Skomer today exemplifies the interactions between people and place, which are visible in settlement systems and pattern ways in which humans use the surface of the Earth. Its prehistoric families may be viewed in relation to the large annual nomadic circuits which became more compact with the emergence of diversified foraging, and people established winter camps that they then occupied for greater and greater numbers of months until the first permanent hamlets were born.

From this beginning Skomer is part of the hierarchical settlement systems which emerged in several independent locations in Afro-eurasia and the Americas. Cities grew along with states and empires. Region settlement systems became linked in interaction with other distant regions and eventually form the single global system of cities in which we now live.

Large cities will soon contain over half of the human population of the Earth. Thus have we gone in only a blink of time from nomadic hunter-gatherers to denizens of huge warrens that blanket the surface of our planet. The processes of settlement- building and the resource consumption of cities have been major motors of social change and world history .

The source material used in landscape investigation are aerial photographs, historic documents, maps, etc.  Environmental archaeology, intertidal and wetland archaeology, place- name evidence and charters, buildings, and recording of standing buildings also provide important evidence.

Environmental evidence can be used to explore the way changing traditions of agricultural practice, tenure and settlement have shaped the landscape. Food-producing landscapes and their settlement can be deduced from topographical evidence as can  landscapes of administration, systems of defence, landscapes of lordship, communications networks, industrial exploitation, ‘New Age’ landscapes, contested landscapes, and landscapes of pleasure and recreation.  Ritual and cognitive landscapes may be discerned in prehistoric contexts.

Skomer is a microcosm in which all of these concepts can be illustrated.