Archaeology of High-Mountain Pastoral Campsites in the High-Pyrenees

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Empirical Approaches to Mobile Pastoralist Households" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

European high-mountain landscapes are nowadays characterized by the presence of pastures and grasslands. Archaeological and palaeoenvironmental research conducted during the last decades are picturing these environments as long-term cultural productions, resulting from complex environment-society interactions. Since prehistory, herding appears as one of the main factors in the ecology of high-mountain landscapes.The Landscape Archaeology Research Group from the Catalan Institute of Classical Archaeology has conducted different multidisciplinary projects in the Eastern Pyrenees since 2004. The archaeological work included the excavation of 100 structures related to the temporary accommodation of both shepherds and animals and the micromorphological study of the soils. This contribution will present different case studies of excavated structures, with chronologies from the Neolithic to the Modern period. In this paper we will analyze (1) the internal articulation of the sites, (2) relation to landscape transformations and (3) the integration of high-mountain activities in complex supra-regional socio-economic dynamics of the different periods.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Empirical Approaches to Mobile Pastoralist Households   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25156