On the other hand, the site founding index also increased slightly, from a MF value of 55% to 59%. These two facts appear to be contradictory. If the landscape of the Taraco Peninsula was filling up, why then do we witness an increase in the rate of founding of new sites? The solution to the conundrum is this: the increase in the site founding index is produced by the resurgence of a category of settlements I will call ``hamlets''. These are small settlements, inhabited by no more than a few families. For present purposes, and entirely arbitrarily, I will identify a hamlet as a sector with a population index value of less than 100.
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Table 7.3 displays the ratio of total hamlet population index - so defined - to phase population index for each of the periods of Taraco Peninsula prehistory. The final column of the table represents the percent of the estimated population of the peninsula during a given period which was living in hamlets. Clearly, the percentage of the population living in hamlets hit an all time low in the MF. This is probably due to the existence of multiple competing polities on the peninsula (as discussed in Chapter 6), a situation which probably involved some degree of armed conflict and/or sporadic raiding. In such a context, living in hamlets in the countryside is rather more hazardous than joining a larger village community. In the LF1, however, the majority of the peninsula was politically unified (as I will argue below), thus making hamlet living a tenable option once more. Thus, the evident resurgence of the hamlet as a settlement category.
