From Trypillia to Tswana: A Global Perspective on Giant Low-Density Settlements

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Theorizing Prehistoric Large Low-Density Settlements beyond Urbanism and Other Conventional Classificatory Conventions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Early giant settlements such as Chaco Canyon, the Tswana “towns,” and the European oppida have long seemed anomalous to scholarship because they did not ally their vast extents with characteristics of conventional urbanism. These large low-density settlements emerged periodically for more than 7,000 years across the globe. They occur far more frequently and in more diverse geographic areas than higher density settlements of similarly novel areal extents. Roland Fletcher (1995) identified that they functioned because by dropping to a low-density internal pattern they were not constrained in expansion by interaction stress or issues of communication. Without such constraint, they developed across a range of formal and operational characteristics, often with evidence of population mobility and within extensive regional interaction networks. But their expansions and persistence often appear somewhat random. Structurally, they were giant variants of common regional forms appearing within specific culture regions but ceasing to develop with region-scale systemic change. These settlements were both robust and vulnerable. More than 200 examples have been identified and there are many more. They constitute a human settlement behavior that we are only beginning to systematically explore.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Theorizing Prehistoric Large Low-Density Settlements beyond Urbanism and Other Conventional Classificatory Conventions   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38521.0