Changing Rural Production Strategies during Urbanization in Medieval Lucca

Summary

This is an abstract from the "New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 1: Landscapes, Food, and Health" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The later Middle Ages saw significant changes in the ways that humans exploited their natural environments, fueled by rising populations in cities and the development of commercial industries. This has been studied historically, often through the lens of urban elites, but it is less clear how these changes occurred from the perspective of the countryside. This paper will use the hinterland of the medieval city of Lucca, Tuscany as a case study from 1000 to 1300, to investigate changes in the focus and intensity of agricultural production and the exploitation of animals. Conducting a regional analysis, this work will combine GIS land-use modeling with zooarchaeological data to provide an integrated picture of how the agricultural economy shifted over these 300 years. It will also stress the importance of the decisions of rural producers, who over this period, shifted their productive activities to participate in wider commercial interactions. As such, production became increasingly specialized by environmental zone. I will argue that such shifts were not only driven by elite and urban demands but were, in part, the result of the decisions of producers themselves, who altered their productive activities to take advantage of new economic opportunities and possibilities.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 1: Landscapes, Food, and Health   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38038.0