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Southwest Asia saw the emergence of large settlements in the Early Holocene, and the world's first urban communities around 6000 years ago, with cities a feature of the region ever since. These developed in diverse environmental settings, including the dry-farming plains of Northern Mesopotamia, the irrigated alluvium of Southern Mesopotamia and the more variegated landscapes of the Levant. In this paper we use a dataset of several hundred sites dating from the earliest large sites around 12,000 years ago to the Classical period (2000 BP), to examine trends in settlement sustainability through time. We use persistence of occupation as a proxy for sustainability and compare settlement trajectories in different land use zones. Comparing cities and settlements at these spatial and temporal scales allows us to address a key question in the New Urban Agendas framework: how urban development can best be supported by sustainable use of land. We find that the highest levels of persistence were not uniformly associated with high agricultural productivity regions, and some of the longest-lived settlements are located in marginal environments, likely at critical points in transport networks. We also find that persistence is enhanced in landscapes which do not require large-scale capital investment or specific forms of economic and social organisation to maintain high levels of agricultural productivity, and that sustainability is inversely correlated with social complexity. Our results show that the millennial timescales available through archaeology can enable us to identify the political, social and ecological conditions required for large centres to persist through time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the use of planform sinuosity as a metric to produce an automatic classification of waterways in the pre-modern and present-day irrigation networks in the Konya Plain in south-central Türkiye. Results show that such automatic classification may replace a time-consuming manual classification or provide a preliminary classification for subsequent manual refinement, depending on the number of classification categories used, the distribution of sinuosity across the network, and the degree of human modification. They also show that sinuosity thresholds for classification are area- and time-specific. Sinuosity is then used to quantify and interpret network changes in planform alignment and expansion and to identify long-term trends and areas of landscape modification. Results reveal a general pattern of decreasing sinuosity over time in the Konya Plain, indicating a continual human intervention, with areas where the present-day network was built upon the old Ottoman system. The methods presented in this investigation may be applicable to other studies of irrigation-network evolution and impact on landscape and can be used in conjunction with archeological and historical analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]