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This chapter provides an account of the physical structure of Sripuram. It starts by presenting a brief account of the location of Sripuram in relation to important geographical and cultural landmarks. It then investigates its internal arrangements—the settlement pattern, the disposition of streets with regard to one another, the situation of temples and other community centres, etc. The values represented in the distribution of space in Sripuram are largely those of its traditional order. Sripuram proper is essentially a cluster of habitations having a certain geographical and social identity. The agraharam (or Brahmin villages) is in every sense of the term, a community. Sripuram as a whole constitutes a unit in a physical sense and, to a much lesser extent, in the social sense. The physical structure of the village has not meanwhile undergone any substantial change; it continues to reflect the primary cleavages of its traditional social structure.

This chapter examines the territories and regions in the southern area of Central Asia, focusing on the Surkhan Darya Province and Bactria. It analyses the distribution of the pattern of settlement using site, oasis, province, or secondary river valley as the main spatial entities. The chapter shows that the notions of territory and region could be used to help interpret the human ecology and the history of Central Asia, and discusses the relationship between nomad and sedentary populations and the relative importance of ethnic identities.

This chapter explores the emergence of the autonomous ethnic polities of the Colca Valley during the Late Intermediate Period (LIP) and their subsequent incorporation into the Inka empire. It presents archaeological data that document a shift from heterarchical community relations during the LIP to the emergence of a more centralized but locally mediated political arrangement under Inka rule. The chapter evaluates the contrasting views that emerge from documentary and archaeological perspectives on the LIP and Late Horizon in the valley. On one hand, textual depictions represent the Collaguas and Cabanas as powerful warring chieftaincies that were comprehensively reorganized under Inka imperial aegis. The archaeological evidence, on the other hand, signals a more fluid social landscape during the LIP and an improvised order under Inka rule in which extant patterns of settlement and land use were left intact, while local-imperial relations were mediated by local elites and through the idiom of commensalism. The chapter synthesizes these views by considering how the colonial written record reflects discourses shaped by a century of Inkaic colonialism, which amplified and ossified previously latent inequalities and political hierarchies—processes that are evident in the settlement pattern, architectural, and material culture of the archaeological record.

This chapter examines the history of Irish immigrants in Great Britain during the period from 1871 to 1921. The Irish who came to Britain in the 1870s were mainly reluctant immigrants, and they were mostly transient people. Many of those who stayed in Britain experienced virtual exclusion from secure employment and housing. The warped occupational distribution of the immigrants was reflected in their housing and patterns of settlement. In the following fifty years, though the acuteness of immigrant estrangement abated, there was no complete transformation of the Irish in Britain into either an expatriate community or a fully accepted ingredient of British society.

Members of the Seneca Nation of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy resided in a surprising variety of settlement forms during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Seneca communities in what is now western New York State lived in sequentially occupied sites that ranged from nucleated to fully dispersed, with and without defensive palisades. The regional Seneca settlement pattern also changed from one with two large core sites and surrounding satellites to a network of evenly spaced smaller sites arrayed across their territory. While earlier scholars viewed these transformations as decline away from a precontact cultural climax, the changes were non-linear and corresponded quite tightly to the dynamics of the regional political economy known in detail from documentary sources. This chapter reviews the details of 1669-1779 changes in Seneca community forms, and examines the lived experience of community relocation as a dynamic time for negotiation, reimagination, assessment of political-economic conditions, and the exercise of power.

This chapter compares the settlement ecology—factors influencing settlement location choices, settlement size, and settlement relocation—of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) communities in northeastern North America predating the arrival of Europeans, to early Colonial Period communities. It enhances understanding of Haudenosaunee reactions to the introduction of European societies, politics, economics, ecologies, and ideologies in the region. Results suggest that settlement location choices changed very little after Europeans arrived. Either the landscape changed little from the Haudenosaunee perspective, or Haudenosaunee communities were not significantly influenced by the changes that did occur, although particular landscape features related to agricultural subsistence activities did shift. The chapter investigates these large-scale trends and explores the ecology of Haudenosaunee settlement patterns and processes before and during early colonialism. Results are supplemented with existing data on community life to create a multiscalar view of Haudenosaunee settlement ecology as it relates to the advent of colonialism in northeastern North America.

