HELIKE IV 47 Topography and Settlement: Perception of the Bounded Space Erika Weiberg Uppsala University, Sweden The Early Helladic people lived and shaped their lives in interaction with the world around them. The topogra- phy of the surrounding landscape would have been one important part in this, important for the definition of settle- ments and for the perception of bounded space in relation to Early Helladic local landscapes. As has often been for- warded in previous research, the benefits of a specific location chosen for habitation may have been economic, such as being located along routes of movement through the landscape, or in a location that left other land free to be farmed. When the locations of settlements are coupled with a certain altitude, considerations of defence and control of the surroundings, tend also to move to the forefront of our discussions. Some of the Early Helladic settlements did command extensive views over the surrounding territory (Fig. 1 ). Views like those would have enabled control of passage through an area. Extensive views combined with a less accessible vantage point would also have been help- ful if defence was needed. We do not know the exact routes through the landscape followed in the Early Helladic pe- riod. The knowledge that archaeological field surveys have given us, however, give indications that available informa- tion on Mycenaean road networks can at least to some part be used also for the earlier period. Early Helladic settle- ments of different sizes are often found in relation to later Myceneaen ones and in relation to natural and continiously used routes through the landscape. 1 These issues of defence and control, economy and strategy, however, are func- tional considerations, likely to give us only pieces of the puzzle. Furthermore, they are considerations with focus on the regional perspective and on an inter-settlement level. I believe there is room, on the regional as well as particularly on the local level, to ask also other kinds of questions to the archaeological material and to the contexts in which we find it. For a fuller understanding of site location we should begin to consider the ways in which topographical features were experienced and used within day to day life, and, how this may have guided the choice to settle and remain settled. Humans are categorizing beings and based on our own position in different contexts we tend to create spaces which in relation to our surrounding render the relative ‘other’. We create or assign boundaries that distinguish dif- ferent contexts from each other. These boundaries are constantly renegotiated, but at a given point in time they de- fine our position and guide our actions. Certainly, there are large variations between the topographical features in connection to which the Early Helladic people chose the settle, differences in terms of form, elevation, size and in the specific location of the settlements within the larger landscape. 2 Many settlements share, however, the natural defini- tion added to them by their topography – a common theme is their spatial definition. This aspect is not non-func-