How did people organize their settlements in prehistory? This question is at the core of a large number of archaeological excavations throughout Scandinavia and beyond, and has remained so during the past three to four centuries. A few decades after the introduction and implementation of settlement archaeological excavations based on top-soil mechanical stripping, the influential book “Settlement and Landscape” was published (Fabech and Ringtved 1999). This book aimed to compare results and establish a new way forward for understanding settlement archaeology and landscape organization in northern Europe from the Stone Age to the medieval period. While the discussions on differences in research traditions and terminologies between the Nordic countries are still valid, new excavations and methodological developments that have taken place during the past two decades have made it necessary to discuss settlement organization again, in a broader comparative perspective. The aim of this book, therefore, is to present new research based on new excavations and/or material, which employ up-to-date methodologies. In doing so, we hope to contribute to a greater understanding of the complexity and dynamics of settlement and landscape organization in Scandinavia and beyond, from the Late Bronze Age to the Renaissance. At the outset, we highlight four aspects which characterize settlement archaeological research in Scandinavia today. First, differences in research traditions have contributed to notions of differing developments in settlement organizations within the Scandinavian countries. Second, differences in terminology between languages regarding settlement organization, particularly the words in Scandinavian languages for single farms and villages, contribute to different interpretations between national research traditions. Third, settlement organization differs between regions and periods rather than between the later national borders. Lastly, methodological developments contribute to increasingly rapid developments in results and interpretations, and open for a broadening range of opportunities in the years to come. The discussion of these four aspects, which forms the first part of this introduction, prepares the ground for our presentations of the contributions to the volume.