A question of place: economies and intimacies in early Sweden’s smallest upland communities.

Summary

Can we understand the connections between the state, farming economies, and the lived experience of smallholders in past societies? Using archaeological examples from the smallest smallholdings – crofts on marginal lands in northern Europe – the view of land as a rare, precious, and highly managed resource is examined. Despite the still-pervasive materialist notion that smallholders are passive mechanisms with shortsighted, self-defeating land management strategies, anthropologists have repeatedly demonstrated that many similar pastoral commons are carefully managed for the long term, providing high consumable yields and high income for the state. Furthermore, can we ‘populate’ the past of smallholder communities to understand their real role in the civic and social life of the state? Curing the materialist notion of the machinelike peasant requires examination of the real-life impacts of hard work, marginality, and government demands through archaeological and documentary data. This can unite the fact that the crofts, as an aggregate whole, were vital to a healthy state economy with the understanding that they also hold traces of a community life that was rich with organizational skills but also personal joy and crisis.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Big Roles for Smallholders in Complex Societies

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