Settling the World

From Prehistory to the Metropolis Era

Léna Sanders (dir.)

Publisher: Presses universitaires François-Rabelais

Place of publication: Tours

Year of publication: 2021

Published on OpenEdition Books: 19 October 2021

Series: Perspectives Villes et Territoires

Electronic EAN: 9782869068551

http://books.openedition.org

Printed version

Date of publication: 1 January 2021

EAN (Print version): 9782869064942

Electronic reference

SANDERS, Léna (ed.). Settling the World: From Prehistory to the Metropolis Era. New edition [online]. Tours: Presses universitaires François-Rabelais, 2021 (generated 19 octobre 2021). Available on the Internet: <http://books.openedition.org/pufr/19610>.

This text was automatically generated on 19 October 2021.

© Presses universitaires François-Rabelais, 2021

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70 000 years ago, Homo sapiens left Africa to colonize the world. 6,000 years ago, he founded the first cities. Today, in the era of city networks, he is creating increasingly wide and complex metropolitan regions. From prehistory to the era of metropolises, man has occupied the earth's space in an infinite variety of ways, under the influence of a multitude of factors. How did the Bantu populate a space already occupied by the Pygmies in equatorial Africa? How were cities born in the Bronze Age?

How did the pueblo society develop and then disappear in the United States? What were the effects of Romanization on the settlement of southern Gaul? How did the village system emerge around the year 1000 in Europe? This book addresses twelve major changes in global settlement formalized as “transitions”.

What is a transition? How can it be identified in the empirical field? Archaeologists, historians, linguists, and geographers combine their efforts to construct, analyze, and compare models of settlement transition in world history. Observing the particular, they seek the universal. This book proposes a method for understanding the laws of human settlement in the very long term.

Léna Sanders

Géographie-cités, UMR 8504, CNRS-Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris. Director of research at the CNRS and member of the Géographie-cités laboratory in Paris. Her work focuses on the evolution of cities and settlement systems and favors an interdisciplinary approach.

Table of contents

Preface

Sander van der Leeuw

Introduction

A collective and interdisciplinary project on the transitions in settlement systems

Lena Sanders

The emergence and functioning of the project TransMonDyn: ‘strength of weak ties’ and ‘choreography’ of research trajectories

The crossing of ‘thematicians’ and ‘modellers’ skills for an interdisciplinary co-construction

A volume structured in three parts

Chapter 1: Disciplinary convergences on the concept of transition

Denise Pumain, Lena Sanders, Thérèse Libourel and Timothy A. Kohler

The concept of transition: tacking between natural sciences and social sciences

Concepts for identifying and modelling transitions

Triggering factors: exogenous versus endogenous factors

Identification and anticipation of a transition in the empirical domain

Conclusion: the particularity of human systems

Chapter 2: A generic conceptual framework for describing transitions in settlement systems

Application to a corpus of twelve transitions between 70 000 BP and 2050

Laure Nuninger, Lena Sanders, Arnaud Banos, Frédérique Bertoncello, Anne Bretagnolle, Christophe Coupé, Robin Cura, Stefani A. Crabtree, César Ducruet, François Favory, Jacques Ferber, Jean-Luc Fiches, Alain Franc, Pierre Garmy, Julie Gravier, Jean-Marie Hombert, Lahouari Kaddouri, Timothy A. Kohler, Samuel Leturcq, Thérèse Libourel, Pierre Livet, Elisabeth Lorans, Florent Le Néchet, Hélène Mathian, Lucie Nahassia, Marie-Jeanne Ouriachi, Denis Phan, Denise Pumain, Sébastien Rey-Coyrehourcq, Xavier Rodier, Clara Schmitt, Cécile Tannier, Frank Varenne, Céline Vacchiani-Marcuzzo and Elisabeth Zadora-Rio

The notion of settlement system: dynamics of reproduction and transformation

Construction of a conceptual framework for identifying transitions from the thematic point of view

