Spatiality and the making of space. Archaeology and the ontology of relational reach

Archaeologists routinely map buildings, routes and landscapes, yet the boundaries they record do not necessarily coincide with the boundaries through which social and material processes operated. This article develops ‘relational reach’ as a way of comparing the process-specific extents of movement, heat, sound, moisture, visibility, authority and other effects within the same material arrangement. I place the concept in dialogue with affordance, time-geography, rhythmanalysis, meshwork, topology and power geometry, and apply it to seasonally changing indoor spaces in medieval Oslo, Norway. The case shows how a stable building plan can remain an indispensable structural reference while other spatial relations shift across processes and seasons. I argue that relational reach is useful when these different extents are tied to appropriate evidence, chronology and formation history, allowing archaeologists to describe spatial plurality without abandoning measurement, bounded analytical units or realist claims about past material constraints.