Medieval rural settlements have seen a variety of transformations from dispersed to nucleated settlements, from shifting settlements to permanent villages. There are regional developments as well as general trends. In many landscapes in Central and Western Europe these processes resulted in the formation of the late medieval village nucleated around the church and connected with an open field system during the 10th–13th centuries.
Archaeologists, geographers and historians provided various explanations for these settlement changes. Some argued towards a correlation of settlement dynamics with changing patterns of local power. However, most studies only took single landscapes or even single sites into consideration, whereas a comparative approach is missing.
By mapping the chronological frames of rural settlements, it is possible to assess regional settlement dynamics and to correlate them with historical processes and geographical spaces. This paper is based on some preliminary work triggered by previous studies of the author on the history of medieval villages mainly in South-West Germany. It outlines possibilities and problems as well as first results of a GIS-based approach aiming for a comparison of settlement dynamics mainly in Western Europe.