Professor Daniel Lawrence dan.lawrence@durham.ac.uk
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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
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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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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