| Abstract: |
Settlement patterning in premodern Myanmar remains a little-studied subject. On the one hand, Burmese-language studies of early Burmese cities mostly describe physical features of walled sites. English-language works, on the other hand, emphasize the artifacts excavated, the presence of fortifications, and the quest for corroborative evidence between physical characteristics of sites and descriptions in Burmese chronicles. There has never been any systematic study of the hierarchies of sites which ranks the sites according to their relative sizes, their locations, proximity to resources and each other, probable population sizes, and the shapes of their walls. Bob Hudsons dissertation ranks Pyu-period sites according to sizes of city walls and their geographical locations, but he stops short of proposing an argument regarding the significance of these data. This paper examines the nature of early Burmese urbanization through a diachronic study of settlement hierarchies in Myanmar from the 5th to 16th centuries.
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