Abstract

A cultural-ecological model of agrarian colonisation in upland Wales Colin Tbomas Over a period of more than seven centuries that may have been built upon them. Keeping in independent Wales experienced transformations mind that at any given time they represent but a of its environment, economy and society that single stage in a protracted sequence of subtle were so fundamental that their early medieval adaptive change, the precise nature of agricultural holdings will be a product of complex interactions characteristics appear to have been all but obliterated. The patterns of settlement distribution, between potential alternative soil, vegetation and socio-demographic structure, agricultural practice water resources and the immediate demands of and landscape ecology depicted in the Ordnance the community's economic demography, i.e. the Survey maps, estate surveys and accounts, tithe numbers of active and dependent population to maps and schedules, and population censuses of be sustained by local food production or wider the nineteenth century, however, all reveal trade, together with the quantity oflabour available fragments of former pictures that may be traced to uphold the total regional economy and its and enlarged upon in sixteenth-century documents, cultural-political superstructure. which in turn lead us back to evidence dating from the