Interaction between archaeological sites and geomorphology. Cuaternario y Geomorfologia 6:5–20 Bubenzer O, Riemer H (2007) Holocene climatic change and human settlement between the central Sahara and the Nile valley: archaeological and geomorphological re

As an archaelogist I am usually primarily inrterested in placing an ancient settlement into its gographical context. A lasting contribution to this exercise has been the formulation in 1970 of the concept of Site Catchment Analysis (Vita-Finzi & Higgs, 1970). Taking as fundamental the hypothesis that human communities exhibit territorial behaviour much like other animals, these authors advocated the interpretation of ancient sites in terms of their location with respect to surrounding environmental resources, defining the likely explotative territory as up to 1 hour's walking distance out from a site for fanning settlements, and up to two hours for a pastoral or hunter-gatherer settlement. A very considerable number of field studies have been published from all over the world employing Site Territorial Analysis, with notalble success. Empirical experience shows that these time/distance constraints are rare maxima, with most pre-Industrial settlement requiring far smalller radii for their explotative needs. In Southern England, eg, historical geographers had already shown that medieval villages were frequently spaced at some 4 Kms form each other (ie less than 1/2 hour radius territory), and in a classic early application of STA to settlement patterns in this region from Neolithic to early Medieval times, Ellison & Harriss (1972) found a 2 km radius territory ftted the data best Despite the fact that one of the two inventors of Carchment Analysis, Claudio Vita-Finzi, is