The Living Cadastres of Early Medieval Iberia

Objetivo

Modern states rest the control of their territories upon centralised, high-resolution information about land and people (cadastres, property registers, etc.). Virtually none of these existed in the early middle ages, and yet, this was the period when the land-based aristocracies and monarchies of later times emerged. How did lordly estates grow without detailed records of real property? At the time, the highest-resolution land records were the minds of the people that created and inhabited the local landscapes. They could locate precisely every plot and its boundaries, and name their owners. This information was part of a larger corpus of oral information that can be termed “Dense Local Knowledge” (DLK).
The core hypothesis of the LivCad project is that, in the early middle ages, DLK functioned as an indispensable interface between localities and their worlds beyond. Its main research goal is to investigate if and to what extent DLK was a resource that rulers and elites needed to access and manipulate in order to build their power locally.
However, DLK is informal and mostly oral, and thus, largely invisible to historians. How can a centuries-old, immaterial web of meanings become visible? While most dimensions of early medieval DLK are long lost, LivCad’s approach is to focus on people's knowledge of their local space. Fractions of this knowledge have survived in (a) the boundary clauses and the spatial divisions mentioned in land-transfer records; (b) the place-names by which people identify landscape features; and (c) the materiality of spatial divisions.
Taking north Iberia as a suitable laboratory, and building upon theoretical contributions from Geography, Sociology, and Anthropology, LivCad will combine the information from the region’s many surviving charters with the archaeological recognition of spatial divisions and the analysis of place names. In doing so, it will bring to the light an essential factor in the rise of medieval social complexity.

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