Archaeological interest in pastoralism -i.e. the predominant reliance on herded animals such as sheep and cattle for the production of food and other items for domestic consumption and (market) exchange -is gradually growing in the Mediterranean region and elsewhere. Ethno-archaeological studies in particular have paid attention to recent historical and contemporary pastoral economies as a consequence of the difficulties in recognizing pastoral material culture in the archaeological evidence. This paper will present an ethno-archaeological case study of recent pastoral economies in a mountain region in Sardinia (Italy), which have been investigated from a landscape perspective. I argue that the archaeologically visible features of pastoral and rural landscapes generally should be considered the outcome of both spatially and temporally diverse rural practices on the local level and their interaction with wider economic and political structures.
For several decades the socio-economic and political organization of rural communities in the northern Mediterranean has been a central topic of ethnographic and modern historical research. Although the concept of (rural) class has generally been avoided, a scholarly picture has often been maintained of a sharp social stratification in local contexts. In this framework the notions of peasantry and patronage have frequently been applied. This article argues that on occasion rural communities in southern Europe showed a rather flexible social stratification and high amounts of social mobility in particular among shepherd groups. The case study is of the agro-pastoral community of Fonni in the central mountains of Sardinia (Italy), which has been characterized predominantly by a pastoral economy based on sheep and goat herding during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Although there have been increasing amounts of archaeological work carried out in the Mediterranean on Post-Medieval periods, particularly in Greece, historical archaeology in the Anglo-American sense is so far poorly developed in Italy. For many, work on this period is seen as synonymous with the archaeology of capitalism and the growth of world systems. Such concerns require many different scales of analysis and an inter-disciplinary approach. One crucial question for archaeologists is how processes at different scales and perhaps different tempos articulate. While fieldwork typically contributes to the local and regional, the archaeological search for broader syntheses often privileges ecological conditions as determining the nature of possible responses; historians and anthropologists, for their part, have tended to emphasize the economic. Here we present two case studies from broadly ecologically similar areas, the central highlands of Sicily and Sardinia, both with rich archaeological, historical and ethnographic archives from the last two centuries. Our analysis supports work elsewhere in the Mediterranean which suggests that even under the homogenizing influences of global trade and regional ecologies, the specific sociopolitical conditions within which communities and classes articulate with wider forces are crucial in determining historical and cultural trajectories.
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