**1. Introduction**

We focus in this article on contingency and agency in the "Long Anthropocene" in the Soule Valley of the western Pyrenees, where the Neolithic onset to agropastoral land use during the Middle Holocene marks an important transition in human-environment relations. Whereas the Anthropocene as a unique geological period concerns the sum total of human impacts on the whole earth as a complex system, the Long Anthropocene focuses on spatially heterogeneous shifts in localized human behaviors that ultimately lead to human dominance of the Earth System. An important shift in these localized behaviors is the domestication of plants and animals during the Neolithic and the concomitant transformation of landscapes. Significant effort among proponents of the Anthropocene has gone to identifying a "golden spike" in geophysical archives that would denote the punctuated on-set of human dominance of the earth as a whole, such as the abrupt transition to industrial forms of production, fossil fuels, and intensive global trade networks in the 18th century [1–3]. Long Anthropocene proponents have placed more attention on discovering the deep roots of human influence, progressively moving back through time in some instances into the Plio-Pleistocene, while giving attention to social in addition to geological dimensions of the relationship between humans

and the earth (e.g., [4–6]). Proponents of both approaches have at times formulated deterministic accounts that capture the imagination, and the polemics between them may stem from what is in fact a paradigm shift between environmental science and earth system science [7,8]. We view the approaches as necessary complements and take a Long Anthropocene position in this article to draw attention to the complex dynamics of human-environmental interaction across the temporal and spatial scales at which the relationship unfolds in the western Pyrenees.

The Soule Valley is not a specific locus of plant or animal domestication, ye<sup>t</sup> the localized deployment of agropastoral land use by Neolithic people has had long-term co-evolutionary consequences for both landscape and society. This paper presents a synthesis of our work in the Soule Valley that takes the long-term processes of human-landscape co-evolution as its main subject. The Neolithic transition in the Western Pyrenees is frequently termed a 'conquest' [9–14] and pastoral activities, including cutting, burning, and shepherding, are said to 'penetrate' the land so that the Neolithic is the first step on the orthogenetic path to becoming a global geological force [2]. This narrative of prehistoric land conversion (i.e., "anthropization" in the Pyrenean literature) is closely associated with the presumed inevitability of the degradation of nature brought about by the interaction of humans and environment [15]. By contrast, cross-disciplinary findings presented in this paper indicate that landscape "domestication" in the Soule Valley was not a unidirectional, imperious transformation of mountain landscapes, but an asynchronous, complex, multiscale process associated with individuals as operational change agents. These results are illustrative for research on the Long Anthropocene because they show how a place-based, cross-disciplinary approach can more accurately capture complex dynamics surrounding issues of socioecological sustainability.

Simplistic assumptions about the past trajectories and sustainability of mountain landscapes are not unique to disciplines such as palynology and archaeology. Historians in France have traditionally ignored mountain areas because " ... above 1000 m, there is no history" [16]. When mountains have been recognized they are examined indirectly from observations on the plains that surround them [17], resulting in a "quasi-immobile history" [18]. As a consequence, European mountain landscapes and their human inhabitants are perceived as spatially, politically, and economically marginal, which is a conclusion seemingly confirmed by the progressive abandonment of mountain landscapes and the pastoral lifestyle in the 20th century. Whether abandonment is due to marginality or ever-more specialized land-use policies and regulations (e.g., classifying the millennial practice of pastoral fire as irresponsible land stewardship) remains an open question [19–22]. We argue that speculation of a di fferent kind simply substitutes for understanding of discrete vs. continuous components of a pastoral lifestyle and the nature of human-environment interactions across time.

Pastoralism is a production strategy in which sheep consume grass and transform it with the assistance of a herder into diverse commodities, while enmeshed in a complex interaction between broad-scale drivers, local resources, institutions, and individual agency [23–25]. This means that people, place, and history are inextricably linked, while land-use change unfolds as a multi-stranded process of intensification and dis-intensification related to generation-by-generation means and variance in individual reproductive success [26]. Any given household pedigree that holds, transfers, or abandons a portfolio of land parcels is but one realization or historical sample from the full constellation of pathways expressed in a particular population. While convenient to assume equilibrium between reproductive success and migration or between death and survival, to do so obscures the lived reality of agropastoralism that must be apprehended in order to explain how and why change happens.

