How Space Talks
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 07/10/2015

Markus Spring
ZURICH UNIVERSITY

When we occasionally would look up from our smart phones, we may get hold of stimuli in our built environment. The towering
colons of a cathedral can bring us at awe or the glossy prospectus of a new housing development may tease us as potential buyers. But also prehistoric built environments are likely to have conveyed a message about inhabitants and their social
structure to a visitor from outside.

The proposed paper is an experiment into combining prehistoric archaeology with aspects of environmental psychology. It
draws its inspiration from critics Daniel Montello, an American Geographer and Psychologist, expressed on the role Space
Syntax Analysis played in environmental psychology and how this could be improved. He outlined, how people experience a
built environment and how they may react to it. The proposed paper turns the wheel of time back into Early Bronze Age
Europe. It cannot reconstruct people's reactions. However, it explores how a contemporary first-time visitor walking through a
selection of fortified lakeside settlements would have experienced this for him new environment.

Although this approach is still rather crude and sample numbers limited, the paper reveals that built space during Early Bronze
Age also left impressions on a contemporary visitor. He may e.g. have realised how close people lived together and drew his
own conclusions about their social organisation. And through the eyes of a contemporary person, rather than from our own
perspective as researchers, we may be able to better understand built space in the past.