Settlement Scaling in Middle-Range Societies

Abstract

The contemporary relevance of archaeology would be greatly enhanced if archaeologists could develop theory that frames human societies of all scales in the same terms. We present evidence that an approach known as settlement scaling theory can contribute to such a framework. The theory proposes that a variety of aggregate socioeconomic properties of human networks emerge from individuals arranging themselves in space so as to balance the costs of movement with the benefits of social interactions. This balancing leads to settlements that concentrate human interactions and their products in space and time in an open-ended way. The parameters and processes embedded in settlement scaling models are very basic, and this suggests that scaling phenomena should be observable in the archaeological record of middle-range societies just as readily as they have been observed in contemporary first-world nations. In this paper, we show that quantitative scaling relationships observed for modern urban systems, and more recently for early civilizations, are also apparent in settlement data from the Central Mesa Verde and northern Middle Missouri regions of North America. These findings suggest that settlement scaling theory may help increase the practical relevance of archaeology for present-day concerns.

A New Kind of Relevance for Archaeology

“…In contrast, Figures 1 and 2 combine sites that date to different moments in the history of each region. There is no theoretical reason to expect that the intercept of the fit line capturing the relationship between N and Y should be static, but previous studies have not found evidence for a changing intercept over time (Ortman et al, 2015Ortman and Coffey, 2017). The fact that the pooled analysis presented here leads to an estimate of β that is so close to the theoretical prediction provides additional evidence for consistency in the basic energetics of the economy in each of these regions over long periods of time.…”

“…As a result, individuals in larger settlements have more social contacts and exchanges per unit time; and there are also increased opportunities for specialization as individuals can meet more of their material needs through human networks as opposed to their own individual effort. This process, which we label the "social reactor process, " induces human networks to grow in consistent, non-linear, and open-ended ways with population (Bettencourt, 2013(Bettencourt, , 2014Ortman et al, 2015Ortman et al, , 2016Cesaretti et al, 2016;Hanson et al, , 2019Ortman and Coffey, 2017).…”

“…An example of such a test is shown in Figure 1, which examines the relationship between settlement population and aggregate settlement productivity in the archaeological record of five New World societies: the Basin of Mexico; the Prehispanic Upper Mantaro Valley of highland Peru; the Mesa Verde region in Colorado, USA; the Middle Missouri region in North and South Dakota, USA; and the Lower Santa valley of coastal Peru (Data Sheet 1). The data for the Lower Santa valley derive from a settlement pattern survey of the region by Wilson (1985Wilson ( , 1988, and the other datasets have been analyzed in previous publications (Ortman et al, 2015Ortman and Coffey, 2017). These settlements encompass six orders of magnitude in population, 60 • in latitude, and 6,000 years in time.…”

“…Across these five societies the size distribution of settlements varies, and the overall height of the relationship varies, but the slopes of the fit lines capturing the relationship are nearly identical. Table 1 shows that these (Ortman et al, 2015) Lower Santa 39 1.1531 0.0849 0.833 (Wilson, 1988) Mesa Verde 130 1.1665 0.0619 0.735 (Ortman and Coffey, 2017) Middle Missouri 17 1.1628 0.0635 0.957 (Ortman and Coffey, 2017) Upper Mantaro 91 1.1393 0.0373 0.913 All (centered) 357 1.1653 0.0263 0.846 This study slopes are all in excess of one and in the vicinity of the theoretical prediction of 7/6, or 1.167. All of the regressions have high rsquared values, but these are in part autocorrelation effects that derive from using the house count to construct the roofed space estimate at many sites.…”

Cities Through the Ages: One Thing or Many?

“…The social interactions facilitated by physical proximity-and the lower costs associated with such interactions-drive productivity (Bettencourt et al, 2008Bettencourt, 2013). These relationship have been statistically investigated not only for modern metropolitan systems (in the United States, Western Europe, Brazil, Japan, India, China and South Africa) but also for Native American farming villages in North America (before the arrival of the Europeans), Pre-Hispanic Andean and Central Mexican settlements, Ancient Greek and Roman cities, Medieval European cities and towns, and cities in Tudor England (Ortman et al, 2014(Ortman et al, , 2015Cesaretti et al, 2016;Ortman and Coffey, 2017;Ossa et al, 2017;Cesaretti et al, under review). The results show a striking similarity in scaling relationships, as predicted by the settlement scaling framework.…”