The development of larger and more densely networked settlements is a key issue in archeological research (Birch, 2013; Feinman and Neitzel, 2023). Early towns were not only large settlements, but they also ushered in new types of regional relationships (Quinn and Barrier, 2018). With new forms of sedentism and aggregation came new institutions to foster interaction and decision-making (Holland-Lulewicz et al., 2020). These institutions often have consequences for the distribution of socioeconomic resources and political power within a society (Beck and Quinn, 2023).

Rather than assume a particular arrangement of social hierarchy or egalitarian systems, the relationship between people and access to key economic resources becomes the core of analyses (see Blanton and Fargher, 2008; Borgerhoff Mulder et al., 2009; Earle and Spriggs, 2015; Leppard, 2019; Smith and Codding, 2021; Feinman and Neitzel, 2023). Drawing upon cross-cultural research, Feinman and Neitzel (2023, p. 6) have noted that key resources that were patchy or had to be acquired through trade provided opportunities for differential control and fostered greater and enduring inequalities, while horizontal ties and collective action was much more common if a community’s key resources were broadly dispersed or evenly distributed. In heterogeneous landscapes, there must be diverse and alternative pathways of long-term social change. By separating the processes of sedentism and aggregation from explanations of resource extraction and distribution, archeologists can investigate how they articulate and change over time.

The Bronze Age was a time of technological, socioeconomic, and political transformation in Europe. Advances in metallurgy increased the quality and quantity of metal used for adornment items, weapons, and more mundane tools (Radivojević et al., 2019). The increased reliance upon copper and bronze helped fuel the development of interregional trade and exchange networks as people sought out mineral resources that were not locally available in many parts of the continent (Ling et al., 2013, 2014, 2022). People ramped up trade infrastructure, including boat and ox cart technologies, to handle the increase in quantity of material being exchanged and further facilitate long-distance exchange (Van de Noort, 2004; Bondár, 2012). Communities across Europe articulated themselves to these economic networks through which metal – and a wide range of other natural resources and commodities – flowed (Earle et al., 2015). People aggregated into larger towns, including those with control over other communities as part of complex regional polities, which required new socioeconomic institutions to ensure access to resources, social cohesion, and safety (Gogâltan and Sava, 2010; Szentmiklosi et al., 2011; Gogâltan et al., 2019).

These socioeconomic transformations were neither unidirectional nor universal across the continent. Understanding how, when, and where complex regional polities emerged in the Bronze Age has been a fertile area for archeological research (Gilman, 1981; Hanks and Linduff, 2009; Earle and Kristiansen, 2010; Duffy, 2014; O’Shea and Nicodemus, 2019; Gyucha and Parkinson, 2022; Laabs, 2023). The fitful process by which inequality was institutionalized within a broader social hierarchy was as variable as the cultural practices and landscapes across the continent. For example, Nicodemus (2014, 2018) has argued for elite-controlled specialized production of horses at Pecica-Santul Mare, which Kanne (2022) has shown co-occurs with forms of equestrianism and political authority that were dispersed more broadly and less hierarchically across the Carpathian Basin. Tell-building traditions and their settlement systems in the Carpathian Basin were likewise highly variable and followed different regional trajectories (Duffy, 2014; Kienlin et al., 2017; Kienlin, 2018; Lie et al., 2019). Settlements and settlement systems were considerably diverse in terms of their site layout, size, and location (Găvan and Kienlin, 2021). Consequently, Bronze Age Europe can best be described as a multi-scalar mosaic: where local histories and landscape affordances shaped and were shaped by larger-scale political, social, and economic networks.

Bronze Age socioeconomic institutions were rooted in the landscape, making them accessible through a settlement ecology approach. Settlement ecology seeks to explain the choices people made regarding where to live as they are mediated through historically and geographically contingent factors (Stone, 1996; Jones, 2010). Within a settlement ecology approach, settlement patterns are considered the product of people’s interaction with dynamic natural and cultural landscapes (Stone, 1996; Jones, 2010, 2017; Jones and Ellis, 2016; Kellett and Jones, 2017; Quinn et al., 2022). Settlement ecological approaches center human-environment interaction and avoid the pitfalls of the older “ecosystem approach” (see Brumfiel, 1992) by highlighting human agency and creating an interpretive structure where groups of actors can create transformative change. These approaches are part of a broader effort to understand the relationship among the landscape, socioeconomic organization, and human decision-making and their effects on settlement patterns and culture change (McClure et al., 2009; Jazwa and Jazwa, 2017; Weitzel and Codding, 2022).

Kellett and Jones (2017, p. 3) have identified the core question in archeological applications of settlement ecology: “why do people settle in a given place during a specific time and in a particular arrangement?” This question can be divided into two themes within settlement ecological studies: (1) where people position themselves in space, and (2) how people arrange themselves into communities and broader settlement systems. How people position themselves in space can be investigated through assessments of site location and how people prioritize their settlement locations relative to key resources and topographic features in the landscape (see Quinn and Ciugudean, 2018; Quinn et al., 2020b). How people arrange themselves across settlement systems can be investigated through assessments of how population was spread across a settlement network. In this study, I use site-size and rank-size analyses to characterize settlement patterns in southwestern Transylvania, and trace how they change over the course of the Bronze Age. The multiple changes in the settlement ecology of Bronze Age communities in Transylvania necessitated changes in socioeconomic institutions for the procurement, distribution, and consumption of metal and other key resources in this resource-rich landscape.

