Traditional villages contain rich natural and humanistic information, and exploring the spatial distribution characteristics and cultural landscape zoning of traditional villages can provide scientific support for their centralized and continuous protection and renewal and sustainable development. In this study, 326 traditional villages in the northern Henan region were taken as the research object, followed by analyzing their spatial distribution characteristics by using geostatistical methods, such as nearest-neighbor index, imbalance index, geographic concentration index, etc., combining the theory of cultural landscape to construct the traditional villages’ cultural factor index system, extracting the cultural factors of the traditional villages to form a database, and adopting the K-means clustering method to divide the region. The results show that the spatial distribution of traditional villages in northern Henan tends to be concentrated overall, with an uneven distribution throughout the region. The density is highest in the northwestern part of Hebi City and lower in the central and southern parts of Xinxiang City, Neihuang County, and Puyang City. Based on the cultural factor index system, the K-means algorithm divides the traditional villages in northern Henan into six clusters. Among them, the five cultural factors of topography and geomorphology, building materials, courtyard form, structural system, and altitude and elevation are the most significant, and they are the cultural factors that dominate the landscape of the villages. There is a significant correlation between topography, altitude, and other cultural factors, while the correlation between the street layout and other factors is the lowest. Based on the similarity between the clustering results and the landscape characteristics, the traditional villages in northern Henan can be divided into the stone masonry building culture area along the Taihang Mountains, the brick and stone mixed building culture area in the low hills of the Taihang Mountains, the brick and wood building culture area in the North China Plain, and the raw soil building culture area in the transition zone of the Loess Plateau.

The core objective of the concentrated and contiguous protection of traditional villages is to achieve the large-scale preservation and sustainable development of cultural heritage. Elucidating their spatial distribution characteristics and the underlying driving mechanisms serves as a fundamental prerequisite for the effective implementation of conservation practices. Using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and the optimal parameter-based geographical detector (OPGD) model, this study quantitatively analyzes the spatial distribution and formation mechanisms of traditional villages in southern Shanxi. The results indicate that traditional villages in southern Shanxi exhibit a “one belt, three cores” spatial agglomeration pattern. This pattern emerges from the nonlinear coupling of multiple factors, including natural environment, socio-economic conditions, and historical and cultural elements, among which historical and cultural factors serve as the most prominent driver. The factor detection q-value for cultural heritage density (X18) reached 0.45, and it exhibited a significant synergistic enhancement effect with natural environmental and socio-economic factors. Interaction detection reveals that the explanatory powers of bivariate interactions are generally stronger than that of individual factors, with the synergistic effect between slope (X4) and annual mean temperature (X9) being the most pronounced (q = 0.56). Based on these findings and emphasizing the pivotal role of historical and cultural factors, this study proposes a four-dimensional collaborative governance framework—“cultural leadership, spatial support, institutional safeguards, and social synergy”. This framework aims to provide theoretical foundations and practical pathways for the concentrated and contiguous protection of traditional villages in intra-provincial cultural regions.