Chapter 9 provides the major conclusions of the work: that the demographic peak indicated by the archaeological record was accompanied by profound changes in settlement patterns and land use. In addition, social conditions fostered increasing demands for comestible goods that created market conditions favourable to agricultural specialization, investment, and intensive trade. These conditions persisted to the beginning of the early Islamic period but apparently not much beyond it.

A major effort of the Village Ecodynamics Project involved translating the archaeological record of the central Mesa Verde region into quantitative summaries of the actual ancestral Pueblo settlement history, using explicit and repeatable criteria. This chapter introduces the study area, explains how we translated the archaeological record into a quantitative database using Bayesian statistical methods, and presents the basic outlines of the resulting settlement history derived from these data. These analyses provide an introduction to the basic issues surrounding ancestral Pueblo historical ecology, whichthe remaining chapters of this book address in various ways. They also provide the “pattern of resistance” against which models of climate change; agricultural potential; water availability; wood, stone, and game resources; exchange; warfare; and settlement decisions are evaluated throughout this volume.

This chapter critiques Thomas Emerson's interpretation of the countryside settlement pattern, which he claims supports the view that Cahokia was the dominant centralized power. It also interprets these same data in terms of the heterarchical polyistic locale-centric account. Subsequently, the chapter outlines the mortuary aspect of this archaeological record (primarily drawing on the work by George Milner, Melvin Fowler, Thomas Emerson, and supporting researchers), critiques the funerary paradigm interpretations that they give, and then presents the alternative Mourning/World Renewal Mortuary model. Then, it shows that the very same settlement data can be more coherently interpreted in terms of the World Renewal Cult Heterarchy model. It first introduces the sequential settlement articulation mode. In addition, the bifurcated settlement articulation mode account is explained.

The National Science Foundation-funded Village Ecodynamics Project organizes data on the sizes and locations of Pueblo archaeological sites within a 1,817-sq-km portion of southwestern Colorado. The expansion of farmers in this area between AD 600 and 1280 is an example of a worldwide process known as the Neolithic Demographic Transition. We compare the settlement patterns created by these farmers, known through archaeological research, with simulated patterns generated by computerized agents on virtual landscapes (representing households) as the agents attempt to get enough maize, meat, wood, and water to survive under changing climatic circumstances. This will allow us to assess how relevant the concepts of adaptation and optimality are to understanding the changes seen in settlement patterns through time.

This chapter synthesizes data about Kentucky’s Early-Middle Woodland domestic landscape using a multiscalar approach. Regarding microsettlement, most domestic structures are small, lightly built, short-term, single-use, circular and curvilinear open ramadas and cabanas with few internal features. Large, heavily constructed, and rebuilt enclosed structures are less common. Regarding intrasite patterning, more intensely occupied, open habitations exhibit multi-purpose activity areas, numerous features, and domestic structures, while less intensely occupied sites lack activity areas and have few tono features and structures. Rockshelter and cave sites show a similar dichotomy, though domestic structures are uncommon at the latter. Regarding intersite patterning, the widespread distribution of domestic sites suggests generalized utilization of the landscape, though there is temporal variation in preferred ecological zones and landforms. Domestic and ritual spaces were physically separate in most drainages. Logistical mobility associated with a collector subsistence strategy best characterizes Early-Middle Woodland settlement across Kentucky.

This chapter interprets the Sponemann settlement pattern in developmental terms, as the working out over time of shifting proscriptive-prescriptive deontics arising from intensified cultivation and settlement as predicated under the Sacred Maize model. It begins by presenting the proscriptive/prescriptive settlement and subsistence dynamics. The chronological scheme of Communities 1 through 4 seems quite consistent with the predictions that flow from the Sacred Maize model. The chapter also discusses the Sponemann site ritual/ceremonial sphere. The interpretation of the Sponemann phase occupation is consistent with the Sacred Maize model in that it illustrates that the incorporation of maize as a major subsistence crop is correlated with the expansion of the population, the elaboration of world renewal ritual through the construction of a sequential series of keyhole structures, and the modification of the deontic ecological posture from a strongly proscriptive-settlement toward a less proscriptive-settlement orientation correlated with an intensifying prescriptive subsistence ceremonial orientation.

