ABSTRACT
Settlement ecology seeks to establish a theoretical basis for understanding human settlement dynamics using principles adapted from geography, anthropology, archaeology, and agricultural economics (Stone 1996). This approach encourages us to consider how settlement patterns reflect relationships between people and their cultural and natural environments. At its core, settlement ecology is based on functionalist principles whereby natural environmental variables, including subsistence resources, other raw materials needed to produce the necessities of life (e.g. to meet shelter, comfort, or health needs), and items for trade or exchange are thought to affect cultural adaptation. While archaeological frameworks informed by settlement ecology take human-environment interaction as a primary organizing principle, its proponents recognize that settlement patterns are also strongly influenced by social and political factors, including but not limited to ethnicity, ideology, belief systems, and place-making as well as relationships between the natural and cultural realms at multiple scales of analysis (e.g. Anschuetz et al. 2001; Birch and Williamson 2015; Jones and Wood 2012).
