Remnant Settlement Patterns

Developing a Landscape History as Part of a Survey Strategy: A Critique of Current Settlement System Approaches based on Case Studies from Western New South Wales, Australia

“…The density and range of material on such sites is always a poor reflection of site composition at any one point in the past. Dewar and McBride (1992) commented that, in the absence of permanent buildings, repeated occupation of the same location but not necessarily the exact same spot would lead to an increase in site area through the accumulation of material belonging to partially overlapping occupations. Wandsnider (1998), in summarizing a number of settlement pattern studies, noted the long-recognized difficulties of moving from artifact or site numbers to population estimates.…”

“…These geomorphic processes can be matched by a series of behavioral processes that also occur at different temporal scales. Dewar and McBride (1992) list activities performed by individuals over short durations -annual hunter-gatherer settlement processes that occur seasonally, and ecological processes like soil exhaustion that may take years or generations to occur. At the longest temporal scale are evolutionary processes that affect the genotype.…”

The Ahmarian tradition of the Levantine Upper Paleolithic: the environment of the archaeology

“…On the other hand, in order to adopt the spatial patterning of sites as a basis for inferring diachronic change in social organization, it must be assumed that cultural systems are internally homogeneous (Binford, 1992). The relationships among variations in artifactual assemblages, sizes of settlements, and a systemic structure are in general inadequately understood (Thomas, 1986;Dewar and McBride, 1992) to permit this dilemma to be unraveled. All types of niches of the ecological landscape are elements of a hunter-gatherer system, but only the places where people, or artifacts, stopped are recognizable archaeologically as ''sites.''…”

The Historiography of Landscape Research on Crete

“…2-D maps enhance a false impression that spatial distribution equals a temporal phenomenon, but in fact maps should be read as interpretations and not as data (Foxhall 2000). We should remember that it is short-term processes that may be even shorter than a life cycle whose accumulation constructs a long-term 'pattern' and it is, no doubt, very difficult to distinguish between different deposits and occupation sequences even in excavated contexts (Dewar 1992;Dewar & McBride 1992). A distinction, however, between long, medium and short term should be pursued, and we should aim at an as fine resolution as possible, exploring different interpretative possibilities.…”