The socialist transformation of Romania has resulted in the cooperativization of village estates and the virtual eradication of private re? sources in land. Production has been nearly (but not entirely) removed from the traditional peasant household, and these same households have, in turn, joined the industrial labor pool, as well as the cooperative farm. These changes have occurred throughout Romania ? except in those areas where geography or other environ? mental conditions have prevented the rational application of modern agricultural technology. Notable among these are the villages of the Carpathian mountains, which have remained centers of private ownership and peasant agri? culture. But these areas too have been affected by the socialist transformation of production in the country at large, and, as we shall see, dis? play a wide range of adaptive responses to these changes. One such village is Paltin, situated about an hour and half from the city of Brasov, and only thirty minutes by bus from Poiana M?rului, the principal village of the comuna (commune) in which Paltin is located. The village of Paltin consists of little more than two small upland crests and one larger hill, from which the village takes its name. It was not, in fact, a village at all until the government, in the early 1960s, located a small elementary school and cooperative store at the mouth of the narrow valley which winds between Paltin hill and several other slopes. Nowhere in the general vicinity of Paltin do the Carpathian foot hills rise above the tree line, and all elevations lie between 500 and 1000 meters. Consequent? ly, the area is not marked by rapidly differentiat? ing ecozones or by alpine agro-pastoral land utilization strategies, such as those described by Cole and Wolf and Netting [1]. However, the nature of the narrow valleys, the er? ratic twisting rivulets which bisect them, the extreme angle of slopes, the poor soils, and the shaded hillsides have all contributed to the mixed subsistence strategy which characterized the area until after World War II. Rhoades and Thompson have described in detail the adaptive circumstances encountered by human settle? ment within the world's larger mountain systems, and which, at least in some respects, are shared by the Carpathian foothills at this location [2]. The ethnic composition of Pal tin is entirely Romanian, and appears to have been so (along with most upland villages in the vicinity) since the first agro-pastoral communities entered the area from Tara Birsei [3]. In Paltin there were no more than one or two ethnic Germans, associated administratively with the mining operations carried on prior to World War I.