ABSTRACT
The socio-economic structure of the peasantry, based on the nuclear family as a unit of reproduction in farming communities and the ties of solidarity that developed amongst the members of those communities, determined its historical and universal survival.
The peasantry appeared when the primitive farmer opted for living a communal life. In the Celtiberian territory of the Serranía the conflicts that broke out around 2000 bce led to the appearance of the first hamlets with an economy based on the sedentary stock-raising of sheep, goats, cattle and swine and the cultivation of cereals and legumes, together with hunting deer, hares and rabbits and collecting acorns. It was the standard economy of the Celtiberian period.
Around 1100 bce a type of settlement referred to as a “village with a central space” appeared in the Ebro sedimentary basin, with houses of a similar size and similar grave goods that is the archaeological embodiment of an egalitarian social structure. The persistence of this model of fortified village at the height of the Celtiberian period reflects the survival of that social structure in a political environment in which the state already existed, with oppida that were producing their own coinage.
The Celtiberian epigraphic documentation reveals the extended family to be the basis of the peasantry’s egalitarian social structure. It developed an ethos that prevented the concentration of wealth and the emergence of a distinctive aristocracy. That, at least, is what their necropoleis suggest: They contain no luxurious burials or outstanding grave goods. And their small cities have no monumental buildings that would demonstrate the existence of a hierarchy that taxed the peasantry.
