PROFESSOR ANVAR SHUKUROV

The hierarchies of modern and historical cities, towns and villages exhibit remarkable, universal regularities in the settlement sizes. Zipf's law is the best known of them, stating that the rank of a city is inversely proportional to its size: the size of the second/third/fourth largest city in a system is a half/third/quarter of that of the largest city. The nature of Zipf's law and its significant generalizations can be shown to be related to the stochastic growth of settlements and largely controlled by probabilistic factors. We discuss the application of settlement growth models, based on stochastic equations, to a system of settlements of the Cucuteni-Trypillia Cultural Complex (Late Neolithic–Bronze Age, 5,400–2,800 BC) in the territory of modern Ukraine. The archaeological data exhibit a striking agreement with one of the recent models of stochastic growth, allowing us to quantify basic features of the evolving settlement system. No previous knowledge of either archaeology or stochastic calculus will be required from the audience.