In this study, we present a modeling approach that investigates how much cultivable land was required to supply a society and whether societies were in need when environmental conditions deteriorated. The approach is implemented for the North-Eastern Peloponnese and is based upon the location of Late Helladic IIIB (1300–1200 BCE) archaeological sites, an assessment of their sizes, and a proposed diet of the people. Based on these information, the areal requirement of each site is calculated and mapped. The results show that large sites do not have sufficient space in their surroundings in order to supply themselves with the required food resources and thus they depended on supplies from the hinterland. Dry climatic conditions aggravate the situation. This indicates that potential societal crisis are less a factor of changing environmental conditions or a shortage of arable land but primarily caused by socio-economic factors.

The importance of a place can be assessed via an analysis of its centrality. However, although central place research has a long history, there is no generally accepted theoretical base, leading to continuous debates about the core elements of centrality and those features that ultimately constitute the centrality of a place. We propose a generalized definition that understands centrality as the relative concentration of interaction. Using this definition, we are able to integrate various social, cultural, and natural aspects in the analysis of a central place and its landscape setting. We present a semi-quantitative method to assess the actual and potential centrality and that enables us (a) to draw conclusions about the type and characteristics of central places, (b) to investigate their development throughout time, and (c) to compare them to each other. We sketch the application of the method using two exemplary sites: the Iron Age site Heuneburg and the Roman palace Felix Romuliana

In this contribution, we apply different methods of spatial and geomorphometric analysis in order to present a general approach of data exploration in areas where detailed local information is absent. Our data are based on locations of megalithic graves from Funnel Beaker societies (3700–2800 BCE) in the area of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. Using these locations, we apply methods of point pattern analysis in order to reconstruct the spatial processes that created the sample: We use density-based measures to show the influence of first-order effects on the dataset. While first-order effects are related to the underlying areal characteristics of the point locations and hence are determinant of their intensity, second-order effects are the result of interactions between points. We conduct distance-related approaches, e.g. focusing on nearest-neighbour characteristics, in order to investigate the interaction between the points. The point pattern analyses are complemented by integrating geomorphometric measures that are indirectly indicative for some general environmental conditions, even in prehistoric times. This helps (a) to relate first-order effects to societal or environmental features and (b) to understand the specific pattern of interactions between the points. The necessary raw data in the form of digital elevation models are freely available for large parts of the globe. All analyses are conducted using free and open-source software in order to provide their limitless application.

Societies undergo continuous dynamics and change. By investigating the spatial structure of societal remains and material culture, we tried to get insights into the processes of their landscapes creation. Ritual practices, economic strategies, or the societal structure are stored in the landscape as a form of cultural contextualization. We presumed that changes of these will be strongest during phases of transformation and investigated to which degree transformation processes are mirrored in the spatial structure of material remains. Absolute and relative locations were investigated using data from Neolithic domestic and ritual sites in Wagrien, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. The results showed that transformations have a different influence on ritual and domestic locations: There are no discernible influences on the choice of relative domestic site locations, in contrast to ritual sites, whose relative location changes as a result of sociocultural transformations. This illustrates the importance of cultural and socioeconomic functions of individual sites and shows that transformations, even when they impact the fundamental structure of a society, do act on different relative and absolute scales and spheres.