Applications of the IFD and IDD to Complex Societies

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Ideal Free and Ideal Despotic Distribution (IFD/IDD) models have become increasingly popular in the archaeological and anthropological literature because of their flexibility to be applied at a variety of geographic scales. With some exceptions, however, most of the applications of the models have been to hunter-gatherer or horticultural populations, with less attention given to more complex urban and agricultural populations. This paper demonstrates the breadth of IFD/IDD by expanding their applications. We provide examples of settlement in Bronze Age (ca. 3100-1050 BCE) Greece over rising complex palatial society and northwest Morocco before and after its annexation by the Roman Empire (ca. 200 BCE – 500 CE). In these regions, settlement patterns are consistent with the predictions of the IFD/IDD. We also discuss changes in settlement consistent with a transition from the IFD to an IDD among these populations and complex hunter-gatherer-fishers in California. This study demonstrates the flexibility of the IFD/IDD models not only at different geographic scales, but for different population sizes and degrees of social stratification. These applications are promising for future avenues of ecological research and the use of Human Behavioral Ecology models, especially in the case of complex societies like those around the Mediterranean basin.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23762