Page 1 of 10 Transhumance to Farmstead: Landscape and the Medieval Resettlement of Dartmoor Kathryn Catlin Department of Anthropology Northwestern University Presented at the 47 th Annual Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology Quebec City, Canada Session SYM‐38: Foregrounding the Landscape in Archaeology Friday, January 10, 2014 Chair: Linda France Stine, University of North Carolina Greensboro , USA Discussant: Suzanne Spencer‐Wood, Oakland Abstract Dartmoor is an upland area of southwest England that has been used for centuries as transhumant pasture. During the 10th and 11th centuries, the moor was permanently resettled by peasants and tenant farmers. This paper explores how traditional explanations for this resettlement ‐ environmental change and population pressure ‐ are insufficient to understand the processes and consequences of medieval settlement. Peasants and manorial lords and overseers experienced the landscape in fundamentally different ways, and these experiences changed with the changing economic context of medieval England. Two very different medieval settlements, at Houndtor and Okehampton Park, show that the way medieval settlements were conceived and valued depended on their social and economic context. A historically situated, multiscalar approach to medieval Dartmoor shows how dimensions of social difference, including class and gender, were contested and negotiated on, within, and through the landscape. Introduction Dartmoor is an upland area of southwest England that has been used for centuries as transhumant pasture. The moor is an agriculturally marginal landscape. This means that it is difficult to grow arable crops on the land ‐ the soil is not as deep or as good as it is in other areas, and the climate not as