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Disentangling the spatio-environmental drivers of human settlement: an eigenvector based variation decomposition
Ralf Vandam1, Eva Kaptijn, Bram Vanschoenwinkel
1Sagalassos Archaeological Research Project, Faculty of Arts, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium. ralf.vandam@arts.kuleuven.be
Plos One
|July 12, 2013
Summary
Deterministic and stochastic processes influence human settlement patterns. Environmental factors like land cover and water availability, alongside spatial clustering, were key drivers over 8000 years in SW Turkey.
Area of Science:
- Archaeology
- Spatial Ecology
- Environmental History
Background:
- Understanding human settlement patterns requires disentangling deterministic and stochastic processes.
- Existing analytical tools struggle to differentiate spatial and environmental drivers at various scales.
Observation:
- A multivariate statistical framework from community ecology was adapted to analyze settlement drivers.
- Moran's eigenvector maps and redundancy analysis were used with archaeological data from SW Turkey (8000 years).
Findings:
- Environmental variables (land cover, water availability) and spatial clustering significantly influenced settlement.
- Spatial clustering was prominent at smaller scales, with some independent of environmental gradients.
- Incorporating historical settlement data improved model explanatory power, highlighting temporal autocorrelation.
Implications:
- This study provides a robust method for analyzing settlement drivers, applicable to broader archaeological and ecological research.
- Findings support the role of environmental determinism in early farming communities and reveal complex spatial dynamics.
- The approach can help identify factors like dispersal limitations or expansion into suboptimal areas affecting settlement distribution.
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