An Archaeological Approach to the brañas: summer farms in the pastures of the Cantabrian Mountains (northern Spain)

The pastures of the Cantabrian Mountains have constituted an important resource for the subsistence strategies of their inhabitants, from the Neolithic to the present day. Seasonal settlements in these upland areas –so-called brañas in the case study – were used by shepherds in relation with herding mobility. In this paper we reflect on present-day brañas in order to understand different types of herding settlements in the archaeological record according to different mobility systems or pastoralist strategies. This way, we hope to gain a better understanding on archaeological issues from summer farms. In fact, this kind of approach has been really useful to encourage the discussion around our on-going research on cultural landscapes of the Cantabrian Mountains from a long-term chronological perspective.