Firman
Marcos Fernández Ferreiro (organizador)
Estefanía López Salas (organizadora)
Tim Kinnaird (organizador)
Sam Turner (organizador)
Jose Carlos Sánchez Pardo (organizador)
Resumen
Monastic landscape studies, even nowadays, still largely focus on written evidence and detailed site surveys of architectural remains. Some efforts on integrating historical sources and palaeoecological approaches have been made in those areas were exceptional environmental archives such as peatlands are common, and in such a way, likely to find clues of emblematic monuments such as monasteries but, many monasteries lack the presence of such extraordinary environmental archives in their immediate vicinity. At these sites, sediment and agrarian terrace sequences are the best option to approach the environmental fingerprints of monastic agrarian history.In this paper, we present a diachronic agrarian history of the lands around Samos abbey (NW Spain) by combining palaeoenvironmental and text based approaches. OSL, geochemistry and palynology analysis of an agricultural terrace and a sediment sequence located in the surroundings of the abbey, were considered together with historical text analysis of “Tumbo de Samos” and “Apeos de Samos” books. The main objectives were to: 1) evaluate the role of monastic activities in shaping the Samos landscape and 2) get a better understanding of the interplay between proxy based and written sources of information. Written evidence of intense agricultural activity existed from the early middle ages, although the strong environmental transformations occurred during the XVII century in the lands near the monastery, and not so well documented in the texts, seemed to have mask their printing in the environment. Our results show how the interplay between palaeoenvironmental and text based approaches, resulting both fragmentary, allowed to reconstruct the diachronic evolution of a monastic landscape.
Palabras clave
Palaeoenvironment. Monastic studies. Geochemistry. Palynology. Agrarian History.