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18.12.11 Quirós Castillo (ed.), Social Complexity in Early Medieval Rural Communities (Castellanos)

18.12.11 Quirós Castillo (ed.), Social Complexity in Early Medieval Rural Communities (Castellanos)


In recent years there has been a shift in the knowledge of archaeological records of the late and early medieval Iberian Peninsula. Infrastructure works in airports, highways, and high-speed trains, as well as numerous research projects in cities and fields, have surprised with new information, especially for the 5th-8th centuries. It is also noteworthy that the dissemination of the results of these excavations and surveys has been carried out in well-known academic circles, which helps the scientific impact of these developments. A good example of this is this volume, published in Oxford by Archaeopress. The editor, Juan Antonio Quirós, has spent years leading interdisciplinary teams, and publishing important articles and books on the archaeological of post-Roman and early medieval Iberia.

Social Complexity in Early Medieval Rural Communities is a short volume of 133 pages, which presents an excellent selection of multidisciplinary collaborations, based on the theme of social complexity in the early medieval peasant communities. It is true that, as indicated by the subtitle, the book focuses on the Northwest of Iberia, but there are comparative elements with other regions of Iberia, and even other European areas.

One of the common objectives of the contributors is to transcend the archaeological data and integrate it into social and political explanations of the functioning of the post-Roman and early medieval peasantry. The book consists of chapters written by different specialists who put in context analysis of very different empirical evidence; not only with housing and funeral structures, but also with ceramics, elements of personal adornment, tools, archaeobotany studies, archaeozoology, and isotopic data, among others.

Carlos Tejerizo studies the Duero area, which is a particularly clear example of the dismantling of Roman structures during the 5th century. His focus is on settlement patterns, especially between the 5th and 8th centuries, understood as a consequence of social forces and the inequalities between them. Sometimes these differences are more pronounced, as in the case of the hillforts, other times they are more tenuous, as in the farms and villages. Catarina Tente has analyzed the center and north of Portugal in the 10th century. The sites that she studies are very interesting because in them social inequality is barely visible and, nevertheless, differences in comparative techniques can be seen. In this sense, practically self-sufficient communities are perceived in contrast to others that were part of supralocal distribution networks. Idoia Grau-Sologestoa makes a systematic analysis of zooarchaeological data, which come from Basque Country sites dating from the 5th to the 10th century. It is of great interest to see how, in those rural communities that she examines, in addition to a general trend towards diversity in farming there is also a beginning of concentration of meat as food, a concentration that the author seems to understand as a possible attempt to mark status.

Maite Iris García-Collado studies the strategies of food consumption in rural communities in the center of Iberia, in particular the important Gózquez deposit, in the current province of Madrid, which covers the 6th to 8th centuries. This author is specialized in the analysis of isotopes and their social interpretation, and in Gózquez's materials she finds agricultural diversification strategies that she interprets as directly designed by the peasants themselves, arguing against the old idea of the primitivism of the peasant villages. This study is important because it supports the idea of active post-Roman peasant communities, with management of resources and planned strategies, alien to an idea that is now inoperative of primitivism. David Larreina García analyzes iron tools from the Zaballa field, in Álava, in the south of the Basque Country, for a very long medieval chronological horizon. The most interesting thing is that there are elements of great quality, as shown by archaeometry studies. In addition, it is verified that they are allochthonous, which would indicate the connection of the peasantry of Zaballa with supralocal circuits.

Francesca Grassi deals with one of the materials that provides the most information, ceramics, and does so in a comparative study between Castile and Southern Tuscany. She makes comparative approximations, in each case, to elements such as origin, exchanges, distributions, and social differences, among other aspects of the early medieval peasant world in Castile and Southern Tuscany. The contribution of Alfonso Vigil-Escalera focuses on post-Roman and early medieval peasant sites in Iberia. He proposes the hypothesis that, on some variants of the funerary record (precisely in non-funerary contexts), it is possible to detect the presence of slavery in the household context. If so, this hypothesis would delve into the internal differences within the peasantry, which increasingly seem to confirm archaeological sources. Igor Santos focuses on the case study of the village of Torrentejo (Álava, south of the Basque Country, in northern Iberia), for the 10th to 14th centuries. The author combines the literary sources with the archaeological record, detecting the silences of the former and the information of the latter, which allows to glimpse the genesis of the place and the internal differences in the community.

The main contribution of this book is to highlight new archaeological data on the peasant communities of the Northwest of Iberia, and to demonstrate that these communities were unequal. We must congratulate Juan Antonio Quirós and his team, who have not only been excavating fields of enormous interest for years, but who are also capable of disseminating results of great quality in highly relevant publications, this being a clear example. The cases studied in this volume endorse how the first post-Roman village communities were active and planning, as seen both in the occupation of the territory at different levels and in the management of agricultural and livestock production. Not only were these communities unequal, they were also very active and managed a multitude of parameters, alien to the old paradigm of primitivism. For my part, I would like to add that this is particularly interesting, because many times there is only a generic impression of Iberia's post-Roman peasantry. This is because the mentions in literary texts are frequently generic, and obviously do not enter into the internal inequalities of these communities. Thanks to this book we began to know that this was not the case.