Agrarian Archeology in Northwestern Iberia. Local Societies: The Off-Site Record, ed. Juan Antonio Quirós Castillo. Historical Archeology Series. Summertown, Oxford: Archaeopress, 2023, 168 pages.

Abstract

Shards of pottery, ceramic or stoneware fragments of handmade kitchenware, pop up now and then in agricultural fields, far from the loci of their making and normal use. Archeologists, as a way of indicating that they have found these fragments detached from their supposed proper places, use the term “off-site.” The term has an odd, self-contradictory ring, similar to the concept of “non-places” coined by Marc Augé and later applied by Richard Hodges to archeological evidence of the economics and urbanization of medieval Europe. Why do pot shards appear off-site? A leading hypothesis is the “manure thesis,” by which the archeologist T. Spatium J. Wilkinson, the landscape historian Richard Jones, and others have supposed that peasants, carrying their own dung or that of their animals out to fields for deposit as a soil enhancer, inadvertently broke or otherwise discarded the carrying vessels. The present book, a collection of field reports and short analyses based on field studies, aims to augment the off-site record and to test the manure thesis. Results are interestingly complex.