INTRODUCTION

This chapter discusses how settlements may be viewed within their landscapes as both historical and especially economic artefacts. In so doing, it views the situation as though through a series of increasingly powerful lenses. Initially scrutinising the patterning of all the ‘traditional’ communities within the peninsular landmass and the reasons for their placing, it continues by discussing how individual villages fitted within their own sectors of the productive landscape, focusing first on the community as an undifferentiated whole and then on its constituent households. Finally, at its most detailed level, it considers individual plots and the polysemy of their meanings for their owners.

Underlying much of the discussion is the issue of humans as rational decision makers and actors, as seen through archaeological, geographical and cultural anthropological approaches. In all these disciplines, humans are assumed to be rational animals. The difficulty lies in the existence of more than one kind of ‘rationality’. Within social-cultural anthropology, there is a further issue of differences between the ‘rationality’ of the people being described and the author's ‘rationality’. For archaeologists, the foundations of their discipline are inherently materialistic. Not surprisingly, therefore, much of archaeologists' thinking concerning human behaviour is also materialist in one way or another. It has a strong focus on economic behaviour and how humans make a living, often involving the application of energy-efficiency models.