Settlement patterns comprise the means by which humans place themselves and their dwellings in relation to the land, and the patterns of migration, aggregation and dispersal which give rise to their distribution on the land. The comparative study of settlement patterns is not highly developed in social or cultural anthropology. Although ad hoc studies of the phenomenon are common with regard to hunter-gatherers and pastoralists, the ethnographic study of settlement patterns has never become a subdiscipline quite comparable to settlement geography or settlement archaeology.
Hunter-gatherers are well suited to studies of settlement precisely because they exhibit variations which are related to the availability of resources. Factors affecting transhumance may include the availability of water, the seasonal availability of plant foods, the migration of game, or simply custom. In desert areas of Australia and Southern Africa, hunter-gatherers move seasonally or more often, and disperse to utilize outlying water resources. Great variation exists, and this is to some extent determined by local environmental conditions.
Dichotomous patterns such as upland versus lowland, coastal areas versus interior riverine ones, etc., are readily apparent among fishing peoples as well. Native peoples of the northwest coast of North America, for example, have seasonal cycles of settlement which are partly based on the exploitation of migratory fish, such as salmon. Traditional land ownership, political allegiance, and ceremonial exchange are all, in turn, related to the exploitation of seasonal resources and consequent patterns of migration and settlement.
The situation among pastoralists is quite similar in that transhumant settlement is common. The Nuer of the Southern Sudan spend the wet season in upland villages and the dry season in cattle camps along the rivers. In the former they live mainly from meat and grain, and in the latter from fish and milk (Evans-Pritchard 1940). In southern Africa, traditional economies based on cattle and agriculture sometimes create more complex patterns. Tswana families in rural Botswana, for example, typically have three places of residence: a village, one or more cattle posts (where boys and elders often live), and ‘lands’ (where crops are grown, mainly by the women). Tswana villages are complex in structure and divided into wards, each with its own headman.
An important aspect of the study of settlements in geography is central place theory. This was developed in the 1930s when German geographer Walter Christaller noticed that Southern German settlements of similar function and size were located approximately equal distances from one another, and that a hierarchy of such equally spaced settlements, from cities to towns to villages, formed a pattern in the landscape. Christaller (1966 [1933]) hypothesized that such distributions should occur elsewhere and explained the pattern by way of the necessities of trade networks of differing scale. This geographical theory (sometimes said to be geography’s only theory) has had some impact in social anthropology among those who practise on the fringes of geography.