Our overarching hypothesis is that anthropogenic land transformation in the Long Anthropocene was predominantly a long-term, spatially heterogeneous press dynamic [27] resulting in the sustainable coevolution of land use, socioeconomic intensification, and landscape change, rather than an intentional, uniform wave of agropastoral land conversion. Numerous studies now confirm that European mountain landscapes are the result of climatic and anthropic pressures exerted and interrelated in a variable manner over the course of the Holocene [28–32]. This means that factors of change cannot be separated from factors of location, duration, and intensity [33]. Cultural landscapes such as those in the Soule

### *Sustainability* **2020**, *12*, 3882

Valley provide a rare opportunity to examine the origin of structural legacies (long-cycle) and signal processes (short-cycle) that link the past to the present in the anthropogenic transformation of mountain landscapes. We do so by examining the boundaries, scale, and flow in the response diversity of human agents operating under the changing circumstances within a complex adaptive system.

### *Geographic and Cultural Context of the Western Pyrenees*

Our research is centered on the commune of Larrau in the Soule Valley in France (Xiberoa, in Basque). However, the contingency and agency characteristic of agropastoralism has required us to place Larrau within the Soule Valley and the larger Basque region (Euskal Herria) in the western Pyrenees spanning the French-Spanish border. Soule is the smallest of the seven Basque Provinces, and is centered on the Saison River in the French department of Pyrénées-Atlantiques that borders the autonomous community of Navarra in Spain. Despite the modern border between France and Spain, archival research gives evidence that individuals and institutions from both the north and the south slope of the Pyrenees have used its high elevation pastures since at least the High Middle Ages. Indeed, high elevation pastures at the head of the Soule Valley are still used by members of communities outside of Soule, notably Barétous to the east in France and Roncal to the south in Spain (Figure 1).

**Figure 1.** Location of Larrau (1) and the Soule Valley (2) relative to Euskal Herria and biogeographic areas in the western Pyrenees on the border between France and Spain.

At the European scale, the Pyrenees Mountains form a continuous barrier to atmospheric circulation [34,35], resulting in strong west-to-east and north-to-south gradients in climate, environment, and human use (See Supplementary S1, Figure S1.1, in Supplementary Files). The western Pyrenees receives significant precipitation (circa (ca.) 1500 mm/y) under the influence of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and the humid air masses of the north/northwesterly winds. The eastern Pyrenees, by comparison, are much drier (ca. 500 mm/y) and under the influence of a Mediterranean-like climate in which moisture is negatively correlated to the NAO [36,37]. The northward draining watersheds ("north slope") in France are wetter than the southward draining watersheds ("south slope") in Spain. The latter borders the Ebro River basin subject to a Mediterranean climate under a strong continental influence with hot summers and cold, dry winters (ca. 300 mm/y) [38]. Consequently, Soule Valley exists at the convergence between the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Alpine bioclimatic regions and abuts the political border between France and Spain.

Soule as a community is also part of Euskal Herria, where Euskera (Basque), the last non-Indo-European language in Europe, is still spoken as the first language by some 1,300,000 individuals [39]. Archaeological sites from the terminal Pleistocene through the early Holocene within Euskal Herria (Supplementary S1, Figure S1.2) speak to the debated origin of the Basque that are commonly said to have lived in the area bounded by the Adour and Ebro rivers since 'time immemorial'. Mounting evidence indicates that Euskera is linguistically related to Caucasian languages [40–42], suggesting that inhabitants of Iberia and Aquitania adopted the language from the carriers of the 'Neolithic package' as they moved up the Ebro Valley. Genome-level evidence suggests that the Basque are close to other Europeans, and even though they display unique Y-DNA and mtDNA lineages, their continuity as a biological population is only detectable back to the Neolithic/Chalcolithic period [43–46]. The most comprehensive human genetic study for the Franco-Cantabrian region to date [43] identified six unique mtDNA haplogroups autochthonous to the region and estimated that the separation of the Basque-speaking populations from the pan-European gene pool took place ca. 8000 calibrated years before the present (cal BP). The results further sugges<sup>t</sup> a female genetic contribution distinct from other European areas. The implication is that the 'Neolithic package' does not indicate demic replacement as some advocate [47], but rather an extended coexistence of Epipaleolithic and Neolithic populations [48,49].