In this section, I present the results of analyses first at the regional scale across southwest Transylvania (Alba County), then at the microregional scale within the Geoagiu Valley. Of the 108 known sites associated with the six Bronze Age subphases in this study, there are 40 sites with site-size estimates in Alba County. These settlements range from less than a hectare to nearly 9 hectares in size (Figure 4). The sites can be classified into three ordinal size categories: small sites (up to 3 ha), medium-sized sites (3–6.5 ha), and large sites (6.5–9 ha). Of the 40 sites, 28 are small (70%), 9 are medium-sized (22.5%), and 3 are large (7.5%).

The broad trajectory of site-and rank-size analyses provides a divergent picture of Bronze Age Transylvanian settlement systems. There is a general trend toward an increase in the frequency of large sites throughout the Bronze Age in southwest Transylvania (Figure 7). In EBA I and EBA II, all sites are below 3 ha in size. In EBA III, one settlement (Oarda de Jos-Sesul Orzii) was over 3 ha. By the start of the Middle Bronze Age (Formative Wietenberg), people agglomerated into large towns (over 8 ha). This general pattern of multiple contemporaneously occupied large sites within the region continued throughout rest of the Middle Bronze Age (Classical Wietenberg) and into the Late Bronze Age (Terminal Wietenberg).

In contrast, rank-sized analyses do not indicate a general or consistent shift toward a pattern of settlement hierarchy during the Bronze Age in Transylvania (Figure 8). EBA I pattern fits a more primate distribution. While all sites are considered small, one site (Sântimbru-Obreje/La Tabaci) is significantly larger than the rest. The EBA II settlement pattern more closely fit a concave distribution. The beginning of the EBA III saw a shift back toward a log-normal distribution. With the start of the Formative Wietenberg, and continuing with the Classical Wietenberg, settlement distributions became slightly more concave. The concave distribution in the Middle Bronze Age, despite the emergence of large sites is in part due to the presence of multiple large sites in southwest Transylvania (Alba Iulia-Recea/Monolit; Pețelca-Cascadă; Micești-Cigaș). Of these, Alba Iulia-Recea/Monolit and Pețelca-Cascadă are stratigraphically deep as well as horizontally large. If these two large sites represent central settlements within an integrated network, then it is likely that there were at least two networks in southwest Transylvania during this time.

Together, the size-and rank-size analyses suggest that there were three major shifts in how people positioned themselves across settlements during the Bronze Age. First, from EBA I to EBA II, people were dispersed more evenly across settlements. Second, from EBA III to the Formative Wietenberg, people began to aggregate in larger settlements. The settlement dynamics in the Geoagiu Valley reveal fission-fusion and rapid settlement shifts among Wietenberg communities. Third, and finally, from the Classical Wietenberg to Terminal Wietenberg, a three-tier site size hierarchy was established in the Geoagiu Valley. After the arrival of Noua communities into the region, Wietenberg communities increased the amount of archeologically visible activity (settlement and ritual deposition) in the high mountain passes that connect the lowland Mureș River Valley and the richest metal deposits in the region (see Quinn et al., 2020a). This configuration ultimately collapsed within 180 years as Transylvanian communities ultimately abandoned Wietenberg cultural identities during the Late Bronze Age. As seen in other regions in the Carpathian Basin (see Duffy, 2014, 2015), the presence of a site-size hierarchy in Transylvania is not definitive evidence of the presence of regional polities during the Bronze Age. Future work to document the sizes of other Bronze Age sites in the region would strengthen confidence in the patterns identified in this study.

The settlement ecology of Bronze Age Transylvanian communities connects how people positioned themselves relative to each other and to resources in the landscape. Throughout the Bronze Age, people’s strategies for when to aggregate, when to abandon settlements, and when to spread across the landscape varied significantly. At the start of the Early Bronze Age, the community at Sântimbru-Obreje/La Tabaci was larger than the rest, though it was still a small settlement. Most communities were more evenly spread across the landscape as people positioned themselves in locations where they could grow sufficient food for their communities and gain access to growing interregional trade routes.

