From Trypillia to Tswana: A Global Perspective on Giant Low-Density Settlements

Abstract

Giant settlements worldwide which incorporated large amounts of open space, such as Cahokia, Great Zimbabwe and the European oppida, have long seemed anomalous to scholarship because they did not match the characteristics of conventional urbanism. It is now apparent that these settlements appeared relatively frequently in diverse conditions across the world over the past 7000 years and they may constitute a form of human settlement behaviour that has not yet been consistently articulated. In Limits of Settlement Growth, Roland Fletcher (1995) identified that such settlements sit outside usual categories for specifying conditions of settlement operation in the past. He predicted that these settlements would have dropped to a low-density internal pattern as they expanded to large size. In his parlance they operated below a Threshold Limit on the Interaction-Communication Matrix and would not therefore be constrained in their areal expansion. The aim of this research was to test Fletcher’s prediction for these sites in the I-C Model and explore the findings to delineate boundary conditions of their operation. A dataset of sites 100 ha or larger was compiled and compared across variables such as area, population mobility, durations and demise. Using a recently updated version of the I-C Matrix, these settlements were found to have operated beneath the Mobile Interaction-Limit as well as at lower densities. The mobility component of their operation varied substantially and there may be more than one type of human settlement behaviour indicated. Structurally, they were giant variants of preceding and contemporaneous settlement forms emergent under conditions of regional or sub-regional population increase rather than transformations. While individually they could have short durations, they could appear multiple times in a culture region and were resilient to all but regional systemic change.