Exploring Affordances: Late Neolithic and Bronze Age Settlement Locations and Human-Environment Engagements in Southeast Norway

Abstract

With the concept of affordance at its core and a method developed to assess settlement site locations using GIS, this paper aims to provide an improved and more nuanced understanding of the placement of longhouse settlements in the landscape during the Late Neolithic (LN) and Bronze Age (BA), and address what these locations can tell us about past human–environment relationships. While the results align with many of the criteria outlined in previous research on site locations, the study also reveals some temporal and spatial differences within the study area of southeast Norway, suggested to reflect specific relations and local affordances visible through the composition of site location variables. The results strongly indicate that the region’s woodlands heavily influenced LN/BA people and that the many different affordances of the forest likely were fundamental constituents of their life. The developed method and the results of the analysis also indicate the existence of some meaningful distances between where people situated their houses and certain variables, albeit varying slightly over time.