Identifying regimes and transitions in the empirical world

Construction of a corpus of twelve case studies of settlement system transitions

Conclusion

Chapter 3: Simulating transition: an introduction to spatio-temporel models

Arnaud Banos, Florent Le Néchet, Marie-Jeanne Ouriachi and Alain Franc

Introduction

A continuous reference model: The Fisher-Skellam model

A discrete model of reference: the Young model

Comparison of the two models

Proposition of a new model in TransMonDyn: the ColoDyn model

Discussion

Chapter 4: Transition 1: Modelling the migrations and peopling of new geographic areas by Homo sapiens

Christophe Coupé, Jean-Marie Hombert, Florent Le Néchet, Hélène Mathian and Lena Sanders

Homo sapiens conquering the Earth

Modelling the peopling of new territories

Discussion and perspectives

Chapter 5: Transition 2: Modelling the peopling of an already inhabited territory: the case of expanding Bantu populations and Central African forest foragers

Christophe Coupé, Jean-Marie Hombert, Florent Le Néchet, Hélène Mathian and Lena Sanders

The expansion of the Bantu populations

The HU.M.E.-2  model: Modelling migrations in a context of interactions between groups

Discussion

Chapter 6: Transition 3: Village and Polity Formation in Pueblo Societies: How Population Growth Channels Social Processes in Neolithic Societies. The «Village» model

Timothy A. Kohler and Stefani A. Crabtree

Background: The Village Ecodynamics Project

From Hamlets to Villages: Explaining Aggregation in Early Pueblo Societies

From Villages to Polities: the «Polity» model

The Depopulation of the Northern Southwest

Conclusions

Chapter 7: Transition 4: Modelling the emergence of cities

Denise Pumain, Clara Schmitt and Sébastien Rey-Coyrehourcq

Introduction: one or two ‘urban’ transitions?

A multi-situated transition

A highly stylised generic model

Results of the simulations and implications of the observations

Conclusion

Chapter 8: Transition 5: Modelling the territorial mutations of the Iron Age in southern Gaul (6th-5th centuries BC)

Laure Nuninger, Pierre Garmy, Thérèse Libourel, Jean-Luc Fiches and Lahouari Kaddouri

The historical context of the transition

Description of the transition of the settlement system between 900 and 200 BC

Discussion

Chapter 9: Transition 6: ‘romanisation’ (2nd century BCE – 1st century CE): power games between Romans and southern Gauls after the Conquest

Marie-Jeanne Ouriachi, Frédérique Bertoncello and Alain Franc

A narrative to clarify the transition from a thematic point of view

Graphic modelling: the arrow diagrams of regimes 1 and 2 of the transition

LUDUS: an attempt at modelling the relations between Romans and Gauls by means of game theory

To conclude: limits of the model and perspectives

Chapter 10: Transition 7: From the ancient to the medieval world (4th-8th centuries)

François Favory, Hélène Mathian, Laurent Schneider and Claude Raynaud

Introduction

The transition from late Antiquity in Languedoc-Roussillon

From the narrative to its formalisation

Discussion and perspectives

Chapter 11: Transition 8: 800-1200. Emergence of enduring, concentrated and hierarchised settlement patterns in rural regions of North-Western Europe

Robin Cura, Cécile Tannier, Samuel Leturcq, Elisabeth Zadora-Rio, Elisabeth Lorans and Xavier Rodier

Introduction

First step in the modelling

General architecture of the SimFeodal model

Detailed description of the behaviour of agents

Some simulation results

Conclusion

Chapter 12: Towards integrated systems of cities (France, 18th-19th centuries)

Anne Bretagnolle and Alain Franc

Introduction

Cities and exchanges at the opening of the 18th century: an organisation in lines and stars

Transformation of the space of inter-urban exchanges

Two processes for territorial integration by the systems of cities

Discussion and perspectives

Chapter 13: Transition 12: From urban sprawl to polycentric metropolitan regions: forms of functioning and forms of governance

Florent Le Néchet

Introduction

Description of the transition

From new geographic objects to new forms of territorial governance

What final regime for the transition?

