Session: #301

Regular session

The study of settlement patterns has been one of the major topics of rural archaeological studies from the beginning of the discipline. As a result, the definition of different categories based on the shapes of the sites, the study of creations, transformations and desertions of villages, hamlets, farms and other domestic spaces, or the analysis of the social and political impact of these trends have played a relevant role in the comprehension of rural landscapes. What is more, villages and other rural settlements have provided the bases for macroscale (landscapes studies) and microscale analysis (household studies, church archaeology, funerary archaeology), etc.
However, in the last few decades new approaches focusing the agrarian and outlying productive landscapes, and how peasants have organized their land use, have opened new avenues for revisiting site-center studies and, in general, the settlement-patterned paradigms. Within social archaeologies definition of communities and collective action, despite the morphology of their settlements, have been forwarded. New methodological and theoretical approaches to rural landscapes have added to the possibilities of studying peasant action beyond the settlement areas.
The goal of this session is to promote a collective reflection and discussion about rural settlements in Europe beyond the morphological and descriptive approaches, promoting long-term analysis and comparative perspective. In order to deal with the topic, theoretical informed papers and holistic landscape studies are welcomed.
The aim of the session should be to publish a collective book gathering different experiences all around Europe.

Hamlets, Farms, Landscapes, Long-term

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Juan Antonio Quirós Castillo (Spain) ^1,2

Eva Eva Svensson (Sweden) ³