Historias de la aldea. Arqueología de las sociedades campesinas en el centro de la península ibérica (ss. VI-VIII d.n.e.)

Abstract

The development of Archaeology in Western Europe had as a result the exponential growth of data on rural context in the Early Middle Ages, which has completely renewed the analysis on peasantry in this period. One of the aspects that developed the most has been, precisely, the archaeology of villages, which has come to a very detailed information on their genesis during early medieval times, their main characteristics and the type of societies which lived in them. This information came to revised the idea of the causal relation between the medieval village and feudalism, opening the possibility of analysing the socio-economic complexities of these societies. In this paper I will present, in the first place, a genealogic and historiographical analyses of the category of medieval village in order to, and in second place, build an alternative concept in anthropological terms, derived from some analyses on the archaeological record in the northern plateau of the Iberian peninsula.