A New Method for Monitoring Socio-Economic Changes through Settlement Placement

Summary

There is a recursive relationship between socio-economic institutions and the environment. Decisions about where to place settlements in a landscape were informed by existing economic institutions, but placement of sites in turn effected how social and economic institutions were organized. In this paper, I present a new GIS-based method for quantifying socio-economic organization and change in prehistoric societies. Catchment analyses, as employed in this study, define the availability of economic resources for individual settlements. This approach then quantifies cultural preferences across settlement systems. As a case study, I monitor settlement systems throughout the Early and Middle Bronze Age in southwest Transylvania. Southwest Transylvania is a major metal producing region that underwent significant socio-economic changes as metal became commodified throughout the European Bronze Age. Using catchment analysis, I demonstrate that communities in metal-rich landscapes increasingly prioritized access to agricultural land and access to interregional trade routes over metal ore sources. This result challenges existing narratives for how increasingly complex societies emerged in late prehistoric Europe. The method presented in this paper is easily transferable to other regional contexts and can be an additional tool for archaeologists exploring socio-economic organization and change in the past.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20334