ABSTRACT
Settlement is one of those terms that archaeologists intuitively understand. We all think we know what a settlement is, what it looks like, and usually how to analyze it. However, I have to confess that I personally am not sure what exactly a settlement is. In this paper, I outline what I think about the social development of settlements, and how we can use a small segment of the material record to get at the changing dynamics of the history of the inhabitants of a settlement. For my purposes, then, I define settlement abstractly as a dynamic construction of space and time that preserves, or perhaps encapsulates, the collective memory of a group. In essence, this definition allows almost any trace of material to be both a settlement and the preserve of memory but, as I hope to show in later sections, it is the archaeological situations that display more complex conglomerations of material culture that interest me most, and have, I believe, the most potential for understanding the dynamic nature of society.
