On the origin of rural landscapes: Looking for physico-chemical fingerprints of historical agricultural practice in the Atlantic Basque Country (N Spain)

Abstract

Evolution and change in agricultural practice is a major factor in the codification of social relations and represents one of the main resources employed by human societies to establish a durable relationship with their environment. Using a multi-proxy integrated approach, this paper seeks to decipher the long-term dynamics that have shaped agricultural landscapes in the Basque Country (N Spain). Social and economic indicators (archival records, toponymy and oral sources) are used along with geological core sampling (geochemistry, magnetic, palynological and carpological analyses) to reconstruct a diachronic sequence of human settlement and agricultural management in the village of Aizarna over the last ~1500 years. The oldest records obtained refer to non-agricultural human activities dating back to the Roman period. Later on, traces of agricultural landscape-transformation can be divided into four main phases: 1) the onset of terraced agriculture, defined by the clearance and terracing of previous forested areas during the Early Middle Ages; 2) a Late Medieval reorganisation, with new terraces being (re)constructed close to dispersed farmsteads, linked to the emergence of the modern rural landscape; 3) a new model of intensive polyculture developed during the Modern period as a consequence of the introduction of new crops of American origin; and 4) the mechanisation and commercialisation of the agricultural production over the 20 th century. These results provide a valuable pathway for the investigation of currently inhabited rural contexts, and offer, for the first time in this region, an overview on long-term landscape construction in the Atlantic areas of the Basque Country.

What is a village? Agroscapes, collective action and medieval villages in northern Iberia

“…Phosphorus pentoxide (P 2 O 5 ), sulphur trioxide (SO 3 ) and manganese oxide (MnO) show high positive loadings, while MgO shows a moderate positive loading. This reflects the presence of organometallic compounds or non-edaphic organic matter in the sediment (Huang & Jin 2008;Atafar et al 2010), the presence of which can indicate agricultural practices such as manuring (Narbarte-Hernández et al 2019, 2020. Finally, the radiocarbon measurements are summarised in Table 2.…”

Territories of Faith: 1000 Years of Landscape Multifunctionality in Santa Mariña de Augas Santas (NW Spain)

“…In order to appraise this interplay and to assess the contribution of the different factors and processes, here we address the geoarchaeological characterization of one of the more important worship spaces of Santa Mariña, through the combination of the geochemical study of the pedo-sedimentary record with already available historical, archaeological, and documentary information. This kind of approach has been successfully used to characterize landscape configuration processes and land use change in anthropically modified environments [23][24][25][26], by taking advantage of the capacity of soils and sedimentary sequences for storing the signals of human activities [27].…”

Medieval rural landscapes and social change in Northern Spain: the archaeobotanical record for Zaballa (Alava, Basque Country)

“…Moreno, 1990;Di Pasquale et al, 2014;Mercuri et al, 2015) and Spain (e.g. Palet, 2002;Riera Mora, 2008;Orejas and Ruiz del Árbol, 2013;Narbarte-Hernández, 2019).…”