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.

聚落模式分析提供了有关阿克苏姆文明社会、经济和政治关系的一系列见解。两种常见的方法涉及分析站点大小分布和站点空间分布以评估可能的聚类。我们回顾了前阿克苏姆时期、阿克苏姆时期和后阿克苏姆时期的考古调查和聚落模式分析的历史。我们重点关注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来评估空间聚类/分散，并进行高斯混合模型/贝叶斯信息准则分析来评估可能的站点大小层次结构。结果显示，这两个地区的模式相似，包括遗址聚集主要发生在前阿克苏姆时期，从前阿克苏姆时期到阿克苏姆时期，遗址数量增加，平均遗址大小减少，并且没有明确的证据表明遗址大小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，以及随后的后阿克苏姆时期人口和政治集权的下降。