This chapter investigates the precise location of the ancient deme and examines the question of what form the ancient settlement took. Despite its large size and Thucydides’ information concerning its location in the Attic countryside, Acharnai has paradoxically remained all but archaeologically invisible. The chapter collects all the bits of scattered archaeological evidence in the area of Acharnai and examines them in light of competing scholarly claims as to the site of the ancient settlement. It identifies the location of ancient Acharnai and solves the riddle of Acharnai’s scant archaeological presence by placing the evidence in the context of settlement in Attica and current theories of community placement.

From the twelfth to the end of the fifteenth century and even later, Gujarat was still in the process of being ‘settled’. The coastal towns were particularly prosperous and boasted sizeable and entrenched colonies of local and itinerant merchants. In the hinterland, however, migration and mobility were the norm for all those engaged in trade, politics, and pilgrimage. Eastern Gujarat was already urbanized, and trade and even agriculture were largely monetized. Settlement patterns in Gujarat and corresponding local political authority illustrate the extent to which the necessities of trade influenced settlement and administration. The campaigns of the sultans were generally meant to safeguard trade for their own benefit and secure their supplies of resources. The sultans personally supervised the construction of several new forts, city walls, and even entire towns that served as proof of monumental public architecture during the period.

This chapter provides a narrative overview of the urban history of this period of the formation of the Hellenistic states. It presents the restructuring of urban centers against the backdrop of the warfare and state-building activities of the early Hellenistic kings. Covering the period 322–281 (and, to a lesser extent, 281–ca. 250), it stresses both the ideological and structural roles of urbanization in underpinning the Hellenistic states. It treats both the political history of the wars of the successors and presents a detailed survey of the archaeological and historical evidence for the effects of Hellenistic imperial policy on settlement patterns in northern Greece and Asia Minor. What emerges is a picture of great political and social disruption, but also the centrality of polis institutions.

This chapter begins with a description of the village of Utrassu-umanagri in Kashmir, covering its location and physical features, settlement pattern, and legend and history. It then discusses the villagers which include the Muslims and the Pandits. The settlement map of the village is also used.

Spatial analysis provides a greater understanding of relationships between people and environment. This chapter discusses settlement patterns and settlement ecology of the Middle Cumberland River Valley of Tennessee through spatial analysis and a settlement ecological approach. Multiple lines of evidence are necessary to distinguish between survey bias and archaeological patterns. This chapter examines Archaic settlements at local and regional scales using GIS-based analyses, exploring the environments that people chose to settle and the possible relationship of these choices to horticulture and gathering, and highlighting Archaic patterns with consideration of data limitations. The lower number of sites in the region during the Middle Archaic could suggest a return to a residential mobility strategy, while the Late Archaic yielded more logistical mobility. Decrease in site numbers and elevation from the Early to Middle Archaic could be tied to temperature fluctuations during the Altithermal. Some Late Archaic sites occur at slightly higher elevations, indicating perhaps more varied resources.

This chapter examines the settlement patterns, socio-cultural development and the position of Indians in the port city over the period 1819 to 1867. It examines how colonial ideology, policies, and laws created boundaries in intra-Asian communication by defining Indians in relation to other ethnic communities. The chapter also accounts for how the consolidation of colonial control and changes in European social mores saw regulations that increasingly impinged on Indian social formations and religious-cultural practices. This, alongside wider transnational developments—specifically the Great Rebellion in India in 1857— affected Indians in the colony and the way in which they were perceived by those who held cultural primacy.

This chapter outlines an interpretation of the so-called rural settlement pattern of the Mississippian period recently proposed by Thomas Emerson, in which he clearly characterizes the countryside settlement pattern as a “rural” extension subordinated to the paramount chief seated at Cahokia. In a number of cases, the mound groups are linked with a central plaza or, in some cases, central bodies or associated bodies of water, some of them being manmade borrow pits. It is also implied that those who occupied the central precinct with the dominant Monks Mound, the Grand Plaza, and the surrounding palisade constituted the political, religious, and social apex of Cahokia. The presented summary of Cahokia reinforces the earlier comments that there is a common core of all the versions of the hierarchical monistic modular polity account, whether they fall into the gradualist or the “Big Bang” rupturist category: this commonality is the notion that Cahokia was a political center with associated economic, social, military, and even religious aspects and that these aspects were not simply incidentally related but were functionally subsumed to the political.