Despite the linguistic and genetic implications of occupational continuity, there are currently no known archaeological sites in the Soule Valley between ca. 14,700 cal BP and 9700 cal BP. However, it seems likely that hunter-gatherer populations residing in the low- and mid-elevation zones of the upper Ebro Basin used the uplands intermittently depending on weather conditions. Agropastoralism in the western Pyrenees and its continuation into the Cantabrian Range dates to the initial Neolithic expansion around the Mediterranean Basin ca. 7500 cal BP [50–53]. We examine the local socioecological dynamics of the Neolithic expansion and the Long Anthropocene in the headwaters of the Soule Valley in the administrative territory of the commune of Larrau.

### **2. Materials and Methods**

### *2.1. Soule Valley and Larrau*

Over the course of the last decade (2009–2019), we conducted interdisciplinary fieldwork in the communal territory of Larrau, in the Department of the Pyrénées-Atlantiques, France. Larrau has a surface area of 12,680 ha and contains most of the high-elevation pasture used by the 47 communes that presently comprise Soule as a territorial community. Elevations in the commune of Larrau range from 300 to 2000 m above sea level (asl), which is characterized by a cool and humid climate with an average precipitation of 1600 mm/y and average daytime temperature between 1.4 ◦C (winter) and 13.3 ◦C (summer) (data available, Météo-France). Land use in the lower elevations corresponds with private household farmsteads, that can either be consolidated or scattered landholdings, depending on the household. Forests below 800 m asl are dominated by oak, which transitions to beech and fir (*Abies* sp.) between 800 and 1300 m asl. These are predominantly communal woodlands with scattered private "inholdings" representing the upper limit of the privately owned hay meadows. Alpine and subalpine grasslands and heaths with patches of mixed pines dominate elevations above 1300 m asl. These high-elevation grasslands form the bulwark of the communal summer pastures accessed by herders from throughout the Soule Valley.

Landscape within the Soule Valley can be divided into a hierarchical set of socially and ecologically significant spatial units: valley, commune (a village and its territory), quartier (a topographically defined neighborhood), etxe (a household-level farm production unit), parcel (a spatially circumscribed, discrete unit of land use), a borde (an independent cluster of parcels surrounding a barn, often located in the mid-mountain within or between communal and private lands), and a cayolar (collectively owned pastoral inholdings within communal lands) (Figure 2). A valley is comprised of many communes, a commune is comprised of several quartier, a quartier consists of a number of etxe households, and the landholdings of an etxe consist of topographically arranged parcels that provide the unit with diverse resources across the annual production cycle. Pastoralists are often seen as having a separate, peripheral, and marginal existence vis-à-vis sedentary farmers [25]. In the case of the western Pyrenees Mountains this view translates into a perception of the Basque as spatially, politically, and economically marginal since at least Antiquity by comparison to surrounding areas. This view is closely associated with the 'valley republic' phenomenon common across the Pyrenees among Aragonese, Basque, Béarnaise, and Gascogne groups (e.g., [54,55]), of which there are approximately 15 among the Basque in the Western Pyrenees. Briefly summarized, these are ethnic enclaves organized by their dependence on agropastoralism and frequently described as systems in existence since time immemorial.

**Figure 2.** Cartographic depiction of the hierarchical spatial units of the landscape, ( **A**) the commune of Larrau, (**B**) a quartier within Larrau, ( **C**) an etxe and its parcels, ( **D**) a borde and its parcels (an annex portion of an etxe's landholdings), (**E**) a cayolar inholding.

There are two types of land in Soule and the Basque region of France and Spain generally [56–58]: (a) parish-community lands belonging to the individual inhabitants of a village "since time immemorial", and (b) common lands belonging collectively to all parish-community residents in a defined region. In Soule, parish-communities re-defined as communes in the Napoleonic Cadaster of 1830 have been stable since at least AD 1377 based on the first tax-census of the valley [59], and at least five parish-communities have existed since the 11th century [58,60]. This division of the land and its associated administrative and economic autonomy includes diverse aspects of livestock managemen<sup>t</sup> and provides the holders vis-à-vis a central authority with various rights recognized in customary documents called coutume (French) or fuero (Spanish).

