La gestión de los comunales en la Cordillera Cantábrica desde la época medieval a la actualidad. Resiliencia, conflictividad y paisaje

Abstract

This PhD has a twofold aim: 1) to fill a research gap on the commons associated with local communities in the Cantabrian Mountains; and 2) on the basis of this scientific knowledge, to demonstrate that collective resources are sustainable and robust systems that should be taken into account when seeking to implement innovative policies and actions in the rural world. To this end, based on a thorough reflection of the main theoretical trends at the European level, and with a diachronic, community-based approach that takes into account all the spaces that make up this collectivity, this research aims to provide a complex understanding of the socio-ecological models of rural mountain communities, paying special attention to resilience but also to changes in the way in which both the collectivity and the commons are defined from the internal -micropolitical- and external -multi-scale- relationships. A historical-archaeological approach that, under the methodological framework of agricultural archaeology and the archaeology of inhabited villages, has been applied to two collective micro-spaces in the Cantabrian Mountains: Andrúas and Cueiru. Two grazing areas of collective use that have proved to be authentic archaeological palimpsests with long occupation sequences that show the centrality of the commons and grazing areas in the agroecological models from Prehistory to our days. Particularly significant are the data provided from the Late Middle Ages, where the consolidation of the livestock management forms of valley transhumance and long-haul transhumance associated with specific management models allow us to see the different pressures exerted by internal/external agents on the collective spaces associated with the boundaries and the local strategies developed for the defense and (re)communalisation of their territorialities.