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

Abstract

Why, how and when villages emerged across medieval Europe are enduring questions for archaeologists and historians because of the wider social and economic transformations implied—and because many of these settlements persist to the present day. Most archaeological investigations have focused on the nucleated centres of these communities; here, instead, the authors examine the role of agroscapes. Focusing on an agricultural area near the village of Tobillas, changes in soil chemistry are used to document the creation and maintenance of common fields attesting to collective agrarian practice pre-dating the foundation of the medieval village. Reversing the accepted narrative, the authors argue it was these pre-existing agrarian communities who coalesced to constitute villages such as Tobillas.

The social-ecological landscape of herding on the high mountain commons of Larrau in the western Pyrenees (France)

“…Such satisfyingly simple explanations are often based on a single archive, the opinion of a single agent, or the population inferred from an SPD of calibrated radiocarbon dates (Coughlan, 2015;Gragson and Thompson, 2022). Our results-to-date in the western Pyrenees and that of others in comparable mid-elevation mountain settings suggest the agropastoral niche emerged across Europe through a slow, non-linear, cumulative and persistent press linked to social processes that are still under debate (Arnold and Greenfield, 2006;Gragson et al, 2020;Quirós Castillo et al, 2023). Netting's (1972Netting's ( , 1976Netting's ( , 1981 seminal work in the community of Törbel documented cooperative mountain agropastoralism as a static and bounded end point in the effort to find a sustainable balance between community and environment.…”

“…Understanding the process of settling down in the western Pyrenees and Europe have been intellectually dominated by the argument that agropastoral spaces are the inevitable consequence of first establishing a hamlet, village or town. The sequence of events in Larrau and comparable settings in northern Iberia such as Tobillas (Quirós Castillo et al, 2023) point to just the opposite. It is land use and management activities that lead eventually to the materialization of alliance in the form of a settlement and its social institutions.…”

“…above 1,000 m, there is no history" (Falque-Vert, 1997, p. 9). While archaeology typically depends on material proxies of collective action (Gragson et al, 2020;Feinman and Neitzel, 2023;Quirós Castillo et al, 2023), in this paper, we relate archaeological evidence of land use and settlement to ethnographic and historical evidence of the less tangible institutional and organizational aspects of how Basque herders overcome conflicts of interests and issues of coordination.…”

“…Netting added historical and demographic dimensions to the inquiry as these were largely ignored in ecological anthropology investigations at the time. The value of Netting's contribution is without question yet there are conceptual, methodological, and analytical means available now to investigate the processes of change and collective action across time (Thompson et al, 2018;Feinman and Neitzel, 2020;Quirós Castillo et al, 2023) that were not available when Netting pioneered the study of how the people of Törbel balanced on an alp.…”