Cudze ganicie, swego nie znacie… Koncepcje krajobrazu w dwudziestoleciu międzywojennym i ich recepcja w archeologii osadnictwa

It is commonly assumed that landscape studies is a foreign development to Polish archaeology. The idea of landscape is strongly associated with British school of thoughts, while Central European settlement studies are regarded as deeply rooted in German tradition of Siedlungsarchäologie. However, an insight into their origins in Poland reveals a completely different picture. Concepts of landscape were lively debated among geographers and historians in the pre-war period within the frameworks of the then dominant theories of anthropogeography and evolutionism. This led to the development of a school of thought known as historical geography one of whose basic aims was to reconstruct past cultural landscapes through settlement studies. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that theoretical and methodological frameworks of settlement archaeology, which were established in the 1960s and 1970s, sprang from historical geography and initially also aimed towards reconstruction of prehistoric landscapes. Polish cases will be then compared and contrasted with contemporary British and German traditions. This will help determine at which points these traditions differ, what may be the reason for those differences and what can we learn from these pre-war developments