During the first millenium AD metal rich sites begin to appear in the archaeological record of Northern Europe. These specialized sites reflect structural and functional changes in settlement patterns, and in the social, political and economic structures behind them. While these sites began to appear in numbers from the 1980s, with the advent of the metal detector, it would be wrong to say that we fully understand the functional and spatial patterns of these sites.

Inspired by methods from social and health sciences, this paper presents an attempt to model a social landscape index for central places of Danish Late Iron Age. By retrogression from later historical maps, a GIS model is developed to indicate the potential geographic distribution of central places across the landscape. This model is correlated to the already known finds.