidence for field systems. This transformation appears to be roughly contemporary with, or even earlier than, the creation of nucleated villages in the 'Central Province' of England, suggesting that the 'great replanning' was just one of several regionally distinctive trajectories of landscape change in the later 1st millennium A.D.

Shaping the Territory

William Wood's flyleaf map for New Englands Prospect (London, 1634) was the first map to describe the coastline from Narragansett Bay to New Hampshire in some detail. By giving shape to the territory, it served practical purposes; though it did not allow precise navigation, it provided a semblance of location, so that European newcomers could obtain some idea of where they were. The map also shaped the territory figuratively. Despite Wood's clear description of dispersed agricultural settlement, the map has forever linked in historians' minds particular points-the location of meetinghouses-with surrounding spacestowns and villages on the New England landscape. The result has been a fundamental misunderstanding of colonial historical geography. We still cling to the notion that early New Englanders lived in nucleated villages.' And we do so, even as methods of survey and cartographic representation prove otherwise, thanks to dramatic improvements in their descriptive techniques over the passing centuries. By the middle of the eighteenth century, American surveyors such as George Washington mapped with much improved scientific accuracy, compared to Wood's generation. Enterprising Virginians interested in inland resources pondered these maps to determine the most efficient routes to the Ohio Country. They quickly decided that the town of Alexandria, perched on the Potomac River, offered a shorter route, by water and with a few comparatively easy portages, to the mouth of the Cuyahoga River at Lake Erie, site of present-day Cleveland, than did any other eastern seaboard city.2 Surely, they reasoned, Alexandria would rise into the great entrep6t of the eastern seaboard. Speculators were destined to disappointment; rival cities-New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore-captured the western trade thanks to transportation improvements that overcame the disadvantage of location. Nonetheless,

Nucleated settlement: a view from the frontier

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the problem of the origin of nucleated villages using a series of case studies from south Cambridgeshire. It also identifies a particular form of dispersed rural settlement which was arranged around large oval basins of meadow land and that appears to pre-date the villages. The wider implications of this are examined.

From the Counting House to the Field and Loom: Ecologies, Cultures, and Economies in the Missions of Sonora (Mexico) and Chiquitanía (Bolivia)

From the Counting House to the Field and Loom: Ecologies, Cultures, and Economies in the Missions of Sonora (Mexico) and Chiquitanía (Bolivia)

Medieval settlement and landscape change on Anglesey

ABSTRACT In 1283 the Welsh kingdom of Gwynedd was conquered by Edward I of England and the royal lands of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd passed into the control of the English Crown. This case study will examine aspects of the bond settlements at two Anglesey maerdrefi (royal estate centres) in the two south-western commotes of Malltraeth and Menai. It will attempt to determine more closely their location and character and to chart the transformation of the landscape from the Age of the Princes, through the sale of Crown land in the seventeenth century, to the present day. Recent studies have drawn attention to the potential for locating the llysoedd of the Welsh princes of Gwynedd during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, at the core of their royal estates, through the use of documentary evidence and targeted fieldwork (Johnstone 1997). The work of Glanville Jones has considered the organisation of the maerdref in general and maerdref Aberffraw in particular (for example, Jones 1979). However, less attention has been paid, in detail, to the settlements of the bond tenants of the Prince, which it is argued, are likely to have been concentrated in nucleated villages (Carr 1982, p. 31), or to the ancillary components of the estates which constitute the immediate landscape. The components of medieval settlement on Anglesey are described in the context of the administrative and tenurial framework. These provide background to the study of settlement and landscape change on lands formerly held by the Princes of Gwynedd. The pattern is one of increasing consolidation of holdings and the amalgamation of individual small tenancies, with large properties in the hands of a small number of landowners. By the sixteenth century the enclosure of the open field with banks had begun. The dispersed arable quillets of an earlier landscape can be seen to have been increasingly brought together in parcels and closes. By the early nineteenth century, the superimposition of large fields, characterised by ruler-straight boundaries where once ran sinuous strips in open field, has obscured and all but obliterated the pattern of the medieval landscape.

