Agrarian landscapes in the Iberian Iron Age: Mountain communities and land use in southeastern Iberia

Agrarian landscapes are among the least understood features of first millennium B.C. societies in the western Mediterranean. Studies of such landscapes in the context of the Iberian Iron Age have been based essentially on the archeological record in places used for purposes other than farming, particularly settlements and areas reserved for burials and rituals, or on the identification of the possible use of fertilizers. Here we present a multiproxy analysis of an agrarian landscape based on geoarchaeological and paleoenvironmental studies in a mountainous region in southeastern Iberia. The findings confirmed the existence of farmland cultivated as early as the first millennium B.C. in the high Jutia Valley in the Spanish province of Albacete. These results suggest that coordinated analyses can be highly useful for identifying enduring agricultural practices, while contributing to a fuller understanding of western Mediterranean agrarian landscapes and their millenarian resilience, attributable to the coevolution of human communities and the environment.