Landscapes of (Re)Conquest

Frontier Dynamics in Medieval Iberia and Occitania

Aleksander Pluskowski, Guillermo García-Contreras, Michelle Alexander (Herausgeber)

Buch | Hardcover

384 Seiten

2025
Casemate Publishers (Verlag)
979-8-88857-069-2 (ISBN)

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Frontiers were an integral feature of every medieval polity, and their spaces were defined by opposing spheres of influence, contact and connectivity. As these polities expanded and contracted, often as a result of military conquest and territorial annexation, their permeable edges became defined by transformative cultural landscapes. Here, the encounters between resident and incoming populations, from small elite groups through to larger numbers of migrants from diverse social backgrounds, resulted in varying degrees of cultural hybridity. This came to define frontier societies, and left an enduring impact even as borderlands continued to move. These dynamic regions also saw the reconfiguration of political, economic and religious landscapes as frontier authorities invested in both old and new centres, with varying degrees of continuity. Today, the remains of their fortified residences represent the most striking monuments associated with former frontiers. They remain at the centre of public narratives regarding state formation and cultural conflict.

Adopting the definition of frontiers as both the spaces at the edges of polities and the composite societies resulting from their territorial expansion, this book presents a multi-disciplinary study of their dynamics. Focusing on the western Mediterranean, it draws on case studies of cultural landscapes shaped by two contrasting periods of conquest, regime change and state formation: the Castilian and Aragonese conquests of al-Andalus (Islamic Iberia) and the French annexation of Occitania following the Albigensian Crusade. Integrating perspectives from settlement and landscape archaeology, geoarchaeology, zooarchaeology, archaeobotany, archaeometallurgy and isotopic analyses, this book provides a new framework for the study of the transformative spaces of medieval frontier societies.

Aleksander Pluskowski is Professor of Medieval Archaeology at the University of Reading, UK. He completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2003. His main research interests include environmental archaeology, frontier societies and religious transformation in medieval Europe.

List of contributors
Acknowledgements

PART 1: INTRODUCTION
1. Frontier societies in the medieval western Mediterranean: Historical framework and concepts
Guillermo García-Contreras, Michelle Alexander and Aleksander Pluskowski
2. Studying frontier societies: Theory, scales, methods and chronology
Aleksander Pluskowski, Guillermo García-Contreras, Michelle Alexander

PART 2: IBERIA
3. Sites in Iberia: The historical and archaeological data
Guillermo García-Contreras, Luca Mattei and Aleksander Pluskowski
4. The cultural landscapes of medieval Iberian frontiers
Guillermo García-Contreras and Luca Mattei
5. Land use in medieval Iberian frontier societies
Rowena Banerjea, Luca Mattei, Alex Brown, Lionello Morandi and Phillip Toms
6. Towards a narrative change? New archaeobotanical research on the ‘Green Revolution’ at the heartlands and frontiers of al-Andalus
Jérôme Ros, Nicolás Losilla, Thierry Pastor and Camille Hervy
7. The zooarchaeology of frontiers in late medieval Iberia
Marcos García García
8. Diet and animal husbandry on an Iberian frontier: biomolecular perspectives from Guadalajara
Michelle Alexander, Maite I. Garcia-Collado, Samantha Greeves and Marcos García García
9. Metal production after the Christian conquests in Iberia (12th–15th centuries): The Lordship of Molina de Aragón (Guadalajara, Spain)
Yaiza Hernández-Casas, Mercedes Murillo-Barroso, Jesús Alberto Arenas Esteban and Guillermo García-Contreras
10. Mortar composition and technology in Islamic and Christian fortifications: Case studies from Guadalajara and Andalusia
Kevin M. J. Hayward
11. The upper frontier (aṯ-ṯaġr al-a ʿlà) of al-Andalus and the Catalan comital conquest
Jesús Brufal, Helena Kirchner and Antoni Virgili

PART 3: OCCITANIA
12. Sites in Occitania: The historical and archaeological context
Carole Puig, David Maso, Margot Hoffelt, Jean-Michel Carozza and Aleksander Pluskowski
13. The impact of the Albigensian Crusade on the cultural landscapes of the eastern Pyrenean frontier (Pyrénées Audoises)
Carole Puig, Margot Hoffelt and Jean-Michel Carozza
14. Beyond borders and politics: The resilience of human-animal interactions after the Albigensian crusade
Dianne Unsain, Tatiana André and Audrey Roussel

PART 4: SYNTHESIS
15. The impact of shifting frontiers, conquest and cultural transformation in medieval Iberia and Occitania
Aleksander Pluskowski, Michelle Alexander and Guillermo García-Contreras

Erscheinungsdatum	04.06.2025
Zusatzinfo	250 B/W and color illustrations
Sprache	englisch
Maße	216 x 280 mm
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Archäologie
	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Vor- und Frühgeschichte
	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Mittelalter
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
ISBN-13	979-8-88857-069-2 / 9798888570692
Zustand	Neuware