ABSTRACT
The process of choosing a situation in which to establish one or more habitations is an exercise in least-cost location analysis, if the economic aims of the community are assumed to be given. It is commonly noticed how settlements in Europe are generally very closely related to water sources and so it is often inferred that this ‘determines’ the location of villages. If the historical evidence is amenable only to inference and not proof, then the importance of lands in the location of the settlement is confirmed by the behaviour of shifting cultivators. Traditionally, the main link with other communities was through the travelling of persons and the interchange of goods, which render location on or near lines of communication an advantage. The more important these external transactions are, the greater significance attaches to access to land, river or sea routes, and the greater the advantage of a location with good external communications.
