Scale settlement analysis

An archaeological site can be defined as the tangible record of a locus of past human activity. Such sites vary in scale from the locus of a single processing task to a complex urban settlement. They also range in duration from an ephemeral sojourn to milennia of sequential occupation. The spatial dimension provides a reference plane for human activities. Contextual archaeology is concerned with the location of sites in a contemporaneous landscape, the function of such sites, the subsistence and interactive networks defined by groups of contemporary sites, and the changing configurations of such sites and networks through time. The general spatial perspectives of Chapter 12 can now be applied to a more explicit examination of sites in terms of variable resource spaces and the subtle constraints placed on such interactions by perception, information, and technology.

Two modal classes of settlements can be selected for heuristic purposes: the simple and often rudimentary traces of prehistorical hunter-gatherer sites, on the one hand, and the complex records of agricultural, pastoral, and mixed-farming communities, on the other. The one can be modeled on the typical residues encountered in Paleolithic and Mesolithic sites in the Old World and Paleoindian and Archaic sites in the New World. The other can be modeled on traditional villages surviving into the present but also documented by numerous historical and archaeological studies on different continents.