Ohio Hopewell Community Organization (review)

Reviewed by: Ohio Hopewell Community Organization Jack Bernhardt William S. Dancey and Paul J. Pacheco, eds. Ohio Hopewell Community Organization. Kent OH: Kent State University Press, 1997. xvii + 433 pp. Figures, maps, tables, bibliographies, index. Cloth $45.00 Few areas of the United States are as rich in prehistoric remains as the river valleys of southern Ohio. The geometric earthwork complexes of the Middle Woodland Period (ca. 200 BCE–400 CE), called "Hopewell" after the group of mounds on the M.C. Hopewell farm in Ross County, have inspired the imaginations of professional and amateur archaeologists since the early nineteenth century. Although research on the mounds has provided insight into Hopewell mortuary practices and ceremonial architecture, surprisingly little is known about Hopewell community organization and daily life. In part, this is because earlier generations of archaeologists assumed that the magnitude of earthworks such as the Great Circle at Newark, which encompasses fifty acres within its walls, would have required the labor of sizable populations who must have lived in large nucleated villages near the ceremonial centers; evidence of such large settlements has never been found. [End Page 315] The first well-documented example of an Ohio Hopewell domestic site was reported in 1965 by Olaf H. Prufer in "The McGraw Site: A Study in Hopewellian Dynamics." Instead of supporting the nucleated settlement theory, Prufer discovered a Middle Woodland farmstead in the floodplain of the Scioto River in Ross County that he proposed had been occupied by thirty-five to forty-five individuals for approximately one generation, or thirty years. Based on this site, Prufer characterizes the Ohio Hopewell settlement pattern as a system of small, semipermanent farmsteads based on shifting agriculture, clustered around a series of ceremonial centers and burial grounds with which a number of such farmsteads identified themselves. Inspired by the "Dispersed Settlement– Vacant Ceremonial Center Model" then popular for the Maya, Prufer's conception has come to be known as the "Dispersed Sedentary Community Model," or simply the Prufer Model. In the thirty years since excavation of McGraw, little had been done to test Prufer's model, even as archaeologists in other regions of the United States advanced themethod, theory, and substantive framework of settlement system studies. In 1992, a group of scholars organized the symposium "Testing the Prufer Model of Ohio Hopewell Settlement Pattern" at the Society for American Archaeology conference in Pittsburgh. Ohio Hopewell Community Organization, edited by William Dancey and Paul Pacheco, is a fifteen-chapter book consisting of papers from the symposium plus others, including two chapters and an appendix by Prufer, by some who did not attend the symposium. While few published research programs have tested the Prufer model, the editors write that this volume assembles "some of the information on Middle Woodland non-mortuary locations currently scattered in conference papers, master's theses, contract reports, and the like and assess the fit of the data with Prufer's conception" (5). The chapters are concerned primarily with three poorly understood topics: settlement pattern, subsistence, and earthwork function. Given the extensive area covered—from the Indiana–Ohio border on the west to the Muskingum Valley on the east—and 600 years of Hopewell activity, it is not surprising that the authors report variation in the Hopewell settlement pattern. Research by Pacheco along Raccoon Creek near the Newark Works, by Kozarek at the Jennison Guard Site at the mouth of the Great Miami River in Indiana, by Coughlin and Seeman near the Liberty Works in Ross County, and by Carskadden and Morton in the Muskingum Valley support the Prufer model. The model is challenged by Lepper and Yerkes, who reexamined data from Hale's House Site, discovered in 1977 during a highway survey through a portion of the Newark Works. From these and other data, they conclude that the Hopewell settlement pattern featured some habitation sites that were seasonally occupied and that Prufer's notion of ceremonial centers as vacant, or unoccupied, terrain is incorrect. And Robert Connolly's work at Fort Ancient in Warren County suggests that the area immediately adjacent to this hilltop earthwork contained a domestic site occupied continually over a long period of time. [End Page 316] Prufer's contention...

PROBLEMS OF PHASING: A RECONSIDERATION OF THE BLACK PATCH MIDDLE BRONZE AGE ‘NUCLEATED VILLAGE’

SummaryThe Middle Bronze Age settlement complex of Black Patch, East Sussex, originally considered to represent the remains of a single phase ‘nucleated village’, is here reconsidered as representing the remains of two chronologically distinct settlement units. The dangers inherent in overlooking sequence and assuming contemporaneity for all archaeological features revealed within the course of a single excavation, are outlined.

