Ever since 1960s, Settlement Archaeology has become a new approach of exploration with the potentials to observe the dynamic process of social organization and its evolution on the basis of human being's settlement features and changes.Thus, we are likely to come to a good understanding on the development of social organization through the settlement patterns, from hunting and gathering group to the state.On the study of the origin of early civilizations and states, the emergence of city or ur-banization is a symbolic event concerned by a large number of archaeologists and historians.However, the study on the develop-ment of early cities mainly depends on archaeologists due to the shortage of written documents.Settlement study provides us with a new approach to observe the development of human society from village to urbanization.On the basis of international per-spective and findings, this paper aims to describe basic concepts and methods in this field, together with China's case study re-view, and set up a global reference for the study of settlement patterns and urbanization.%聚落考古是20世纪中叶兴起的一项全新探索，它的潜力在于能够根据人类栖居形态的特点和变化来观察社会结构的特点与演变的轨迹。因此，从狩猎采集的游群向国家的演进，可以从社群栖居方式的变化来了解社会结构的发展。在文明和早期国家起源研究中，城市的出现是一个标志性的事件，被广大考古学家和历史学家所关注。但是由于文献记载的局限，早期城市的发展往往需要靠考古学来了解。而聚落形态研究就可以为我们提供一种观察人类社会如何从自治村落向集中城市发展的过程。从当今国际学界研究的视野和成果，结合中国案例的探讨来介绍这个研究领域的基本概念和方法，可以为我们的聚落形态和城市起源研究提供一个世界性的参照。
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