The knowable, the doable and the undiscussed: Tradition, submission, and the 'becoming' of rural landscapes in Denmark's Iron Age

Farmers in Late Iron Age Denmark lived in centuries-old villages, within territories inhabited for millennia. Long-held patterns of settlement, movement, economic interaction and socio-political structure characterized the cultural landscapes of these loosely integrated, heterarchical societies. During the transition to a state in the late Viking Age, many new settlements were established and rapid landscape change transformed older communities into highly controlled, newly regulated places. Such episodes have routinely been dismissed as the result of natural population increases. Examination of cultural landscape change, in conjunction junction with changes in space-time geography, as developed by behavioural geographers, indicate radical shifts in the daily paths and projects of agricultural producers, caused not by population pressure, but directly related to the state's efforts at centralization through the deconstruction and subsequent rebuilding of the cultural landscape.