Zaballa: The new discovered Thousand-Year-Old Vineyard

Zaballa (Iruña de Oca) was a medieval settlement abandoned in the fifteenth century. To build a manor cloister at the center of it undermined organizing the village in the tenth century with creating a rent-seeking system. It was later become a real factory, a specialized estate in the hands of local lords who, below protecting the economic boom in cities like Vitoria-Gasteiz, tried to get the most profits attainable. In the end, the "flight" of its settlers towards the cities caused it to be abandoned.

Today, it is archaeologists from the UPV/EHU-University of the Basque Country who are striving to rebuild and salvage our rural heritage by finding out deserted settlements like Zaballa.

Farming site at Zaballa.
The thousand year old vineyard
discovered in Alava, Spain
(Photo credit: UPV/EHU) 

Zaballa is one among the over three hundred deserted settlements glorious in Alava-Araba; they're rural areas abandoned in historical times however now being studied by the UPV/EHU's Cultural Heritage and Landscapes research group. Its director, Juan Antonio Quirós-Castillo, highlights the importance of Zaballa and Alavese sites. Normally, they're part of one among the most importance archaeological records of the medieval era throughout northern Iberia, and on a par with few sites in Europe. "The issue is not simply the number, but that within the decade that we have been working on this project. Extensive work has been done on nearly half a dozen of them, and work at other levels has been done on nearly a hundred,” Antonio Quirós-Castillo said.

A major site

Zaballa is also the primary deserted settlement in European country that has its own publication and could be a major site. The most recent discoveries made there are published in a special issue of the journal Quaternary International. Among the discoveries, the authors stress the terraced fields built in the tenth century -- still visible in the landscape -- devoted to the intensive cultivation of vines. "Archaeo-botanical studies of seed remains found in the excavations and pollen studies have provided material proof of the existence of vine cultivation in an early period just like the tenth century," explained Quirós. This proof is also supported by the metal tools discovered that had been destined for this use. And therefore the study of the agrarian spaces, "which owing to the nature of the crop spaces built and therefore the agrarian practices developed, they are not compatible with cereal crops however they are with vines," he added.

This publication covers the geoarchaeological work conducted at Zaballa and Zornotegi (Salvatierra). Another abandoned settlement in Alava that became deserted in the fifteenth century and where the terraced fields were devoted to cultivating cereals.

These discoveries are made possible with archaeological excavation protocols, and geoarchaeological sampling and analysis that are new in Spain. "It is not most about excavating a site, but about excavating landscapes," explained Quirós. In other words, it's about abandoning the traditional idea of the site, understood as a monumental or monumentalized place, to get to know the context within which these places are found. "In comparison with Zaballa, Zornoztegi incorporates a fully different history," he pointed out. "Even though it was based at more or less the same time, it is a much more egalitarian social community in which such important social variations don't seem to be observed, and nor is acting manorial powers which, in someway, undermined the balance of the community." In Quirós' view, these micro histories represent tiny windows into the past that allow one to analyze relatively complex historical processes directly, bottom upwards, "in other words, to ascertain how the peasant community itself gradually adapts to the political and economic changes that happen within the medieval era and later."

What is more, the analytical study of those places of production permits one to abandon those more traditional points of view of history that "conceptualize the high medieval periods as a time of technical simplification, as a meager period in economic terms, since they point to considerable social and economic complexity. Specifically, it's been possible in these studies to ascertain that there are numerous important moments in the Basque Country, fifth to sixth centuries and tenth to eleventh centuries that were decisive within the construction of our landscapes."

Consideration of archeological heritage

The study of abandoned settlements permit one to know not solely the village forming phenomena and the reasons why they were later abandoned, but more than anything, the transformation and degradation processes of the abandoned villages. that's why Quirós is calling for these places to be considered a part of archeological heritage: "The space for traditional crops, still simply recognizable in the landscapes closest to US, are historical spaces brimming with explanatory significance to assist US understand the societies of the past; indeed, they need attention which they have not had until now," he concluded. In fact, the farmland analyzed is gradually being destroyed year after year because of recent mechanized agricultural practices that have had and continue to have a considerable destructive effect on this "invisible" heritage.