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
Chapter Title
Prácticas sociales y ejercicio del poder en las localidades. Las residencias de las élites rurales en la Castilla altomedieval
Authors
Juan Antonio Quirós Castillo
Language
Spanish
DOI
10.36253/979-12-215-0530-6.04
Peer Reviewed
Publication Year
2024
Copyright Information
© 2024 Author(s)
Content License
Metadata License
Book Title
Political landscapes in Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages: the Iberian Northwest in the Context of Southern Europe
Editors
Iñaki Martín Viso
Peer Reviewed
Number of Pages
340
Publication Year
2024
Copyright Information
© 2024 Author(s)
Content License
Metadata License
Publisher Name
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
Series Title
Reti Medievali E-Book
Series ISSN
2704-6362
Series E-ISSN
2704-6079