Formative Settlement Patterns in the Valdivia Valley, SW Coastal Ecuador

Abstract The prevailing view of the Formative in Ecuador is of a period characterized by precocious development and transformation. Initially, the Early Formative (Valdivia) period is marked by a very early appearance of ceramics associated with large U-shaped or circular villages reminiscent of Tropical Forest Culture in the Amazon Basin. Subsequently, through the Valdivia period, these villages assumed an increasingly ceremonial function, while much of the population was dispersed among small settlements scattered along the river valleys. The Early Formative thus apparently witnessed a transformation in settlement, from nucleated villages to a dispersed peasantry surrounding ceremonial centers, and this is characterized as a perhaps seminal, first step in the evolution of the great ceremonial centers of Nuclear America. While the outcome of this evolutionary process in Mesoamerica and the central Andes is well known, it seems to have had little impact in Ecuador: at the end of the Valdivia period, cerem...

Social and spatial order in villages in India

Abstract The paper explores the social, ecological, and religious factors which shape the village forms in India. Linear, nucleated and dispersed villages have been identified with different regions. Caste and kinship groups form the basic unit of a neighbourhood. The castes ranked on a hierarchical scale, locate themselves in a centre‐periphery distribution in the village. This layout also expresses the duality between ritually pure and polluting space and defines the social interaction patterns between the different castes.

Effect of population nucleation on house size for pueblos in the American Southwest

House size is dependent not only on the number of residents and various economic and environmental factors, but also on the physical proximity of the house relative to other houses. For the same number of residents, houses in nucleated villages are likely to be larger than houses in dispersed villages. House size is measured both as square meters of floor area and as number of rooms; nucleation is measured as the average number of contiguous rooms per village. Data are derived from Historic Period pueblos in the Southwest.

Le Pays des Illinois

S TUDIES in social history over the last twenty-five years have revealed the close relationship between village England and the New England town. Early New England towns may even be said to have been reformed and improved versions of the early modern English manorial village, corrected according to the countryman's view of the need for social and institutional change. Continuity, it is now realized, was a pervasive early modern value, most certainly at the village level. This persistent localism with its customary themes reflects a general, broader view of life characteristic of the early modern period.1 Social history has shown us, for instance, that much of what was once attributed to Puritanism in New England was, in fact, rooted in English rural social practice.2 But if continuity is an essential component of villageness, does this pattern of transatlantic village continuity hold true beyond the area of English culture? Work on the colonies of England's imperial rivals has so far produced few analogies to the New England experience. There is, however, at least one good analogy, little known and, until recently, almost unstudied: French colonial Illinois.3 Beginning about I700, unauthorized French emigrants established six nucleated villages on the east bank of the Mississippi below present-day St. Louis. These villages contained, c. I 7 52, approximately three thousand people, of whom perhaps one thousand

Fort Ancient Agricultural Systems and Settlement: A View from Southwestern Ohio

Models of Fort Ancient settlement are based on assumptions about social organization, adaptation, and site function. Fundamental to testing settlement models is the question of village autonomy among coeval communities, especially the question of economic self-sufficiency. This question is explored by using catchment analysis as a technique for measuring the amount of usable soils around six nucleated Fort Ancient villages in southwestern Ohio. Economically, each of the sites discussed is shown to have sufficient soil for growing the necessary cultigens to support its resident population on a year-round basis. These results are in agreement with Graybill's (1981) thesis that all Fort Ancient communities, regardless of size, shape, complexity, or time, are self-sufficient social aggregates.

