Session: #501

Content:

Many of our most evocative landscapes – heathlands, bogs, forests, high mountains – have been productive and lived environments throughout human history. Nevertheless, they sit in strange relation to much archaeological work, liable to come into focus as the site of exceptional finds, bodies frozen in pack ice or preserved in bog for instance. While these spectacular finds might grab our attention, they do not break the overriding sense that these were ‘marginal’ landscapes, visited for special purposes on unusual occasions. Given their marginality to modern, productivity-focused worlds, it is easy to forget the centrality such landscapes held to past communities and the particular forms of social organisation and tenure which they called into being, notably commons and shared grazing rights. Understanding land as held-in-common is, for example, a complex and actively heterarchical, even anarchic, way of managing resources. Yet, these landscapes are still underestimated as sources of insight on economic and social life, as if we assume their marginality today must reflect some unchanging essence of the landscape itself.

In this session, we want to re-people and re-animate these ‘marginal’ areas. How can we understand the effect of these landscapes on their inhabitants, and the inventive and productive relationships that people forge with one another in order to use and live in these places? We seek papers that explore social organisation in marginal and pastoral landscapes around Europe, in both the recent and distant past. We particularly welcome papers that discuss entanglements of people, plants, animals and topography, so as to get a fuller understanding of the factors influencing social organisation and landholding. How did ‘marginal’ landscapes afford opportunities for particular social forms, and what factors led to the disruption, reconfiguration or persistence of these regimes over time?

Session: #501

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