Sustainable Giant-Sites?: Resilience and Continuance in Large Low-Occupation-Density Settlements

Abstract Most large low-occupation-density settlements (LLODS) in the size range up to around 100 km 2 were enlarged versions of local settlement forms with deep ancestry in both their own cultures and in broader, more sustained transcultural interaction networks. They rarely outlasted their culture systems and did not usually reappear in successive cultures in the same region. They were dependent on the sustainability of the regional systems which produced them and tended not to outlast changes which impacted on their baseline capacities. Under very specific circumstances a few LLODS, however, continued to grow and transform by adapting their operational parameters to accommodate larger regional shifts. They played distinctly different long-term roles from conventional compact urbanism and did not apparently lead to sustainable transformations which produced the large agrarian urban low-density settlements.