The Ethnoarchaeology of Abandonment and Post-Abandonment Behaviour in Pastoral Sites: Evidence from Famorca, Alacant Province, Spain

Abstract

This paper addresses questions of site abandonment processes, using examples of pastoral structures on the threshold of the archaeological context, recorded during ethnoarchaeological research in eastern Spain. Current views of abandonment behaviour are seen as deficient with respect to the Mediterranean pastoral economy. A selection of 'small' pastoral corral sites and their environs was planned and recorded in detail, and the data supplemented with ethnographic data collected among the contemporary agro-pastoral community. Abandonment behaviour is examined at three scales of analysis: the abandonment of the agro-pastoral 'landscape', patterns of structural disintegration, and the material assemblages of abandonment, including coral 'furniture' and portable material culture. The study concludes that the abandonment of 'small', seasonal pastoral sites is the product of wider re-orientations in landscape exploitation, visible at the inter-site level. At the intra-site scale, abandonment is viewed as a multi-phase process resulting in complex yet structured material assemblages requiring behavioural interpretation.

Deferred Harvests: The Transition from Hunting to Animal Husbandry

“…Ethnographers commonly observe that pastoralists, reluctant to slaughter and eat their valuable livestock, actively hunt wild herbivores as sources of meat. Examples are found in pastoral settings and among people as diverse as those of the South American Andes (Custred 1977;Flannery et al 1989;Garcia 2001;Kuznar 1995), Tibet (Ekvall 1968;Goldstein and Beall 1990), East Africa (Evans-Pritchard 1940;Klima 1970;Robertshaw and Collett 1983), Siberia (Ingold 1980), Europe (Creighton and Segui 1998), the Middle East (Barth 1961;Cribb 1991), and the Navajo (Downs 1972;Luckert 1975). The persistence of hunting might be expected for two reasons.…”

Landscape Construction and Long-Term Economic Practices: an Example from the Spanish Mediterranean Uplands Through Rock Art Archaeology

“…This is what happened in the last decades in the Spanish Mediterranean basin, especially in the lowlands: a dramatic change in land use, a likely important factor in its degradation (e.g., Hobbs et al 1995;Naveh 1998;Rundel 1998;Butzer 2005;González-Hidalgo et al 2007;García-Ruiz 2010). In the uplands, work has traditionally been less work intensive and therefore the risks produced by abandonment are also less pressing, but traditional ways of life fade away generation after generation (Creighton and Seguí 1998;Christie et al 2007). An ecologically fine-tuned Mediterranean environment (Butzer 1996) is increasingly under siege, and prospects for future management and preservation are doomed to fail as long as they are not accompanied by policies that keep people living and working the landscape.…”

“…Herding and cultivation in the lowlands are, thus, traditionally, complementary to each other (Butzer 2005), and a sustainable economic activity (Mangas 1992;Butzer 1996;Creighton and Seguí 1998;Sánchez Moreno 1998;Christie et al 2007), with different dimensions, ranging from mixed husbandry-farming activities to trasterminant short movements between close areas, the likely precedent of trashumance 20 (Pallaruelo 1993;López Sáez et al 2009). In all cases, regardless of the local specificities, the seasonal and varied character of these middle-altitude ranges made them very important in traditional rural economies, and especially important as summer pastures in traditional husbandry, well studied by Klein (1990), Bacaicoa et al (1993), Farnós et al (1993), Roigé Ventura et al (1993), Rubio et al (1993a, Pallaruelo (1993), or Fernández Temprado et al (1996.…”

“…Life along this continuum is not easy to grasp archaeologically otherwise. Archaeology and ethnoarchaeology of pastoralism in the Mediterranean is growing (e.g., Creighton and Seguí 1998;Mientjes 2004;Christie et al 2007) as well 21 Mediterranean mountains "are actually closely integrated into the patterns of production and communication that abut them" (Horden and Purcell 2000, p. 81). Geography shows this: in the Spanish Mediterranean basin, numerous natural corridors link the coast to the inland and mountainous areas-e.g.…”

Modern pastoral landscapes on the island of Sardinia (Italy). Recent pastoral practices in local versus macro-economic and macro-political contexts

“…However, these studies do not systematically discuss the location of pastoral structures in the landscape. Other well-known ethno-archaeological studies of recent pastoral settlements in the Mediterranean are Cribb (1991), and Creighton and Segui (1998). Cribb adopts a statistical approach in studying patterns of discard on pastoral sites of Turkish nomads.…”