Land Tenure and Resilience in Early Iron Age northern Denmark investigated using high-definition dating

The Early Iron Age in southern Scandinavia is often seen as a period of landscape degradation and unsustainable economic practices: Celtic fields expand and the open land with heath and grass pasture reaches a peak, sometimes with episodes of sand drift. However, past land tenure may have been more resilient than such conceptualisations imply. At Aalborg Barracks, northern Jutland, Denmark, an Early Iron Age landscape with Celtic fields, a fence, and contemporary farmsteads were uniquely well-preserved, having been sealed by aeolian drift sand in the 3 rd century BCE. The site provided a rare opportunity to investigate questions of land tenure resilience. During excavation, a palaeoecological sampling strategy, including pollen- and macrofossil analysis, was applied together with a new approach in coupled-dating methods combining optically stimulated luminescence profiling and dating, radiocarbon dates, and Bayesian age modelling. The results point to a landscape dominated by livestock grazing, with an extensive and highly diversified use pattern, based on rotation, fallowing, cultivation and prescribed burning, with indications of both in situ and applied manuring. We show that banks formed gradually c. 750-250 BCE and were part of a dynamic use pattern of often short-lived field plots with long periods of fallow. Our study suggests that Celtic fields in northern Jutland were rooted in a highly complex, specialised, dynamic and diversified landscape use. Agricultural practices may have contributed to local episodes of sand drifting, but overall, the land tenure regime of the Celtic field systems appears low intensity and resilient.