Settlement Archaeology: Houses, Household clusters and activities, Community,Site, Catchment Analysis,Spatial Analysis

1. Settlement Archeology :
Dr. Ashwani Asthana

2. Settlement Archeology :
1. Most of the 20th
century archaeologists who
worked for the reconstruction of prehistoric
settlement pattern looked upon the data like
house architecture, village layout and ecological
adaptation
2. The study of archaeological data began with the
classification of artefacts, identification of
typological variables, houses, style of
architecture, storage, religious structures and
their layout, street and road plans of city, study
of subsistence pattern, etc.

3. 3. Most of the data on these traits are recovered
from excavations and described as single units
in the analysis but they have a content and a
relation to one another
4. Settlement archaeology is part of analysis of
adaptive interactions between people and the
environment
• It revolves around the study of settlement
patterns which are governed by the factors like
environment, economic practices and
technological skills

4. • Sometimes inherited culture patterns
and religious organisations also rule the
pattern of the settlement
5. The study of settlement pattern involves
a multidisciplinary approach looking
into adaptive information between
people and environment

5. 6. Shelters or houses and villages and
various kinds of artefacts found within
these structure along with different
kinds of activities inducing food
residues, hearth, etc., are the kind of
data which form part of settlement
pattern of a prehistoric society

6. 7. This pattern involves relationships among
people who built their houses,
settlements, activities areas, religious
structures at a particular place on the
basis of practical, political, economic and
social considerations
8. Bruce Trigger has defined several levels
of settlements like single building or
structure; arrangement of such structures
within individual community and the
distribution of communities against the
landscape

7. 7. Though K.V. Flannery has broken
down these levels further but the
levels mentioned by Trigger are vital
for any study on settlement pattern

8. Structure
1. House, hut, pit, temple, fortification, cattle-
pen, religious structure—factors playing imp.
role – nature, resource, skill, e.g., wind breaks
• Raw materials – mud brick, clay structure,
stone blocks, wooden, e.g., igloos – Eskimos
• Skill

9. Houses, household clusters and
activities
1. Storage pit, grave, kitchen miden
2. Activity (Example) Zamberi valley
(south central Africa) burial of two male
associated with sets of iron tools, copper
wire (ornamental)- data may suggest
that these male were expert ornamental
copper wire-maker or this activity was
confined to the male members

10. Community
1. Environment and economy limit the size and
permanence of a settlement because the ability
to gather food and store it is as important as the
technology is necessary to transport food and
process it into edible units
2. While the permanence of human settlement is
affected by subsistence ecology, the layout of a
community is greatly determined by social and
political factors particularly by family and
kinship considerations

11. • Defense, agriculture, activity, shape
size of structure
• Harappans used 1:2:4 bricks-set
planning
• Mesopotamian built cities from central
Ziggurats

12. Site Catchment Analysis
1. Catchment area around a village
2. It is a zone of domestic and wild resources
within walking distance of the settlement
3. Richard Lee observed the situation among
the Bushmen of Kalahari Desert of S.
Africa – women folk used and exploited
the area within 10 Km. from base camp.
4. Claudio – Vita Finzi and Eric Higgs
applied their observations to prehistoric
sites near Mount Carmel in Israel in 1970

13. • They coined the term site catchment
analysis which is the study of the
relationship between technology and
those natural resources lying within
economic range of individual sites
5. These scholars drawing a series of 5 km.
concentric circles around their hunter-
gatherer and early farming villages
• Calculated hect. of usable land, rough
grazing land, marsh, dunes and other
categories of lands

14. • Each of the land category formed a
percentage of total catchment area
• Depended upon distance
• 100% resource exploited within 1 km from
site
• 33% on land between 2-3 km.
• Environmental data – derived from modern
sources – Hypothetic - Deductive (HD)

15. Site distribution and interaction
1. Nature of site (quarry, kiln, smithy,
lapidary)
2. Distribution – interaction

16. Spatial Analysis
1. In archaeology the spatial analysis has
borrowed many concepts form geography
and ecology with the help of which
significance of distribution of sites or
artifacts is assessed
2. The first stage in any spatial analysis is to
collect maximum possible quantitative
information and theorise them on the
basis of distribution map

17. 3. To analyse the properties of spatial
relationship, geographers construct
system which employ basic concepts like
direction, distance and connectivity
• Direction means – orientation
• Distance – relative measure (differs from
place to hill)
• Connectivity – is expressed in flow of
people, goods or communication-flow of
words

18. Central Place Theory
1. Formulated by German geographer Walter
Christaller in 1933 who was studying
modern settlement system in southern
Germany
• He brought forward a series of statements
about the relationship between the town
and countryside which is called Central
Place Theory

19. 2. Analysis starts with the development of
site typology
3. Sites are typified on the basis of size,
function and other features, e.g., primary
and secondary regional centres; nucleated
and dispersed villages; hamlets, camps,
residences, etc, on the basis of population
size, architecture and specific criteria
4. Each site type has relationship with other
which ultimately provide a pattern on a
local, regional or even a continental level

20. • Administrative hierarchy with number
of services and areas
• Hexagonal settlement lattice

21. Archaeological studies of
settlement
1. Following the concept of adaptation,
archaeologists believe that the
location, spacing, size, and kind of
sites are determined by the natural
environment, social and biological
factors

22. Demography
1. Pattern of settlement can be described
statistically
• In this, the size and spacing of sites are
emphasised with the people who live in the
sites
• This kind of approach linking people with
essential statistics is called demography
2. Demographic data enumerates the number of
persons comprising a certain population
together with relations among categories (e.g.
Occupation and status) of persons

23. 3. Considering the relation between number
of people and the area they occupy many
estimates of population have been
proposed on the basis of the size of site
4. Methods have been proposed to calculate
the number of people occupying a site
5. One such general estimate was proposed
by Noroll in 1962 who on the basis of
ethnographic model estimated that the
ratio of enclosed floor space/person is a
relatively constant -10:1, i.e., in 100 sq. m.
of floor space there will be 10 people
occupying it

24. • Log population = constant x log area
6. Similar mathematical formulae have been
used to compute population estimates for
California shell midens, Pakistani villages
and African Iron Age mounds
7. Prof. M. Lal – Ganga – Yamuna doab —
calculation based on – shell refuse, and
number of grinding stones
• Pottery breakage rates, vessels capacity
and mortality data from large cemeteries –
tentative estimate of prehistoric
population size

25. Factors affecting population
size and its distribution
• Social and environmental factors – land
form and resource
• Technology
• Trade, commercial activity
• Custom, belief and religion
• Warfare – enslavement of war captives –
ritual-human sacrifices

26. Migration
1. Population pressure, lack of resource,
agriculture activity, social demand
2. Basic data on population growth – came
from site catchment analysis which
provided information on available
agricultural land and its relation with
individual site size, topography, spacing
of settlements