Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Harrower, Michael J.
• Mazzariello, Joseph C.
• D’Andrea, A. Catherine
• Nathan, Smiti
• Taddesse, Habtamu M.
• Dumitru, Ioana A.
• Priebe, Carey E.
• Zerue, Kifle
• Park, Youngser
• Gebreegziabher, Gidey

Titel

Aksumite Settlement Patterns: Site Size Hierarchies and Spatial Clustering

Ist Teil von

• Journal of archaeological research, 2023-03, Vol.31 (1), p.103-146

Ort / Verlag

New York: Springer US

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

SpringerNature Journals

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Settlement pattern analysis offers a range of insights about social, economic, and political relationships of Aksumite civilization. Two common approaches involve analyzing site size distributions and the spatial distribution of sites to evaluate possible clustering. We review the history of archaeological survey and settlement pattern analyses for Pre-Aksumite, Aksumite, and Post-Aksumite periods. We focus on data from two areas of northern Ethiopia collected by the Eastern Tigray Archaeological Project and the Southern Red Sea Archaeological Histories Project. We conduct Ripley’s-K multi-distance spatial cluster analysis to evaluate spatial clustering/dispersion, and Gaussian mixture model/Bayesian information criterion analysis to evaluate possible site size hierarchies. Results show similar patterns in the two areas, including site clustering predominantly during the Pre-Aksumite period, an increase in the number of sites and decrease in average site size from the Pre-Aksumite to Aksumite periods, and no definitive evidence that site size hierarchies are an indicator of political changes over time. Overall, results indicate locally aggregated political organization during the Pre-Aksumite period, locally decentralized organization, infilling, and population growth during the Aksumite period, and a subsequent decline in population and political centralization during the Post-Aksumite period.