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Long-term trends in settlement persistence in Southwest Asia: Implications for sustainable urbanism, past, present and future

Lawrence, Dan; de Gruchy, Michelle W; Hinojosa-Baliño, Israel; Al-Hamdani, Abdulameer

Long-term trends in settlement persistence in Southwest Asia: Implications for sustainable urbanism, past, present and future Thumbnail


Authors

Michelle W de Gruchy

Israel Hinojosa-Baliño

Abdulameer Al-Hamdani



Abstract

Southwest Asia saw the emergence of large settlements in the Early Holocene, and the world’s first urban communities around 6000 years ago, with cities a feature of the region ever since. These developed in diverse environmental settings, including the dry-farming plains of Northern Mesopotamia, the irrigated alluvium of Southern Mesopotamia and the more variegated landscapes of the Levant. In this paper we use a dataset of several hundred sites dating from the earliest large sites around 12,000 years ago to the Classical period (2000 BP), to examine trends in settlement sustainability through time. We use persistence of occupation as a proxy for sustainability and compare settlement trajectories in different land use zones. Comparing cities and settlements at these spatial and temporal scales allows us to address a key question in the New Urban Agendas framework: how urban development can best be supported by sustainable use of land. We find that the highest levels of persistence were not uniformly associated with high agricultural productivity regions, and some of the longest-lived settlements are located in marginal environments, likely at critical points in transport networks. We also find that persistence is enhanced in landscapes which do not require large-scale capital investment or specific forms of economic and social organisation to maintain high levels of agricultural productivity, and that sustainability is inversely correlated with social complexity. Our results show that the millennial timescales available through archaeology can enable us to identify the political, social and ecological conditions required for large centres to persist through time.

Citation

Lawrence, D., de Gruchy, M. W., Hinojosa-Baliño, I., & Al-Hamdani, A. (2023). Long-term trends in settlement persistence in Southwest Asia: Implications for sustainable urbanism, past, present and future. Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980231161245

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Feb 14, 2023
Online Publication Date Apr 5, 2023
Publication Date 2023
Deposit Date Apr 5, 2023
Publicly Available Date Apr 17, 2023
Journal Urban Studies
Print ISSN 0042-0980
Electronic ISSN 1360-063X
Publisher SAGE Publications
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
DOI https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980231161245
Public URL https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1176780

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).






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