Abstract
The archaeological context of settlement studies concerns the reconstruction
of past societies’ physical and socio-cultural landscapes. The interaction between
people and their environments indicates the settlement distribution and social
meaning of settlement. This paper aims to discuss the epistemological re-identifications of archaeological studies as reflected in settlement patterns and past societies. The new positivist processual tradition in archaeology has produced a general
research design founded on the proposition that the natural sciences operate under
the assumption that human behavior is governed by fixed laws and regularities.
This deductive and nomological conceptualization is based on the strategic points
derived from the functional interpretation of archeological cultures and their settlement systems. The processual school conceives settlement as a formulated perception. This approach uses methodological context, household archeology, extensive
survey and landscape approach to explore settlement studies. This processual settlement studies methodology reveals a systematic link between human settlement
and its environment.
Another epistemological construction named postprocessualism proposes an
interpretive and symbolic approach based on critical theory. This approach emphasizes social meaning and rejects an absolute objectivism. The theoretical and methodological implications of postprocessual archaeology are usually commensurate
with a holistic and analogical approach between past and present social realities.
This school study settlements as social, cognitive and symbolic data collected with
a close relationship between subjectivism and contexualism. The settlement as a
cognitive phenomenon is determined by a paradigm framed with ethnoarchaeology, spatial analysis, intensive survey and landscape archaeology. This approach allows the researcher to claim that the settlement in the landscape is the organic
structure between ecology and social essence. Thus, the settlement in the landscape reflects the socio-cultural and economic mode which is created by the structural causality of subsistence strategy in the ecology.
Both schools have focused on the eco-centric research design in the settlement
studies. Therefore, the methodological application called environment archaeology
has reconstructed ecological landscapes by bioarchaeological and geoarchaeological contexts
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