The Archaeology of Peasant Protagonism: New Directions in the Early Medieval Iberian Countryside

Portass, Robert (2022) The Archaeology of Peasant Protagonism: New Directions in the Early Medieval Iberian Countryside. Rural History: Economy, Society, Culture, 33 (2). pp. 1-13. ISSN 0956-7933

Full content URL: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956793322000127

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The Archaeology of Peasant Protagonism: New Directions in the Early Medieval Iberian Countryside
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Abstract

The inherent complexity of early medieval rural society is now widely recognised by scholars; this is in no small part thanks to the transformative effect that archaeology has had on our understanding of many aspects of peasant life. Yet it is only in the last twenty years that an archaeology of peasant society of early medieval Christian Iberia has emerged to challenge the supremacy of deeply-entrenched historiographical motifs, explored in detail herein, which underplay peasant agency, confine peasants to familiar contextual paradigms (poverty, risk-aversion, resistance), and treat the peasantry as an undifferentiated mass of largely passive ‘recipients’ of History. This article focuses upon a case-study – early medieval northern Iberia – to show that, far from an auxiliary discipline used to bolster or reject interpretations founded upon documentary analysis, archaeology now underpins our efforts to understand complex aspects of the society and economy of the early medieval countryside.

Keywords:Archaeology, Iberian History, Peasant Studies, Economic History, Social History
Subjects:V Historical and Philosophical studies > V224 Iberian History
V Historical and Philosophical studies > V130 Medieval History
V Historical and Philosophical studies > V310 Economic History
V Historical and Philosophical studies > V400 Archaeology
Divisions:College of Arts > Lincoln School of Humanities and Heritage > Lincoln School of Humanities and Heritage (Heritage)
ID Code:48648
Deposited On:22 Mar 2022 15:51

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