Rural settlements in geography: from antiquity to rural geography

The aim of this article is to present the development of geography's interest in the study of rural settlements from the earliest known works to the present day. The text analyses changes in priorities in the selection of substantive topics and approaches to the study of rural settlements, particularly in the context of major paradigmatic changes in society, science and geography itself. It therefore divides the history of the geographical study of rural settlements into four major temporal phases. These are the period from antiquity to the end of the 19th century (1), the period of the first half of the 20th century (2), the period of quantitative geography (3), and the current period within rural geography (4). Within the framework of the individual time stages, the text deals with the issues specifically in the world and specifically in the conditions of Slovak geography. Within the current (most prolific) period, the text is divided in even greater detail according to the individual regions of the world, in the environment of Slovak geography after 1989 according to the dominant research themes and according to the nature of the published works. The basic working method was a content analysis of available texts and electronic sources based on their search by keywords in the core database of the Web of Science portal and on the social platforms ResearchGate, Google Scholar and Academia.edu. The article has the ambition to build on previous, more concise and more narrowly focused works of Slovak geographers (Lobotka 1987, Zubriczký 2003).