Tina L. Thurston

The knowable, the doable and the undiscussed : Tradition, submission, and the 'becoming' of rural landscapes in Denmark's iron age

Farmers in Late Iron Age Denmark lived in centuries-old villages, within territories inhabited for milfennia. Long-held patterns of settlement, movement, economic interaction and socio-political structure characterized the cultural landscapes of these loosely integrated, heterarchical societies. During the transition to a state in the late Viking Age, many new settlements were established and rapid landscape change transformed older communities into highly controlled, newly regulated places.

Seeking a Richer Harvest

In current times, intensification is most often discussed in terms of feeding the world’s poor, counteracting globalization, or improving the balance of trade, issues earnestly debated by economists, geographers, development experts, and agricultural soil scientists, chemists, and the like (i.e. Bashaasha et al. 2001, Bebbington 1997, Byerlee et al., 1997, FitzSimmons 1986, Pingali 1989, Smith et al., 1994). When one speaks to current farmers, the voices are more immediate, if sometimes ambivalent (Bennett and Warrington 2003a). Some praise intensification and the coming of the “new” while others damn it, still others point out both successes and failures with the introduction of ‘scientific’ farming.

Infields, Outfields, and Broken Lands

Even before the advent of the well-known “prime mover” theories of the 20th century (i.e. Wittfogel 1957, Boserup 1965) fired the imaginations of contemporaneous archaeologists, scholars had long been asking questions about the connections between political power, agricultural intensification, and economics. While enthusiasm for these ideas has faded, there is still an active debate about the role of state governments in what archaeologists interpret as intensification attempts, and all the ramifications — social, political and economic — that may be inferred from them. Despite some earlier calls for a deeper look into the causes and consequences of intensification (i.e. Bender 1978), until the 1990s, a fairly simple line was usually drawn, connecting large agricultural “improvement projects” and the idea of top-down directives from authoritarian rulers. Even with a continuing accumulation of contradictory data, many researchers continued to assert that only those who could see from the top of a “pyramid” — both literally and figuratively — could have the perspective to organize and plan such complex undertakings. More recently, several authors have called this into question — while some cases surely illustrate the power of elites to demand or support increased production, in other cases, both labor and organization can be traced to farmers and farming communities, who turn out to be fairly capable of both creating and maintaining large, complicated systems of terracing, irrigation, land reclamation, and other laborious intensification schemes (Erickson 1993, Frederick, this volume, Lansing & Kremer 1993). This has led some researchers to replace the top-down assumption with a generalized skepticism about the extent of elite authority in organizing agricultural intensification.

Intensification, Innovation, and Change

The contributors to this volume have tackled fundamental archaeological issues that have long been taken for granted — subsistence intensification, innovation and change. As an underlying assumption in many ‘bread and butter’ problems in prehistory — domestication, social complexity, state formation — the theoretical importance of such processes cannot be understated. What the editors found striking, leading to the development of this volume, is how little attention these topics have actually received. Since the intense flurry of activity around Boserup’s initial publications many decades ago, only a handful of treatments, as noted in our introductory chapter, do more than superficially reiterate these now-questionable theories. Instead, these long-held but unsupported assumptions borrowed from other disciplines have served as paradigmatic ‘place holders’.