Walter Christaller’s Central Place Theory in Prehistoric Archaeology. Reevaluation and Alternatives

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Matthias Jung
• Subject Area: Prehistory and World Archaeology ; Human Geography ; Sociological Theory
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 538768375

In research on the Neolithic, Bronze Age, and Iron Age of Central Europe, Walter Christaller’s Theory of Central Places, first published in 1933, is considered a suitable means of reconstructing prehistoric settlement patterns. Fundamental for an archaeological adaptation of this theory were D. Denecke’s and especially E. Gringmuth-Dallmer’s operationalizations, which attempt to do justice to the particularities of archaeological sources. By means of a reconstruction of the settlement hierarchy, insights should also be gained into social, economic, and power structures. However, an important premise of Christaller’s theory remains unconsidered: It can be useful if it is known that there was a settlement hierarchy but is inappropriate for answering the question of whether there was a settlement hierarchy and whether it was organized according to the logic of central places. This is usually assumed without discussion when projecting the Central Place Theory onto prehistoric settlement landscapes, and the result is a distortion of prehistoric societies towards hierarchy and centrality. Attempts to supplement the analysis of central places with network theories as a corrective to the one-sidedness of the Central Place Theory also focus one-sidedly on the determination of centrality structures without considering other patterns of spatial organization. Unaffected by these attempts is the fundamental problem of settlement hierarchies taken for granted, which are at the same time supposed to be an expression of distinctive social hierarchies. The fact that the available data and the possibilities of visualizing them have greatly increased through the use of geographic information systems (GIS) makes the question of an adequate interpretative framework seem even more urgent. In this context, the planned research project is dedicated to three tasks. Firstly, in an outline of the history of research, the implications of the application of the Central Place Theory to socio-historical interpretations of the Neolithic, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age will be worked out. Secondly, the explanatory value of alternative geographical theories of prehistoric settlement behavior needs to be examined. And thirdly, a separate, empirically saturated model has to be formulated that takes into account the particularities of archaeological sources and that is theoretically based on differentiation-theoretical models, materially on the evaluation of ethnographic documentation of settlement patterns. The categories of differentiation theory serve to identify and morphographically describe different patterns of differentiation in the archaeological evidence, and then to answer the question of the nature of the social systems that produced these patterns by means of ethnographic empiricism.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants