Land Use and Long-term Sustainability on a Mediterranean Landscape: An Archaeological Case Study in the Lower Alentejo of Portugal

University Of New Mexico, Albuquerque NM

Investigators

Abstract

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. James L. Boone and a team of colleagues will conduct a two field seasons of archaeological and geomorphological research into the effect of population growth and changes in land use strategies on the sustainability of agrarian production in a Mediterranean landscape during the Late Roman and Islamic periods (AD 450 to 1250) in the Lower Alentejo of southern Portugal. Previous work carried out by the PI in this area has shown that soon after the dissolution of Roman control of the region in the late 5th century AD, small hamlets and villages of a Medieval character began to appear on patches of relatively high quality soil and in the vicinity of former Roman villae. Over the next five hundred years, during the establishment of Islamic culture following the Muslim invasion of AD 711, settlement density increased eightfold over what had existed during the Roman period. Following the Christian reconquista in the region in AD 1248, the area was almost completely abandoned until the early 1500s, when it was reoccupied at a much lower settlement density. The total settlement area in the subsequent Late Medieval and Modern periods was never more than a third of what it had been during the Islamic period. The questions we ask with this research are: what kinds of social organization and land use strategies supported the high population densities of agriculturalists and pastoralists in the area during the Islamic period? What were processes by which these land use strategies altered the local environment and were they sustainable in the long term? What were the causes of the settlement hiatus following the Reconquista in the 13th century? The project will involve two eight-week seasons of fieldwork. The first season will be devoted to an archaeological site survey of an 8 X 8 km area in the study area. This will complement the previous work we have done by extending the survey database into an area with different topography, soil characteristics, and modern land-use practices. The combined site survey data will allow us to document settlement growth and decline during the Late Roman and Islamic periods. The second field season will be devoted to limited excavations of sites from the Late Roman and early Islamic period (circa AD 550-850), a time period that remains very poorly understood archaeologically and historically. Through both field seasons, we will conduct geomorphic and paleoenvironmental investigations aimed at documenting changes in the landscape and the anthropogenic processes that brought them about. This integrated program of research will illuminate rural social and economic organization and anthropogenic (i.e. human-caused) environmental change and the connections between them. By adopting a long-term perspective, we will be able to explore the ongoing recursive interaction between humans and the Mediterranean landscape. As such, the result will be pertinent to illuminating many pressing contemporary issues from a uniquely expanded temporal perspective, as populations continue to grow and place greater pressures on the scarce natural resources of arid and semi-arid environments in the Mediterranean region and across the globe.