Land tenure systems

Harris, M. (1953). Origin of the land tenure system in the United States. Ames, lA Iowa State College Press. 

The novel state-imposed form of land tenure was far more revolutionary than a door-and-window tax. It established a whole new institutional nexus. However simple and uniform the new tenure system was to an administrator, it flung villagers willy-nilly into a world of title deeds, land offices, fees, assessments, and applications. They faced powerful new specialists in the form of land clerks, surveyors, judges, and lawyers whose rules of procedure and decisions were unfamiliar. 

So the Arslantepe tomb is symptomatic of a process that becomes very pronounced in the Middle to Upper Euphrates (and elsewhere) late in the second quarter of the third millennium - the demarcation of territory through particularized burials - and it may be proposed that at least some of the variation manifest in these burials is correlative with variation in details of sociopolitical organization and/or land tenure practices (Porter 2000). This is an outcome of the breakdown of the southern system of interconnection at the end of the fourth millennium and was probably, at least in part, even its cause - not because ever-incipient conflict between nomad and farmer at last burst forth, so that states declined and tribes now reappeared to take their place, but because ancestral groups became so defined that the system fragmented in a very particular way. The different communities created through this process, communities still consisting of sedentary and mobile components, claimed their own sociopolitical space and territorial definition. 

The Social Tenure Domain Model (STDM), as a specialization of the LADM, is included as an informative annex in the ISO 19152 LADM draft standard. The STDM, as it stands, has the capacity to broaden the scope of land administration by providing a land information management framework that would integrate formal, informal, and customary land systems and integrating administrative and spatial components. This is hugely important because property, even real property, is not a... 

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