ABSTRACT
Archaeologists often try to infer from the layout of settlements and cities defining characteristics of the societies that inhabited them. Observing forms of spatial enclosure, arrangements of differentiated spaces, and patterns of spatial elements, archaeologists attempt to understand social relationships. What is presupposed in these interpretive practices often is that spatial arrangements correspond through specific and distinct ways to ‘social arrangements’, to the layout, so to speak, of an ordered and stable society.
