Deserted settlements as arenas of struggle in the age of supermodernity: a case study in rural northwestern Iberia

Landscape Archaeology Conference - LAC 2024

Alcalá de Henares. Spain
Conference. 2024

Deserted settlements have been a common feature in the landscape in all historical

periods, acting as recurrent mechanisms for expressing social and political

identities. All in all, it is in the contemporary Era when abandonments and ruins

have increased their number at levels never known before. They have, indeed,

been incorporated into our everyday landscapes and routines as a consequence

of the failures of modernity and the structures of current capitalism, what in

Spain has been named as the “emptied Spain” (España vaciada). Thus, deserted

settlements in the contemporary era are being introduced in the social and

political relationships in original ways and used by a variety of agents, both human and non-human, which can be potentially studied from an archaeological and

anthropological point of view. In this paper, we will reflect on deserted settlements

as vehicles for social competition and conflict in the rural world. For this matter, we

will be using a case study located in northwestern Iberia, in the current village of

Casaio (Ourense). This settlement, progressively abandoned between the 50s and

the 90s as a consequence of the industrialisation of the area, have been recently

the material centre of a rather traumatic conflict between the local community

of Casaio, a group of new rural and migrant returnees. Through an archaeological

approach, we will tackle both the process of desertion of the settlement and the

conflict between these agents in relation to implementation of modernity in the

last century.

Modernity. Social conflict. Identities. Northwestern Iberia. Industrialization.