The oldest surviving examples of such documents in the French Pyrenees, e.g., Coutume de Soule, date to the early 16th century [58]. In the Spanish Pyrenees, the Fuero de Jaca is the oldest such document, dated AD 1077, and elements from it were incorporated into a regional managemen<sup>t</sup> document called the Ordenanza de Pastos, dated AD 1457 [61,62]. Coutume and fuero in the Basque region are anchored in an oral customary tradition termed the Derecho Pirenaico that circumstantial evidence suggests either draws from and/or is influenced by older legal frameworks from the 6th–8th century, if not 1st century Roman code from Gallia Aquitania. The groups of parish-communities who invoke a particular coutume or fuero are historically and colloquially referred to, even at present, as a "country", "republic", or "valley", e.g., Soule. This is a tacit recognition of the shared history, language, culture, and geography that gives identity to parish-communities and residents of a valley. Parish-communities are important at a certain scale, but historical and ethnographic evidence identify the etxe household as the principal locus of production and decision-making [26,63,64].

### *2.2. Research Design and Synthetic Framework*

The overarching goal of our research on the Long Anthropocene in the commune of Larrau and the Soule Valley was to integrate diverse place-based observations to understand the co-evolution of pastoralism and landscapes scaled to the decision-making units responsible for activities on the land. Larrau provided us with a unique opportunity to assemble a long-time series on diverse dimensions of mountain pastoralism. Our approach combined multiple methods and data sources, including qualitative and quantitative analyses of historical archives, geospatial mapping and modeling, ethnographic participant observation and interviews with livestock raisers concerning historic and contemporary grazing and burning practices, archaeological survey and excavation of high-elevation pastures, dendrochronology of forest-meadow edges and ancient coppice woodlands, and paleoecological investigations of sedimentary archives. We used our findings to generate highly resolved chronostratigraphic sedimentary profiles for change in discrete landscape units for the entire Holocene (past 11,700 years), that we related through geospatial analysis to grassland pasture flammability, parcel use, and household abandonment. Since our purpose in this paper is to provide a synthesis of our various analyses, we provide only a summary of our methods below. For full methodological and analytical details, please see our various publications [26,65–70].

Humans have unparalleled behavioral plasticity and occupy many habitats that ecologists and development experts would term "marginal", even if a precise definition of marginality is rarely provided (e.g., [71,72]). Being marginal does not mean an area is uninhabitable or uninhabited, it implies that human culture and technology are unable to buffer against environmental or sociopolitical stressors [73]. In the case of mountains, such a determination cannot be made either by assuming there is no history above 1000 m asl or by inference from the more easily accessible plains that surround them. It requires us to examine system behavior itself and arrive at an understanding of the thresholds, alternative steady states, adaptation, contingency, and feedback that allow and determine the nature of the human relation to the environmental setting in which it is expressed [74–78].

Response diversity or how individuals differentially respond to their changing circumstances is an important component of the central tendency of any described behavior [79]. It is anchored in human agency, that nominally includes intentional, self-aware choice [80,81]. The existence of choice

does not imply that human agents are aware of the reasons for their choices, or that they think in terms of costs and benefits regarding fitness or other such measures. Yet, people do make choices expressed in their agency that consider their circumstances and their preferences, and which derive from a developmental process inclusive of inheritance and learning. The weight of pastoral activities expressed in the geoarchaeological record is concentrated on places—a cabin, a corral, etc. However, these places are mere gateways distributed across a pastoral landscape to the exploitation of grass, the key, and almost invariably common resource that is exploited by livestock with the assistance of herders [82]. The implication of this characterization of mountain pastoralism is that to understand the system we must reflect on the boundaries, scale, and flow of the response diversity of the human agents operating within it, while addressing how response diversity can promote stability without resorting to a claim for exceptionalism:


### *2.3. Examining Forest to Pasture Conversion*

In the absence of agropastoral land use and management, subalpine forest should cover all but the exposed rockfaces of the highest and steepest peaks in Larrau. Today, very little of the landscape above 1200 m asl is forested (Figure 3). Forest to pasture conversion is the fundamental process for domesticating landscapes in agropastoral systems and fire is the primary tool [65,66]. To examine forest-pasture conversion as a socioecological process in Larrau, we combined archaeologically derived chronologies of agropastoral occupation and colluvial stratigraphic archives of "legacy" sediments from zero-order hollows at locations along the top of the Pyrenean divide. We auger-sampled continuous profiles of colluvial slopewash sediments eroded from zero-order watersheds in 5–10 cm contiguous intervals. We used a multiproxy approach to analyze these sediments, examining charcoal, magnetic susceptibility, sedimentation rates, and phytoliths to characterize the differential onset of anthropogenic burning and forest-pasture transition across individual catchments [69,70,83].