Modelling the emergence of a centralised governing entity

Discussion 

Chapter 14: Between models and narratives: transitions in settlement systems

Cécile Tannier, Alain Franc, Marie-Jeanne Ouriachi and Elisabeth Zadora-Rio

Introduction

Model

Dynamic, innovation and emergence in models: from physics to the social sciences

A panoply of tools for modelling transitions in settlement systems

Conclusion

Chapter 15: Towards reproducible research in an interdisciplinary framework: issues and propositions regarding the transfer of the conceptual framework and the replication of models

Sébastien Rey-Coyrehourcq, Robin Cura, Laure Nuninger, Julie Gravier, Lucie Nahassia and Ryma Hachi

Introduction

Validating methods and results by their reproducibility: which ones, why and how?

Transferring the conceptual framework of TransMonDyn to other spatio-temporal contexts

Means for achieving good reproducibility for the models

Conclusion

Chapter 16: Ontological points of view on the transitions of settlement systems

Lena Sanders, CNRS, Thérèse Libourel, Pierre Livet and Denis Phan

Introduction

Definition of a research framework linking the empirical realm to a formal model

Different ontological points of view for comparing the transition models of the TransMonDyn project

Conclusion

Chapter 17: From the conceptualisation of the transition to its modelling: interdisciplinary feedback on the TransMonDyn experiment

Marie-Jeanne Ouriachi, Hélène Mathian, Elisabeth Zadora-Rio, Frédérique Bertoncello, François Favory and Xavier Rodier

Identifying a transition: a subject for discussion

Data – at the heart of the relation between thematicians and modellers

The modeller – an objective mediator?

Conclusion

Preface

Sander van der Leeuw

This is a book of very great interest, the result of an ambitious and innovative project, which will constitute a landmark. Starting from the hypothesis that it is the multiple transitions in the organisation of societies which comprise the backdrop to the long-term history of humanity, this book attempts to identify them, define them, and understand their dynamics by way of the spatial organisation specific to each step.

This project, and this book, have brought together a large team, whose senior members are all eminent researchers in their own disciplines, but with broader transdisciplinary interests. They are supported by a large number of younger researchers.

The interest of the book is three-fold. First of all, it combines observation, analysis and modelling of the different dynamics and stages of that history, starting from a collection of archaeological, geographic and historical data, using a range of techniques of statistical analysis and modelling which have been developed over the past twenty years (in part, moreover, by the coordinator and her team). Thus, it is a work which demonstrates in exemplary fashion at once the interest and the potential of a transdisciplinary approach.

Next, it covers the entire history of human societies, moving from the small groups of hunter-gatherers of the Palaeolithic to the first agricultural societies of the Neolithic, the first cities of the Bronze Age and the imperial societies. The volume thus covers the largest possible gamut of human societal forms of organisation. By doing so from a well defined point of view (that of space), it enables comparisons to be made between these forms of organisation, thereby enabling theories to be developed on the subject.

By basing itself on modelling, finally, the book makes it possible – something rare in archaeology and history – to go beyond static studies of the different forms of organisation to study the dynamics which are responsible for them, and therefore to help understand the transitions between different phases and write a process-based history of the emergence of human settlement in all its forms.

The work is divided into three parts. The first part stresses the importance of studying transitions. In our archaeological culture we have long studied the different stages of human evolution without having at our disposal the tools for conceiving and studying the dynamics of transition between those different stages. By combining the historical sciences and computer sciences, modelling at last permits us to do this. A transdisciplinary approach is therefore fundamental. To implement it, the work develops a conceptual framework and the definitions that permit the disciplines concerned to converge. Necessarily, this framework focuses on the dimensions of time and space, which are fundamental. This permits the authors to compare a number of spatio-temporal strategies for modelling transitions.

In the second part, the authors present models of diverse spatio-temporal dynamics, ranging from the colonisation of new territories by Homo sapiens in the Palaeolithic, to the functional dynamics responsible for the emergence of the polycentric ‘mega-cities’ of our age. This allows them to take up several fundamental challenges of human history:

The problem of the adaptation of populations to new habitats, whether the latter are uninhabited or inhabited by populations with a way of life profoundly different from that of the new colonisers.

The evolution of agricultural societies from small relatively egalitarian colonies to the formation of groups structured more or less hierarchically.

The role of the dynamics between society and environment which are essential for all societies, illustrating these by way of the Pueblo societies of the southwestern United States.

