The colonisation of rainfed land in al-Andalus: an unknown aspect of the eleventh-century economic expansion

Abstract

Since the 1980s, there have been significant advancements in the study of the development of rural Andalusi settlement linked to irrigated agriculture, both in relation to large suburban green belts and to the small hydraulic systems of rural communities in mountainous regions. However, recent investigations in several dry areas and, in particular, the intensive archaeological survey that we have been carrying out in the eastern sector of La Mancha, reveal a densely populated rural region that responds to a hitherto unknown pattern. It consists of small villages on the plain, devoid of community defence elements and inhabited by peasants who made the best of the only existing natural resources that have traditionally oriented the region's economy towards cattle ranching and rainfed agriculture. Most of the villages seem to have developed from the beginning of the eleventh century, disappearing at the end of the same century due to the increase in insecurity after the Christian conquest of Toledo in 1085. Their existence would be associated with a general context of population growth that intensified the competition between urban elites and peasants for the privileged agricultural areas and, as a result, the colonisation of less favourable production areas.