Bioarchaeological results from the house 1 at Albalat (Romangordo, Extremadura, Spain): Agriculture, livestock and environment at the Margin of al-Andalus

The multidisciplinary Albalat Project launched in 2009 aims to document a small fortified Islamic establishment, mentioned by textual sources as early as the second half of the 10th century. The site of Albalat became a strategic target for Christian troops due to its location, leading to its siege and systematic destruction in 1142. Its exceptional condition of complete abandonment offers a valuable record of daily life in the Almoravid era. The material culture of this period is, so far, poorly known. In the site, >House 1> was the first to have been excavated. The collapse of the house allowed the in situ conservation of an abundance of material as well as the preservation of numerous bioarchaeological remains. Some of the architectural characteristics as well as the quality of the archaeological material led us to think that its inhabitants might have had a notable status. For this reason, we decided to synthesize all zooarchaeological and archaeobotanical (charcoal fragments and seeds) data available for this part of the site, in order to document the lifestyle of the inhabitants, and to investigate the resources they consumed as well as the types of environments exploited to produce these resources. Based on the bioarchaeological results, it appears the inhabitants of House 1 had access to a wide diversity of resources from the different environmental contexts probably available near the site (open fields, forest, riverbanks and the river itself). Though diverse, the species encountered in House 1 do not reveal a special or higher status of its inhabitants and are, on the contrary, common in the medieval Muslim settlements of the peninsula.