New paper: human settlement patterns
In a collaboration with the department of archeology at KU Leuven (Ralf Vandam and Eva Kaptijn) we used an ecological perspective and a statistical framework developed in community ecology, to investigate the drivers of human settlement patterns in a valley in Turkey over a time period of 8000 years. Not unsurprisingly typical ecological concepts such as sorting along environmental gradients, spatial autocorrelation and dispersal limitation can also be detected in the structure of early human settlements. It was cool to see that what started out as a fun discussion among friends in a bar (one biologist, one archeologist) now resulted in a proper paper. It was a difficult choice where to submit. Archeology journals have notoriously low impact factors and take a VERY long time to process reviews. On the other hand most ecological journals would not take this type of data. In the end we opted for the open access provided by PlosOne and hope the paper will find an audience. At the time I also conveniently had some remaining bench fee left to spend on publication costs.
In any case, I had a lot of fun playing around with distributions of a species that (often) makes rational decisions and we might try more interdisciplinary stuff in the future.
The study area: the Burdur plain in central Anatolia with examples of different human artifacts corresponding to different time periods.
Maps of fitted site scores of the first canonical axis of RDA models explaining the abundance of archeological artefacts. Predictor variables are the significant Moran’s eigenvector maps retained after forward selection. A red color indicates high values, blue areas are
indicative of low values. Separate maps are provided for RDA models for each of the six considered time periods. NEO_ECH: Late Neolithic/Early Chalcolithic (6500–5500 BC); LCH_EBI: Late Chalcolithic/Early Bronze Age I (4000–2600 BC); EBII: Early Bronze Age II (2600–2300 BC); A-CH: Archaic-Classical/Hellenistic (750–200 BC). HELL: Hellenistic (333–25 BC); BYZ: Byzantine (610–1300 BC).
Community Ecology Lab 