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September 27, 2002
Jim Wright
Emergent Complexity in Bronze Age Greece: a case study of settlement and land-use ca. 2000-1200 B.C.E.
A site is an area of human activity. Complexity might grossly be estimated by the density of sites. Difficulties: assignment of type of activity to site, assignment of dates, getting clear data despite multiple uses, reocculpations. Also, what should define geographic boundaries? Modern political boundaries, catchments, ecological zones? Here the study is restricted to the Argive plain and coastal Corinthia.
Jim's own words, from the abstract of the same talk delivered elsewhere:
These three models -- core, dependency, and periphery -- describe three kinds of settlements with three time-courses of site density. Core settlements have steady increases in density; dependency settlements have no density increase until late, when the nearby core settlement reaches some apparent threshold density; and periphery settlements increase and decrease in site density apparently independent of the core. So there are different patterns of settlement growth, and the patterns have qualitative features -- plateaus, spikes, etc. -- that might or might not be reproducible in some sort of simulation of settlement growth. What would such a simulation look like? And how is complexity defined here? Site density is admittedly not complexity, and a future direction would examine the diversity of site uses, inferred from type of artifact at each site.
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