The important transitions of the history of western Europe, notably those of the Iron Age, of Romanisation, of the end of the Roman Empire, and of the emergence of medieval, modern and contemporary landscapes. Each is described in detail on the basis of the data available, with the description followed by a formalisation which raises precise questions calling for answers. This permits the authors to define these transformations against a background of multi-millenary environmental continuity.

Certain of these chapters introduce new approaches to modelling, such as MASQ (Multi-Agent Systems based on Quadrants), and also one which, in my view, represents a very important advance in the modelling of urban systems: the latest offspring of the SIMPOP series of models developed, beginning in 1996, by the Géographie-cités team: SIMPOP LOCAL, which presents the interest of exploring (on the basis of 500 million executions) a great number of potential states of the settlement system using a limited number of parameters, and of validating them by methods still hardly known in these circles. But the team also uses well established approaches, both conceptual and to simulation – for example, game theory and multi-agent models. As a consequence, the volume as a whole opens the way to a far more detailed understanding of a broad range of behaviours, not only spatial, but also social.

The third part presents an in-depth discussion of the interaction between disciplines, between diverse categories of data, between diverse definitions of transitions, between models and narratives, and between modellers and thematicians. This constitutes a rich reservoir to draw on for all those having the ambition to implement a large transdisciplinary project, but it is also grist to the mill of worldwide scientific initiatives, such as Future Earth, which aim at launching a vast undertaking of co-creation and co-construction in the field of global change. Among the questions of epistemology and method which this section raises, let me signal a few which seem to me of fundamental importance:

‘Why do we make an effort to model transition without also modelling the phases of relative stability between them?’: modelling stability and transition at the same time with the same models would give us a still richer perspective on the regulatory mechanisms of our societal constructions.

‘What are the respective roles of narratives and models in the Social and Human Sciences?’, and, especially, ‘What is the relation between the narrative and the model?’, ‘What is the validity of the generalisations that underlie a model?’ ‘How can rigour and uncertainty be associated in modelling?’

‘What are the relations between the concepts of time and of space?’: the subject is obviously fundamental for all our social disciplines but is rarely dealt with in archaeology (see the magnificent book of Laurent Olivier, Sombre abîme du temps. 1

‘What are the role and the nature of innovation?’: a crucial subject, if one considers the social transitions, but a subject which touches on in archaeology in a descriptive manner or in evoking a vague and often outmoded concept of evolution.

‘What is the role of models in transdisciplinary collaboration?’ ‘What are the advantages and disadvantages of working in a transdisciplinary team with distributed responsibilities, compared with working individually?’

And, finally, a question of great importance in every attempt at modelling in the Social and Human Sciences, where quantifiable data, like the quantified results of modelling, are subject to significant uncertainties: ‘What is the relative value of reproducing measurements and of reproducing a reasoned argument’?

In sum, I judge this to be a work of great importance. The richness of its opinions and ideas on points and questions of substantial interest makes it a volume which will transform our perspectives on the human past, but also a volume with a methodological impact in geography, archaeology and the Social and Human Sciences generally. I am sincerely pleased to see it translated into English, for, taken as a whole, it goes beyond anything I have seen published in that language.

Notes

1The Dark Abyss of Time. Archaeology and Memory. Translated in English by Arthur Greenspan. New York, Altamira Press, 2012, 211 p.

Author

Sander van der Leeuw

Arizona State University

Introduction

A collective and interdisciplinary project on the transitions in settlement systems

