Settlement-Size Scaling among Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherer Settlement Systems in the New World

Abstract

Settlement size predicts extreme variation in the rates and magnitudes of many social and ecological processes in human societies. Yet, the factors that drive human settlement-size variation remain poorly understood. Size variation among economically integrated settlements tends to be heavy tailed such that the smallest settlements are extremely common and the largest settlements extremely large and rare. The upper tail of this size distribution is often formalized mathematically as a power-law function. Explanations for this scaling structure in human settlement systems tend to emphasize complex socioeconomic processes including agriculture, manufacturing, and warfare—behaviors that tend to differentially nucleate and disperse populations hierarchically among settlements. But, the degree to which heavy-tailed settlement-size variation requires such complex behaviors remains unclear. By examining the settlement patterns of eight prehistoric New World hunter-gatherer settlement systems spanning three distinct environmental contexts, this analysis explores the degree to which heavy-tailed settlement-size scaling depends on the aforementioned socioeconomic complexities. Surprisingly, the analysis finds that power-law models offer plausible and parsimonious statistical descriptions of prehistoric hunter-gatherer settlement-size variation. This finding reveals that incipient forms of hierarchical settlement structure may have preceded socioeconomic complexity in human societies and points to a need for additional research to explicate how mobile foragers came to exhibit settlement patterns that are more commonly associated with hierarchical organization. We propose that hunter-gatherer mobility with preferential attachment to previously occupied locations may account for the observed structure in site-size variation.

Scaling the Size, Structure, and Dynamics of Residentially Mobile Hunter-Gatherer Camps

“…Not only does this imply a well-defined expectation for the number of coresiding families at prehistoric hunter-gatherer camps, but it suggests that if large hunter-gatherer camps are identified in the archaeological record, they likely represent aggregations of multiple bands, and thus we can infer that these are rare occurrences based on the ethnographic data. Whether large sites with multiple features are reoccupations made by individual bands over time or single large-scale aggregation events is, of course, a question that can only be answered on a site-by-site basis (see Binford 1982; Haas et al 2015; Hamilton et al 2013; LaBelle 2010; Surovell 2009). Therefore, the archaeological signature of hunter-gatherer camps is likely to be the inverse of the actual ethnographic occurrence, as larger camps will leave a much greater archaeological signature than smaller camps, while being rarer events.…”

Environmental factors drive language density more in food-producing than in hunter–gatherer populations

“…The weak impact of environmental factors on HG language density raises the question what drives the considerable spatial clustering that we detect nevertheless (figure 1). We leave this question for further research, but a promising explanation points to cultural factors in the form of 'a self-organized property of preferential attachment behaviour whereby foraging populations preferentially occupied certain locations on the landscape to take advantage of material culture or symbolic resources' ( [38] p. 22).…”

Energy, Hierarchy and the Origin of Inequality

“…Similarly, slave estate size in the antebellum American South was roughly power-law distributed (see S1 Fig). Evidence also suggests that huntergatherer settlement sizes had a power-law distribution tail [84]. The types of institution certainly vary across time and space.…”