Planned landscapes in north-east Poland: the Suraż estate, 1550–1760

The villages and fields of the former Crown estate of Suraz in north-east Poland exhibit a distinctive and rare symmetry and reflect the highest level of seigneurial control of the landscape. The planned layouts were the result of an agrarian reform based on the three-field system, nucleated villages, a precise landholding and measure known as the wŀoka and manorial farming. The reorganization imposed by statute took place for the most part in the mid-sixteenth century and affected many of the royal lands in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Suraz was situated in the westernmost province of the Duchy and closest to the influence of new agrarian models diffusing from Poland and Germany. The origin of the Wŀoka Decree, which finally shaped the geography of the estate in the years 1560–1563, is to be seen in earlier, piecemeal reforms in the region based on the wŀoka . Despite enormous fluctuations in population levels in the next two hundred years, the wŀoka system survived largely unaltered. The level of symmetry imposed is of intrinsic interest and is examined in some detail. It is concluded, that lordship and its influence on the pattern of the landscape may have been as important a factor in the emergence of less orderly three-field systems and nucleated villages in an earlier, largely undocumented, period in west European history.

Formative Period Political Differentiation in the Southern Valley of Mexico: A Comment on Steponaitis

In his recent article, Steponaitis (AA 83: 320-363, 1981) presents an interpretation of the relationship between political differentiation, site size, and catchment productivity for the Formative Period in portions of the Valley of Mexico. This analysis focuses on data from the Texcoco, Ixtalapa, Chalco, and Xochimilco regions in the southern Valley of Mexico. In essence, Steponaitis suggests that larger sites reflect differences in population sizes, which are, in turn, a function of the productivity of a site's catchment and its position within a regional political hierarchy (p. 325). In exploring the relationship between these three major variables, Steponaitis indicates that, in the absence of political differentiation, there is a direct positive relationship between population (as measured by site size) and the productivity of a site's catchment (p. 326, Fig. 2a). As political differentiation emerges, higher-order sites will begin to occur. Second-order sites termed are argued to contain both economic producers and nonproducers (p. 327). The nonproducers in these local centers are said to be supported jointly by the producers that also reside there and by the extraction of tribute from nucleated villages that occur on the lowest tier of the regional hierarchy. Steponaitis argues that this process characterizes the emergence of local centers in the Late Formative Period in the

Human geography of Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea is topographically diversified and, although it lies within the topics, it has many different climatic regimes. Traditional settlement has exploited the various ecological situations in different ways and this is reflected in population densities ranging from less than 5/km 2 over large areas to more than 100/km 2 in Highland valleys and other restricted areas. In the Highlands the dominant food crop is now the sweet potato, introduced probably only 300 years ago. Its introduction led to changes in both economic and social systems and influenced population densities. In lowland regions, the sago palm is used either as a staple or supplementary food and, in river and coastal communities, fish and other marine resources are exploited. Settlement forms range from single-family homesteads through hamlet and nucleated villages to communal longhouses. Some settlements number more than 1000 people, but more are small with approximately 50% numbering 75–300 people. Before European contact trade routes across the country were well established, as well as some to neighboring islands. Principal trade items were shells from the coast, stone axes from inland and salt from saline springs or from plants. In addition, local trade involved many types of food. European colonization resulted in many changes which have affected the distribution of population, health and social structure of the indigenous peoples.

Changes of Social and Agricultural Structures and Farmland Consolidation of Neunkirchen-Seelscheid in the Eastern Suburb of Bonn

