Spatio-Demographic Structure and Social Organization: A Linear Trajectory or Overlapping Trends?

An oversimplified understanding of general systems theory in archaeology co-relates the concepts of population growth, social complexity, and economy. To analyze how the spatial layout of large settlements are the outcomes of the interactions of highly diverse social, political, economic, and religious orders, we argue and focus on more universal and less diverse characteristics, such as population, spatial location, and economic subsistence. Recent studies have demonstrated discontinuities between demographic trends and socioeconomic transformations worldwide. By developing a multiscalar analysis and estimations based on the application of Central Place Theory to Cucuteni-Tripolye settlements and their systems, this paper presents deep nonlinear patterns of demographic growth that in many cases can be wrongly taken for specific types of sociopolitical organization. Furthermore, we show that this growth takes place even though simulations demonstrate that large settlements would only last four generations. ‘Satellite’ settlements that were branched off from the settlements of medium and large size in our case study represent demographic self-regulation caused by density dependence.