WHAT DO settlement patterns tell us? Several decades of surface reconnaissance projects in western Asia intended to identify the periods during which sites were occupied have produced bodies of evidence that are regional in nature and transcend the evidence of individual sites while providing a broader context for each of them. The size and spacing of settlements can suggest hypotheses about population density. Larger nucleated settlements surrounded by satellite sites, more evenly dispersed sites, or sites strung out along canals, stream beds or roads can suggest differences in the economy, whether agricultural or commercial, in the relationship of settlements to natural resources, and in the nature of political authority. The end of occupation at some sites and the beginning of occupation at others can suggest demographic shifts, which are explained usually in terms of migration or political change. Since the evidence for occupation is based on material remains, the latter are also taken as evidence for cultural continuity or change, a procedure which involves assumptions about the consecutive nature of different material cultures. These have been issues for archaeologists, based on the material available to them. Historians have generally been concerned with other issues, but each relies on the other to provide a context, for mutual confirmation, or to fill in gaps.

When it comes to Iraq, there has been a poverty of excavated and published sites relevant to the late Sasanian and early Islamic periods. Overwhelming attention has been paid to sites of greater antiquity or to urban sites with monumental architecture. For the period in question, there has been work at al-Ḥira,’ al- Ḥīra,al-Kūfa, Wāsiṭ Sāmarrā’, and al-Madā’in,s but the only rural site is that excavated by Robert Adams at Tell Abū Sarīfa in order to acquire a diagnostic sherd sequence for late Sasanian and early Islamic sites which he then used in surface surveys.

Perhaps paradoxically, beginning in the 1950s, Adams pioneered the technique of surface survey in Iraq, which has since been applied to other regions. Although his work has a much longer chronological range, it is to his credit that he covered all periods of occupation down to Ottoman times. Thus the main work on settlement patterns in late Sasanian and early Islamic Iraq remains that of Adams, who advanced the thesis of administrative centralization in the late Sasanian period to explain the scale of the irrigation system which then retracted in early Islamic times. Although Adams’ methods remain somewhat controversial, his conclusions have been used by historians, such as Waines, who argued that the irrigation-based agricultural system declined under the ‘Abbāsid dynasty because the latter were more interested in roads than in canals, possibly reflecting commercial rather than agricultural interests.