Settlement networks and sociocultural evolution

Anthropologists and historical comparative social scientists have seen value in understanding not only how different locations and cultures are distinct but also where and when sociocultural complexity and hierarchy have emerged over the past 12 000 years. Knowledge of where and when the sizes of human settlements have changed over time is useful for testing aspects of general models of sociocultural evolution. This chapter examines the roles of settlement networks in sociocultural evolution using the comparative world-systems perspective. The first section focuses on settlements, and the interaction networks built among them, before the emergence of states. The second section describes how interaction networks were involved in the rise and fall of large settlements and polities and in the emergence of settlements that were larger than any that had existed before. The third section discusses the early emergence of cities and states in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus River Valley, the Yellow River Valley, Mesoamerica and the Andes, and the expansion of empires and their building of empire cities. The fourth section considers the emergence and spread of semiperipheral capitalist city-states, and their roles in the construction of commodity trade networks and the spread of commercializations networks in world-systems in which state power and tributary accumulation remained the main instruments of reproduction. Then we consider how the emergence of the Europe-centered capitalist world-system drove and was driven by the establishment of core world cities and dependent colonial cities. We conclude by providing an overview of the implications of research on the evolution of settlement systems for understanding the contemporary global system of city-regions and possible futures for the world city system. The emergence of sedentism, the growth of settlements and interaction networks among settlements and polities, are fundamental processes of social change that required the invention of institutions that could facilitate cooperation and enable polities to effectively compete with one another for resources, including territory. The study of settlement-size distributions – the relative sizes of interacting settlements within polities and in networks of independent interacting polities – provides another important window for viewing and comprehending the emergence and growth of human organizational complexity and hierarchy.