This report deals with the changes of the rural area in the suburb of a German metropolitan region, in reference to the case of the Wolperath farmland consolitation area in the Köln-Bonn metropolitan region. The changes of the rural area are analyzed through social structure, agricultural structure and landscape formed by farmland consolidation.Farmland consolidation (Flurbereinigung) means the land consolidation of scattered small farm lots into larger farm lots, sometimes by means of Aussiedlung (resettlement of a farmstead out of a dense nucleated village to the heart of a farming area) (Fig. 3). Wolperath lies in the southern part of the rural district Neunkirchen-Seelscheid, Rhein-Sieg Kreis, Regierungsbezirk Köln, Land Nordrhein-Westfalen. Wolperath is located 20 km NE of Bonn, and 28 km ESE of Köln and on the upland of the Bergische Hochfläche with an average altitude of 180 m. Fifty-eight percent (58 %) of the district consists of agricultural land and 25% of forest.The number of people resided in the district has been increasing since 1956, especially from 1968-1973 (Table 1). In contrast to population, the number of farms has been declining. The increase-rate of population in the district has shown the highest in comparison with the Kreis, Regierungsbezirk and Land (Fig. 1). The population pyramid reveals a ballanced pillar with two lobes reflecting younger age groups. The increase of population depends on social increases rather than on natural increases and the latter, in fact, shows minus. Most in-migrants came from the adjacent areas of Köln and Siegburg (Table 3), and out-migrants moved to the adjacent areas of Siegburg, Köln and Düsseldorf. A relatively large in-and out-migrantion flows may be observed in relation to foreign countries.Due to the urbanization in the suburb of the Köln-Bonn metropolitan region, the number of farms has decreased by 54% from 1949 to 1974. Fifty-six percent (56%) of the farms are dairy farms. Forty-six percent (46 %) of the farms are tenants of farm land which the owners have ceased to manage as agricultural enterprises (Table 4).The farmland consolidation office assigned Wolperath as a farmland consolidation area in 1964, based on the low of Flurbereinigung in 1953. This law was revised in 1976. Measures to improve the agricultural structure have been financed by both the Federal and Provincial governments since January 1, 1973, within the framework of a common project : “Improvement of the agricultural structure and coastal protection” (Table 5). Land consolidation was originally a means of improving the agricultural structure chiefly through the amalgamation of fragmented small holdings (Fig. 3), the construction of farm roads, and an expansion of the waterways, and has become of primary importance in the context of the recognization of rural areas. This includes measures to develop and modernize the village, to develop industrial and residential settlements and the planning of supra-local and supra-regional communication services. Moreover, land consolidation contributes to the maintenance and improvement of the recreational value of the rural areas. Even the rural area around big German cities, such as Wolperath, has been developed and controlled by the government authorities. In short, laissez-faire urban expansion into the rural area is rare in West Germany.

Population structure in the western Pyrenees: II. Migration, the frequency of consanguineous marriage and inbreeding, 1877 to 1915

In an earlier paper (Abelson, 1978) it was suggested that relationships between population density, migration, and the frequency of consanguineous marriage depended on variation in the social class composition of populations. For two valleys in the western Pyrenees, it was found that migration distances are shorter in areas with lower population density and that this could in part be attributed to the effects of social class independently of the occupations of the population (Abelson, 1979). The present paper investigates further the relationships between migration, the frequency of consanguineous marriage and inbreeding in the Roncal valley in Navarre, Spain, for the period 1877–1915. The Roncal valley contains seven villages, each a separate administrative unit. Almost all the total population of 3900 live in these nucleated villages and there are few isolated households. The area of the valley is 420 km2, and the population density 9·28 inhabitants/km2.

Time and Village Structure in Northern Unyamwezi: An Examination of Social and Ecological Factors affecting the Development and Decline of Local Communities

IntroductionIn October 1974 I returned to the Kahama District of Tanzania for a further period of research in northern Unyamwezi where I had previously worked between late 1957 and early 1960. The present paper arises from a consideration of the implications of two facts which impressed me strongly on this second visit. The first of these was that a substantial number of the homestead heads who had been my neighbours in the village of Butumwa for the larger part of my first fieldwork were still alive though some of them had moved to other parts of the District and beyond. The second was that those who had remained, along with many others from surrounding villages, had been moved as part of the Tanzanian Government's national resettlement programme into a new large nucleated village shortly before my return there. These two facts have led me to pay further attention to the nature and functions of pre-1974 settlement patterns and to examine the relation between these and the form of the new scheme. One of the main points which will emerge from my discussion is the need, in trying to understand these settlement patterns, to take careful account of how villages change and develop over time as part of a complex combination of social and ecological processes. This processual aspect of village organization in the area has, I may add, not previously received sufficient attention in my own and other accounts of the situation there.

The Origins of European Villages and the First European Expansion

The countryside of Europe in the Roman period was one of dispersed villas and farmsteads placed in a regular grid. That of post-Roman Europe was one of nucleated villages surrounded by irregular fields and “spider's web” tracks. The change occurred between the sixth and the ninth centuries, when the countryside was largely emptied of its population. The reasons for this change should be explored, for this reconstruction of the countryside was the start of the medieval economic expansion that gave Europe a density of population and intensity of land exploitation it had never before achieved.