The potential economy in Iron Age settlements. Los Montes de León (north-western Spain) as Case Study La economía potencial en los asentamientos de la Edad del Hierro. Los Montes de León (noroeste de España) como caso de estudio Óscar Rodríguez-Monterrubio1 Abstract This paper focuses on Site Catchment Analysis (SCA) to calculate the Iron Age potential economic efficiency in Los Montes de León (north-western Spain). In Los Montes de León, there are 498 settlements inventoried as Iron Age hillforts. Reconstruct the economic system of such a large number of sites is overly complicated when only 4% of excavated archaeological sites. When we study a human group’s economy, we usually find studies focusing on specific activities performed in one particular inhabited settlement. However, to understand how the whole community spread over their nearby territories, we would need to collect information from other contemporary places, sites that had not been excavated but surveyed or merely described, inventoried, and located. It exists an unjustified inductive jump from the conclusions obtained in the excavation of individual sites to define how a large community inhabited the territory and exploited its resources. In this study, we propose a procedure to minimise the existing gap between a site’s economy and its environment, providing economic efficiency values that are highly potential due to the lack of proven information and helpful in creating theoretical settlement models. This analysis instrument complements what is objectively defined in excavation to reconstruct a potential economic system where a site’s economy could fit in. To apply Landscape Archaeology to know more about the available resources and their placement from the inhabited settlements. The result of combining territory and resources yields a value that we have called the Potential Economic Efficiency Index (PEEI), which is a numerical simplification whose calculation will form part of this paper. PEEI obtains information from the landscape facts available without making excavations, allowing us to balance the level of data from hillforts whether they were excavated or not. As well as understanding the potential economy of territory, this resulted index could help to complete the already known information in excavated sites, compare and classify settlements, and contrast with the historical records. Keywords: Iron age, Landscape archaeology, Resources, Economy, Hillforts. Resumen Este trabajo se basa en el análisis de las áreas de captación (SCA) para el cálculo de la eficacia económica potencial de los asentamientos de la Edad Del Hierro en Los Montes de León (noroeste de España). En Los Montes de León, hay 498 asentamientos inventariados como castros de la Edad de Hierro, reconstruir el sistema económico de tantos asentamientos es altamente complicado cuando sólo un 4% de ellos han sido excavados. Cuando se reconstruye la economía de un grupo humano, normalmente encontramos estudios centrados en actividades específicas realizadas en un asentamiento específico, sin embargo, para entender cómo toda la comunidad ocupó el territorio, tendríamos que recopilar información de otros poblados contemporáneos, los cuáles no han sido excavados, sino prospectados o simplemente descritos, inventariados y localizados. Existe un salto inductivo injustificado cuando se pasa de las 1
PhD. UNED, Scientific team of ZamoraProtohistórica. orodmon@gmail.com 59
