Site Catchment Analysis
Site catchment analysis models a settlement's economy by delimiting the territory that its inhabitants could realistically exploit and inventorying the resources within it. Introduced by Claudio Vita-Finzi and Eric Higgs in their 1970 study of the Mount Carmel area, the method rests on the premise that the cost of moving to and from a site falls off sharply with distance, so most subsistence activity occurs within a limited radius. By drawing a catchment — classically the area within one or two hours' walk — and measuring how much of it is arable land, grazing, water, lithic sources, or wild biota, the analyst characterizes whether a site is oriented toward farming, herding, hunting, or gathering. Modern practice replaces simple circles with terrain-sensitive least-cost territories computed in a Geographical Information System, as set out by Conolly and Lake.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Vita-Finzi, C., & Higgs, E. S. (1970). Prehistoric Economy in the Mount Carmel Area of Palestine: Site Catchment Analysis. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, 36, 1-37. · DOI 10.1017/S0079497X00013074
- Conolly, J., & Lake, M. (2006). Geographical Information Systems in Archaeology. Cambridge University Press. · ISBN 9780521797443
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.