| Archaeologists have long held that changing patterns of settlement within a region reflect the changing social organization of Its human population, but they have had little success developing general theory to explain or otherwise make use of this relationship. Much of this difficulty results from an over-emphasis on extracting social information directly from recorded site distributions---an approach which is incompatible with the nature of archaeological settlement data and obscures the longer histories of human---environment interaction that settlement patterns represent. This study develops an alternative approach to spatial analysis based the concept of landscape, which is defined broadly as the perceptions and practical knowledge about the natural and social environment that condition human behavior. Settlement patterns and other aspects of human spatial organization such as village plans, house forms, trade routes, and territories are, in part, manifestations of landscapes, but they are also key material contexts in which landscapes are created, modified, and reproduced in the process of social life. Understanding changes in the physical organization of space therefore requires attention to how such changes are produced by human action within particular spatial contexts, to the consequences of these changes for the ways in which people interact with each other and their environments, and to how, in this process, landscapes are continually reshaped. The ability to perceive a succession of physical spaces and changing patterns of human behavior within them gives archaeologists a unique perspective on how possibilities for social change are immanent in historically constructed spaces and a crucial means for evaluating and incorporating these possibilities Into historical explanation. Three case studies, set in Village Period southwest Iran, Uruk period Mesopotamia, and northeast Syria during the third millennium B.C., examine different aspects of a landscape approach while demonstrating its ability to integrate diverse archaeological, geographic, and paleoenvironmental data into analyses of social change. |
