Settlement pattern analysis offers a range of insights about social, economic, and political relationships of Aksumite civilization. Two common approaches involve analyzing site size distributions and the spatial distribution of sites to evaluate possible clustering. We review the history of archaeological survey and settlement pattern analyses for Pre-Aksumite, Aksumite, and Post-Aksumite periods. We focus on data from two areas of northern Ethiopia collected by the Eastern Tigray Archaeological Project and the Southern Red Sea Archaeological Histories Project. We conduct Ripley’s-K multi-distance spatial cluster analysis to evaluate spatial clustering/dispersion, and Gaussian mixture model/Bayesian information criterion analysis to evaluate possible site size hierarchies. Results show similar patterns in the two areas, including site clustering predominantly during the Pre-Aksumite period, an increase in the number of sites and decrease in average site size from the Pre-Aksumite to Aksumite periods, and no definitive evidence that site size hierarchies are an indicator of political changes over time. Overall, results indicate locally aggregated political organization during the Pre-Aksumite period, locally decentralized organization, infilling, and population growth during the Aksumite period, and a subsequent decline in population and political centralization during the Post-Aksumite period.

定居模式分析提供了一系列关于阿克苏姆文明的社会、经济和政治关系的见解。两种常见的方法涉及分析站点大小分布和站点的空间分布以评估可能的聚类。我们回顾了前阿克苏姆、阿克苏姆和后阿克苏姆时期的考古调查和定居模式分析的历史。我们专注于由东提格雷考古项目和南红海考古历史项目收集的埃塞俄比亚北部两个地区的数据。我们进行 Ripley's-K 多距离空间聚类分析以评估空间聚类/分散，并进行高斯混合模型/贝叶斯信息准则分析以评估可能的站点大小层次结构。结果显示这两个领域的模式相似，包括主要在 Pre-Aksumite 时期的站点集群，从 Pre-Aksumite 到 Aksumite 时期站点数量的增加和平均站点规模的减少，并且没有明确的证据表明站点规模等级是随着时间的推移政治变化的指标。总体而言，结果表明前阿克苏姆时期的地方聚集政治组织，阿克苏姆时期的地方分散组织、填充和人口增长，以及后阿克苏姆时期的人口和政治集权随后下降。