The goal of this paper is to discuss the social and political role of early medieval high-status settlements in the framework of landscapes of power. The identification of elite residence is one of the major challenges of early medieval archaeology because there is a profound asymmetry between the relevance and the density of aristocracies in the written record and the elusive and problematic definition of high-status settlement in material terms. European comparative analysis has shown that relationship between social status and the morphology of domestic spaces is not straightforward. In this paper it is argued that a social practice approach, aimed at exploring what has been done rather than how they might look like, would provide new insights to the understanding of this topic. Considering some case studies of early medieval Castile it is suggested that legitimation practices deployed at local and supralocal scale have determined the nature and the role of elite residences. In addition, it is explored how aristocracy identity have shaped high-status sites and the limits of the normative definition of these sites.
University of the Basque Country, Spain - ORCID: 0000-0002-4676-102X
Titolo del capitolo
Prácticas sociales y ejercicio del poder en las localidades. Las residencias de las élites rurales en la Castilla altomedieval
Autori
Juan Antonio Quirós Castillo
Lingua
Spanish
DOI
10.36253/979-12-215-0530-6.04
Opera sottoposta a peer review
Anno di pubblicazione
2024
Copyright
© 2024 Author(s)
Licenza d'uso
Licenza dei metadati
Titolo del libro
Political landscapes in Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages: the Iberian Northwest in the Context of Southern Europe
Curatori
Iñaki Martín Viso
Opera sottoposta a peer review
Numero di pagine
340
Anno di pubblicazione
2024
Copyright
© 2024 Author(s)
Licenza d'uso
Licenza dei metadati
Editore
Firenze University Press
DOI
10.36253/979-12-215-0530-6
ISBN Print
979-12-215-0529-0
eISBN (pdf)
979-12-215-0530-6
eISBN (xml)
979-12-215-0532-0
Collana
Reti Medievali E-Book
ISSN della collana
2704-6362
e-ISSN della collana
2704-6079