land Editorial Central Place Theory Reloaded and Revised: Political Economy and Landscape Dynamics in the Longue Durée Athanasios K. Vionis * and Giorgos Papantoniou * Department of History and Archaeology, University of Cyprus, P.O. Box 20537, 1678 Nicosia, Cyprus * Correspondence:
[email protected] (A.K.V.);
[email protected] (G.P.) Received: 12 February 2019; Accepted: 18 February 2019; Published: 21 February 2019 1. Introduction The aim of this contribution is to introduce the topic of this volume and briefly measure the evolution and applicability of central place theory in previous and contemporary archaeological practice and thought. Thus, one needs to rethink and reevaluate central place theory in light of contemporary developments in landscape archaeology, by bringing together ‘central places’ and ‘un-central landscapes’ and by grasping diachronically upon the complex relation between town and country, as shaped by political economies and the availability of natural resources. It is true that 85 years after the publication of Walter Christaller’s seminal monograph Die zentralen Orte in Süddeutschland [1], the significance of his theory has been appreciated, modified, elaborated, recycled, criticised, rejected and revised several times. As Peter Taylor and his collaborators [2] (p. 2803) have noted, “nobody has a good word to say about the theory”, while “the influence of a theory is not to be measured purely in terms of its overt applications”. Originally set forth by a German geographer, central place theory, once described as geography’s “finest intellectual product” [3] (p. 129), sought to identify and explicate the number, size, distribution and functional composition of retailing and service centres or ‘central places’ in a microeconomic world [4] (p.