By the Middle Bronze Age, the large regional centers, like Alba Iulia-Recea/Monolit and Pețelca-Cascadă, were consistent draws for a more continuous form of occupation, while the smaller village sites appear to have had shorter life-histories. Residents of smaller communities abandoned these sites more often, and while some people may have moved into the larger towns, it is likely that these communities established new smaller settlements in a different part of the landscape. There is currently no evidence that larger communities fissioned due to population density pressures. The persistence of larger towns may owe to their strategic positioning in highly productive catchments or along the primary interregional trade route (see Quinn and Ciugudean, 2018). The increased residential mobility of smaller communities may be linked to local depletion of resources, such as lumber and ore, that were important for craft production. Rather than find new ways of mobilizing resources to these settlements, as they would have for the larger towns, the communities decided to abandon the settlement and establish a new one with more easy access to key economic resources that were unevenly distributed across the Transylvanian landscape. For residents of the larger centers, the socioeconomic benefits of their strategic positioning likely offset the costs of transporting raw materials and food from increasingly distant locations into the settlement. This may have created political economic bottlenecks and opportunities for emerging elites to exert control (see Earle and Kristiansen, 2010; Earle et al., 2015). However, it may also have been a collective action problem that could have been mediated through cooperation without need of centralized control (see Carballo et al., 2014). In either case, all townspeople found reasons to aggregate and stay, such as seeking safety in numbers, potential access to ritual spaces, and more direct access to broader economic and social networks (see O’Shea and Nicodemus, 2019).

The arrival of migrant communities in the Late Bronze may have spurred new forms of competition for access to the critical natural resources (e.g., copper, gold, salt) in Transylvania. There is currently no evidence of direct violence between these communities, but the increased intensity of occupation of high elevation locations and ritual deposition at key mountain passes by Wietenberg communities may indicate indirect competition with Noua communities. This new regime of situating settlements indicates a shift in the settlement ecology of Terminal Wietenberg communities to prioritize securing access to metal ores that were only previously seen in the placement of Early Bronze Age burial mounds.

The patterns from southwest Transylvania fit within an emerging view of regional diversity in the trajectories of wealth inequality and political centralization in the European Bronze Age. In southeast Transylvania, Dietrich (2010, 2014) has argued for the presence of more hierarchical polities during the Middle Bronze Age based on hilltop fortified as sites that were elite-controlled centers that dominated the landscape. Alternatively, Puskás (2018), drawing upon Boroffka (1994), has suggested that these fortified hilltop sites may have been temporary refuges, though not fully discounting their potential link to emergent political elite. New radiocarbon dates from southeast Transylvania support the suggestion that the trajectories of Bronze Age societies in that region may have differed from those in southwest Transylvania (see Quinn et al., 2020a; Puskás et al., 2023). To the northwest of Transylvania in the Upper Tisza region, Kienlin et al. (2017, p. 118) have argued that the organization of social space was informed by concerns other than competition among individuals or corporate groups to establish political hierarchies. Further to the west, beyond the Apuseni Mountains and into the Carpathian Basin, many researchers, including Duffy (2014), Jaeger et al. (2018), Gogâltan et al. (2020), and Kanne (2022), have demonstrated the variability in socioeconomic organization, political centralization, and settlement dynamics between and within different regions of the Carpathian Basin.

The process of settling down in this resource-rich landscape was dynamic. As seen in cases where resources are broadly dispersed (see Feinman and Neitzel, 2023, pp. 6–7), metal ore was difficult to control and there was an increased emphasis on horizontal ties rather than hierarchical relationships throughout the Bronze Age. At the same time, the variability seen in how people positioned themselves in the landscape and relative to each other suggests that the key resources (e.g., from metal to agro-pastoral resources), or key part of the broader commodity chain (e.g., from extraction to distribution), were likely influenced by changes in historically-specific interactions, fashions, and decision-makers. While the location and abundance of ores did not vary significantly over the 1,500 years of the Bronze Age, where people lived, and the density of their settlements, would have necessitated changes in socioeconomic institutions for the procurement, distribution, and consumption of metal and other key resources over time. The settlement patterns explored in this study provide one view of these dynamics. Economic abundance, rather than the potential environmental marginality of mountain landscapes, may have inhibited the development of more hierarchical societies with significant wealth inequality (see Leppard, 2019). Future analyses of the temporality, population size, and socioeconomic organization of the emergent towns of the Middle Bronze Age in southwest Transylvania, as done for the much larger Trypillia megasites (see Chapman et al., 2019; Gaydarska, 2019), may provide insights into the relationship among site size, social inequality, and political authority. Additional work on the organization and distribution of resources in detail at different communities in Bronze Age Transylvania, both large and small, are also needed to better understand the context and consequences of settling down.

This study contributes to a broader understanding of the factors that inform where people chose to settle down and the consequences those decisions have on the development of social, economic, and political institutions. Communities in resource-rich southwest Transylvania balanced agropastoral, crafting, and trade economies with social institutions to support emergent towns. By the Late Bronze Age, competition over resources played a greater role than sheer abundance in transforming how people positioned themselves relative to each other and the landscape. While people in Transylvania started to live in bigger towns by the Middle Bronze Age, the establishment of regional polities appears to have happened later.

Middle-range societies like those in Bronze Age Europe were dynamic, often driven by the tensions between social, economic, and political institutions (see Quinn and Beck, 2016). Settlement ecological perspectives provide a way to hold these tensions together into a complete view of society. As people balanced their priorities with the risks they entail, these tensions were mediated through the landscape – rendering their decision-making processes visible to archeologists.

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

CQ: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Methodology, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.