The Role of Forts in the Local Market System in the Lower Rhine: Towards a Method of Multiple Hypothesis Testing Through Comparative Modelling

Abstract

This paper analyses rural settlement patterns in the Lower Rhine frontier zone to elucidate the role of forts in the rural economy. Von Thünen's model of rural marketing suggests that market centres attract intensive cultivation, making them identifiable through spatial analysis of rural settlements. Environmental factors that influenced production capacity, however, can also be expected to exert a strong influence on settlement location, so a multivariate method of spatial analysis is necessary. Using a process of comparative modelling with logistic regression analysis, I test the hypotheses that rural settlements responded to the location of market centres, both civilian and military. I use univariate analysis of settlement territories to identify influential local environmental factors and combine these into a logistic regression model. Then I add a market potential (MP) variable that quantifies the accessibility of marketing opportunities from any location within a market system to see if this factor also shaped settlement patterns. Finally, I vary the centres included in the MP variable to determine whether rural settlements responded to the locations of forts in addition to civilian centres. I find that forts did not generally attract settlements and conclude that smallholders sold their produce primarily in civilian market places.

Paradigm and pragmatism: GIS‐based spatial analyses of Roman infrastructure networks and land‐use concepts in the Upper Rhine Valley

“…Nicolas Revert considers rural location preferences in northern Gaul principally in relation to local markets (Revert, ). In a recent publication, Eli Weaverdyck pointed out that Roman military fortifications and local markets were influencing each other but that local trade took place in towns and villages rather than in military camps (Weaverdyck, ). There is a direct link between a rural settlement or agglomeration and a market close to regional trade structures.…”

“…The physical location factors consist of different parameters, such as water availability and groundwater level limitation, soil quality and drainage potential, as well as climatic conditions, such as precipitation patterns or drought stress. One location factor may sometimes overlay or compensate for another, whereas drainage potential and suitable soil quality appear to be the crucial criteria for the general utilization of soils (Weaverdyck, ). However, these are modern concepts of land‐use and perceptions of location factors, which can only be related to premodern societies and their agricultural strategies with certain restrictions.…”

Modeling multivariate landscape affordances and functional ecosystem connectivity in landscape archeology

“…This is a deductive approach that strongly depends on a theory of how certain contexts are embedded in their standardized settings (Kamermans 2000). Multivariate modeling (and particularly multivariate site location analysis) rather follows an inductive approach that evaluates the specific site conditions in a particular region to detect preferences of human patterns in the landscape (Güimil-Fariña and Parcero-Oubiña 2015;Weaverdyck 2019). Accumulative surfaces deriving from environmental data analyses thus enable the inductive evaluation of physical parameters without excluding human interactions.…”

Modelling Bias and Environmental Preferences in Archaeological Spatial Analysis

“…The latter would explain the growing pressure of Roman land-use and population dynamics during the first centuries in the URA. In addition, Roman technological development led to the construction and maintenance of regional to supraregional infrastructural networks in the URA, which in turn supported the establishment of Roman villae, settlements, and market-oriented production units in close distance to accessible and stable routes and roads (WeaVerdyCK, 2019). Further amplified by the military presence of the Roman army, these pull-factors have caused a strong transformation of the landscape into a Roman cultural activity area, which is not only mirrored by geomorphological proxies like colluvial development (lanG et al, 2003;mäCKel et al, 2002;mäCKel et al, 2003), but also by vegetation change through clearing activity, mineral resource exploitation, and socio-political development of the local, peripheral society -on both side of the river Rhine.…”