Early 19th Century Mobility And Complexity On The Basque Rangelands In The Western Pyrenees (France)

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Every summer since at least AD 1000, hundreds of Basque herders from dozens of villages across the 1500 km2 Soule Valley in the French Western Pyrenees have converged with thousands of sheep on 90 km2 of high mountain rangeland in the parish-community of Larrau. The summer convergence of herders and sheep over the last millennium suggests a successful even sustainable system but does not explain why individual herders participate in the practice. Our goal is to evaluate system performance by distinguishing between contingent vs. ideal herder behavior for participating in the collective enterprise of herding. We do this by combining exponential random graph modeling of herder relations obtained from a unique set of documents from AD 1830, spatially explicit information on herding cooperatives and grazing lands from the Napoleonic Cadastre, and the results of a pedestrian archaeological survey of the high mountain rangeland of Larrau.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SHA 2023 General Sessions   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow