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Communities, Settlements, Sites, and Surveys: Regional-Scale Analysis of Prehistoric Human Interaction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Christian E. Peterson  and
Robert D. Drennan
Christian E. Peterson
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260 (cepst22@pitt.edu, drennan@pitt.edu)
Robert D. Drennan
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260 (cepst22@pitt.edu, drennan@pitt.edu)
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Abstract

The study of developing complex societies can fruitfully focus on the human interactions that define communities, which have always been at the heart of settlement pattern research. Yet little attention has been paid to how communities of varying scales can actually be identified in archaeological survey data. Most often sites have simply been assumed to correspond to communities, although this practice has been criticized. Methods are offered to delineate communities at different scales systematically in survey data, and their implications for field data collection strategies are explored comparatively for cases from northeast China, Mesoamerica, and the northern Andes.

Résumé

Résumé

Las interacciones humanas que definen las comunidades siempre han sido fundamentals para las investigaciones de patrones de asentamiento, y conforman un enfoque productivo para el estudio del desarrollo de las sociedades complejas. Sin embargo, los métodos para identificar las comunidades de variados tamaños con datos de reconocimiento arqueológico no han sido muy discutidos. Generalmente se asume que un sitio arqueológico corresponde a una comunidad humana, aunque esta práctica ha sido criticada. Este artículo ofrece una perspectiva basada en la representación de distribuciones de población como una superficie cuya altura varía según la densidad de ocupación. Asumiendo que la interacción en general disminuye con distancia, las comunidades de interacción pueden ser delineadas sistemáticamente como las bases de picos aislados en esta topografía artificial. Se exploran los requisitos que tiene esta forma de análisis en cuanto a la recolección de información en el campo. Ejemplos del análisis de patrones de distributión de ocupación en China (región Chifeng), Mesoamérica (Valle de Oaxaca), y los Andes colombianos (Alto Magdalena) demuestran que el método sugerido ayuda a delinear comunidades de una variedad de tamaños y que tiene la capacidad de no delinear comunidades cuando esta estructura específica de interacción no está presente.

Type
Articles
Information
American Antiquity , Volume 70 , Issue 1 , January 2005 , pp. 5 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Archaeology 2005

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