El Páramo Leonés entre la Antigüedad y la Alta Edad Media

Resumo

This work offers new ideas on the transition process from the Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages and the origin of the feudal society in the north of the Iberian Peninsula. An area was selected where the written documentation could be proved with archeological research. Thus serious doubt is cast on the traditional theory of the "depopulation of the Duero Valley", the creation of a "strategic desert" and its repopulation by independent peasants. On the contrary, this region would have been a restricted wooded area belonging to the landlords of the Late Roman Villas located in the vicinity. With the breakdown of the power structures of Late Roman, peasants would have occupied and exploited these lands. Later, in the tenth century, according to written documents, these areas and farm were progressively taken over by the new aristocracy: monasteries, nobility and the royal family of the Astur-Leonese Kingdom. The supposed repopulation would therefore have actually been a feudal conquest of properties previously belonging to peasants.