From Sites to Systems
A single site is a dot; the real subject is the pattern of dots — how settlements of different sizes distribute across a region, and what that distribution says about economy, power, and movement. Landscape archaeology widens the lens from the trench to the territory, treating the whole terrain as the artifact.
Site Hierarchy
Rank a region's sites by size and function and a hierarchy usually appears: many hamlets, fewer villages, a handful of towns, one dominant center. The number of tiers is a rough gauge of political complexity — a two-tier landscape (villages plus one center) suggests a chiefdom; a four-tier landscape (hamlet–village–town–capital) signals a state administering through nested levels. The pattern of dots is a fossil of the organization that made it.
Why Settlements Sit Where They Do
Central place theory (Walter Christaller, 1933) models the ideal: if people minimize travel to obtain goods and services, central places space themselves evenly, each surrounded by a hexagonal service area — hexagons alone tile a plane with no gaps or overlaps. Real landscapes never match the clean lattice, but the deviations are the data: rivers, coasts, passes, and defensive hills pull settlements off the ideal grid, and reading the pull reconstructs what mattered — trade, safety, water, or a lord's whim.
Archaeologists test spacing with the nearest-neighbour statistic, which distinguishes three regimes:
- Clustered — sites huddle (around a resource, a market, a spring).
- Random — no organizing principle detectable.
- Regular / dispersed — sites hold each other at arm's length (competition for land, central-place spacing).
The visibility trap: what survives to be mapped is not what once existed. Stone towns outlast timber hamlets; deep-plowed valleys erase sites that hilltops preserve; a Roman villa is easy to find and a laborer's hut is not. A settlement "pattern" is always partly a preservation and discovery pattern — the map of the found, not the map of the past.