Lena Sanders

The two key words of this book are ‘settlement system’ and ‘transition’. The first refers to the ways in which human societies have occupied space in past and present times. It implies an interest in spatial actors and objects belonging to many levels: notably, individuals and families, settlements and transportation infrastructures, territories and networks, villages, agglomerations and urban systems. The second term refers to the passage from one ‘thing’ to another qualitatively different. Within a speech or a text, a transition (from the Latin transitio , a going across or over) makes it possible to pass from one idea to another and thus to join them together. In the social and natural sciences, ‘transition’ refers to the dynamic of change in a system which passes from a given state at a moment t 1 to another state, qualitatively different, at a moment t 2 . This is the case, for example, with a regime change in a political system, with the transformation of water into gas in a physical system, with a population characterized by high mortality and birth rates that experiences low ones as part of a demographic transition. In this volume, we are explicitly concerned with transitions in settlement systems. These transitions relate to diverse processes: migrations of hunter-gatherers, settling and concentration of populations, emergence of cities and of settlement networks, fragmentation or fusion of territories. The volume consists of three parts corresponding to the three principal stages of the collective research undertaken. In the first one, the objective is to explain and discuss the different meanings that the terms ‘transition’ and ‘settlement system’ can carry, and to present the choices adopted in this work. The discussions led to the collective elaboration of a common conceptual framework. Secondly, the concepts thereby defined are put to work in a group of case studies ranging along different spatial and temporal scales: from the local level to that of the planet, from the out-of-Africa migration of Homo sapiens to the emergence of new urban forms in the present day and into the future. Finally, in the third stage, the meaning of the concepts and models elaborated and developed in the preceding chapters is re-examined in a comparative and reflexive perspective.

This volume counts 35 co-authors representing different disciplinary traditions, who are extremely varied in their research practices and in their relations to space, time, data and models. The work is the fruit of multiple meetings, seminars, work groups and intersecting collaborations over a period of five years within the framework of the ANR project TransMonDyn. 1 All of the participants had already had experience in interdisciplinary work, and the project is based on an advanced form of interdisciplinarity, nourished by a great profusion of cross-connections, whose results were not known beforehand. The co-authorship of each chapter by researchers in several disciplines, in a variety of combinations, most of them new, reflects the process of co-construction of the models developed as part of the project.

The emergence and functioning of the project TransMonDyn: ‘strength of weak ties’ and ‘choreography’ of research trajectories

The project has benefited from a number of predecessors 2 and it has forged new relationships between various laboratories and networks. The intersection of two conceptual fields derived from the social sciences makes it possible to capture the functioning of the TransMonDyn project: the theory of ‘weak ties’ of Mark Granovetter 3 and the ‘time-geography’ of Torsten Hägerstrand. 4

The former distinguishes between the ‘strong ties’ and ‘weak ties’ (figure 1) that connect an individual with others. The strong ties link the individual with persons sharing the same kinds of knowledge, the same networks, the same visions of the world as himself. The ‘weak ties’ connect him with people and networks more distant. The theory of the sociologist Granovetter emphasizes the ‘strength of weak ties’, which are best able to open an individual to new things by establishing bridges between him and areas less well known to him. Thus, in the field of research, strong ties unite researchers sharing a common object of research, belonging to the same discipline or sharing the same methodological orientation, and who are used to working together. Weak ties are those that researchers form during participation in conferences and in the context of interdisciplinary research networks. They often stem from individual initiatives, even if they find a place within institutionally defined frameworks, reflecting the combination of ‘bottom up’ and ‘top down’ processes in the establishment of a research programme.

Figure 1 : Schematic representation of ‘strong ties’ (solid lines) and ‘weak ties’ (dashes) according to the approach of Granovetter

Thus the conception of our project had its origin during the French-American ANR-NSF 5 conference entitled ‘Dynamics in the Human Sciences: Cognitive, Behavioural and Social Complexity’, which took place in April 2009 at Reims. Present on that occasion were Arnaud Banos, Denise Pumain and myself from Géographie-cités (Paris), Laure Nuninger from the Maison des Sciences Humaines et de l’Environnement (Besançon), Timothy Kohler from Washington State University (Pullman), Jean-Marie Hombert from the UMR Dynamique du Langage (Lyon) and many others. The exchanges were intense during this conference, and especially between those researchers who later played a key role in the establishment and functioning of the TransMonDyn ANR project. Each of them had ‘strong ties’ with the researchers with whom they worked regularly and ‘weak ties’ with researchers coming from other disciplines, encountered in different research networks 6 and sharing similar methodological and epistemological approaches. A double linkage underpins the project, involving both the groups having ‘strong ties’ (archaeologists and historians on one side, geographers on the other) and a number of researchers engaged in the project as individuals. The project was therefore fully able to make use of the ‘strength of weak ties’. Figure 1 illustrates the principle of this construction.

At...