Resumo
As other European mountainous regions, the upland pastures of Babia (León, Spain) in the Cantabrian Mountains have been exploited by pastoralist groups since Late Prehistory. These landscapes have been shaped by long-term human activity; archaeological research allows us to understand these processes. Contrary to the common perception of upland regions as wild or peripheral areas, distant from the centres of historical inquiry on Big History, our ongoing investigations in Babia illustrate how research programmes on Landscape Archaeology illuminate global geopolitical processes such as modernization, world trade, and human adaptation to climate change. Indeed, pastoralist activities in the study area have been instrumental in sustaining the production of raw materials such as wool and meat, which are fundamental to the national economy and its international relations during the modern and contemporary periods. This paper assesses changes and continuities in settlement patterns, the scale of herding production, and seasonal modes of transhumance. We analyse archaeological and paleoenvironmental datasets in this region in order to correlate changes and continuities in the socio-environmental relations established by local communities and their surrounding environs with both local and global historical dynamics. European mountainous landscapes have been shaped significantly by global geopolitics.
Palabras chave
Landscape Archaeology. Historical Archaeology. Pastoralism. Rural landscapes. Transhumance.