ABSTRACT
The Forestry Officer’s report of 1865, before the demesne Caporotondo was redistributed, describes it as an expanse of treeless uncultivated scrub: gorse and mastic, ideal - the officer said - for allotment to the proletariat. Holdings can become smaller without becoming more scattered. Where men exclude women from inheritance, for example, holdings may be progressively divided with each new generation, but they do not become more scattered. Thus Stirling describes a society in which land passes from a father to his sons, and the fields are a genealogical map of a patrilineal sort. The size of holdings is in part a function of the domestic cycle. In Caporotondo - which is typical of Pisticci as a whole - the number of properties increases by rather less than a quarter in about a hundred years; and the number of people with rights to land nearly doubles in the same years.
