The southern Harz Mountains were on the northern periphery of the Latène culture, which was organized around central sites. Here, toward the end of the 2nd century B.C., settlements of the Polish Przeworsk culture are present, providing evidence of a process of migration into a limited “cultural island”. The project had two parts. First, on a broad regional level, the settlement structure of the southern Harz Mountains and the changing role of central-site organization was analyzed from a diachronic perspective using GIS, on the basis of a systematic registration of sites with finds from the Neolithic to the time of the Völkerwanderung (barbarian invasions). Second, on a narrower geographical basis, geophysical prospections and targeted excavations of selected sites permit statements on settlement organization and the environs of settlements. The interface between the two approaches consists of reconstructions of the paleo-environment comprising both the concrete area of settlement and the broader surrounding region, permitting statements on the changes in the synchronous (cultural) landscape. Using the multi-scalar database thereby generated, an answer was sought to how immigrants organized themselves in space, whether two different settlement systems existed in parallel, whether they converged, or even if one structure was subsumed in the other.