Practice question · Multiple choice
A regional survey finds hamlets, villages, towns and one capital. Why does the number of tiers matter more than the size of the largest site?
Hints
- Ask what each intermediate settlement level is doing administratively.
- One huge city with only villages beneath it. What does that missing tier suggest about governance?
Show the answer
B. Because each administrative level implies a layer of control
Why
Tiers stand for layers of decision-making, so counting them measures organisational depth rather than population, a state needs intermediaries between capital and hamlet. Wright and Johnson built the three-versus-four-tier criterion on this, which is why survey data can identify a state without excavating a palace.
Practise Settlement Patterns and Landscapes
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More questions on Settlement Patterns and Landscapes
- Order the steps of a landscape survey that builds a settlement pattern.
- Which factors pull real settlements away from the clean central-place lattice?
- A mapped settlement pattern is a faithful, complete picture of all settlements that once existed.
- The nearest-neighbour statistic reports whether settlements are clustered, random or regularly spaced. Why is…