The anthropization of the Cantabrian Mountains (NW Iberia) during the Later Prehistory

22nd Annual Meeting of the Europaen Asociation of Archaeologists

Vilnius. Lituania
Congreso. 2016

This paper attempts to provide a historical narrative that accounts for the biography of the cultural landscapes of the Western part of the Cantabrian Mountains based on a social interpretation of archaeological data and paleo environmental sequences. A diachronic perspective is adopted drawing on in the theoretical and methodological framework of Landscape Archaeology. This is achieved by analyzing the patterns of settlement and subsistence deployed by human groups during the five millennia that mediate between the emergence of agriculture and animal farming (ca. 4800 BC) and the Roman conquest of the area under study (late first century BC). In light of the data considered for the mountainous area which separates Spanish contemporary regions of Asturias and León, the investigation reflects about the human experiences and the historical processes that intervened in the anthropization and the social construction of the cultural landscapes of the Later Prehistory in the area.

During the Neolithic there is a spread of agriculture and farming. This process can be perceived earlier in the coastal áreas than up in the mountains. This resulted in the emergence of humanization processes of the environment characterized by an increase of open areas for pastures and crops related to itinerary forms of production and settlement. Later in the Bronze Age, the anthropization of the territory significantly increased, revealing a certain tendency towards the territorialization of human groups. The Iron Age implied the almost complete adoption of sedentary forms of life by human groups. Iron Age communities developed new livestock and farming practices, now intensified with the emergence of stable crop fields. This new productive pattern led to the emergence of a compartmentalized and highly anthropized landscape around the hillforts. However, this general scheme shows some gaps and exceptions which should be considered in detail. In the first place, they could reveal the limits of the data available for the region. But, more interestingly, they might point out the divergence in the social or cultural livelihoods performed by the communities who inhabited the Cantabrian Mountains during the Later Prehistory.

Anthropization. Landscape Archaeology. Later Prehistory.