We complemented each colluvial sample with systematic pedestrian archaeological survey of the surrounding catchments. We also conducted ground-penetrating radar surveys at and adjacent to 11 of the archaeological sites we located and followed this with subsurface auger testing [67]. For seven archaeological sites located beneath or adjacent to our zero-order colluvial catchments, we auger-sampled stratigraphic profiles at 5 cm contiguous increments and collected archaeologically-deposited wood charcoal for radiocarbon dating. Additionally, French colleagues conducted excavations of two sites a short distance (<10 and <100 m, respectively) from two colluvial sample sites [68]. Charcoal from these excavations were radiocarbon dated as well.

**Figure 3.** Typical upland pastures in Larrau showing treeline around 1200 m asl.

### *2.4. Analysis of Land Use Transition and Persistence*

Regional studies sugges<sup>t</sup> landscape transitions are primarily driven by "exogenous innovations that originate outside the boundaries of the local system" [84]. However, this approach necessitates that the motivations, decisions, and actions of individual land managers are derived from inferences about the group to which individuals belong, rather than the action of individuals themselves.

In Basque society, etxe households are social and economic reproduction units resulting in the demographic conditions that make the spatially- and historically-contingent economic decisions responsible for local patterns of land use change [85–89]. The etxe is more than just a smallholder family farm. It constitutes a spatially fixed property conceptually independent from a family. This means that normatively, an etxe can be abandoned while the family continues, or a family bloodline can die out while the etxe continues to bring in a new inheritor [63]. Etxe inheritance norms include ambilineal primogeniture and impartibility of the estate of land and buildings [26,90], i.e., the eldest male or female child inherits the entire estate and the right to form a family. The inheritor's younger siblings stay on as productive ye<sup>t</sup> celibate members of the etxe household, who are beholden to the decisions of the inheritor [63]. Documents from the private archives of etxe in Larrau sugges<sup>t</sup> that a least some of them were established prior to the 16th century.

We developed a geodatabase of fiscal land records from 1830 to the present that covers the entire commune of Larrau. We additionally compiled archival records from household and regional repositories that date back to ca. A.D. 1000 and provide information ranging in scale from the etxe household to the valley level. For one quartier in Larrau, we conducted field- and cadastral-based reconstructions of etxe and parcel-level infrastructure and land use from 1830 to the present. To confirm historical parcel boundaries for the quartier we matched the 1830 cadastral maps with current and historical air photos and conducted pedestrian surveys of parcels, hedgerows, and trails that access them. We additionally conducted a dendrochronological sampling program in the woodlands and hedgerows between communal lands and etxe private parcel holdings of the quartier. Using communal birth records from 1790 to 1950, we reconstructed household-level demographic histories and linked these to our geodatabase of etxe abandonment and parcel-level land use change in the same quartier. Using event-history analysis [26], we examined how agropastoral-focused etxe move at any point in time among a finite and theoretically meaningful number of states (e.g., 'occupied', 'abandoned') and

how parcels flow in and out of dynamically-scaled etxe in response to time-constant or time-dependent factors [91,92].

Above the etxe landholdings (>800 m asl), are lands held in common by the members of a valley republic [93] and used by etxe as summer (May–September) pasture for their livestock [94,95]. Within these communal lands are small, collectively owned inholdings that typically contain a cabin and milking grounds, that together form a traditional grazing cooperative known as an olha (Basque) or cayolar (French) [94]. Ott [94] and others [56–58] have described in detail the historical and legal precedents of the cayolar institution, the roles and responsibilities of herders, and the economic and social imperatives of participation.

While extensive archaeological survey of Larrau's high elevation pastures allowed us to confirm the spatial and functional accuracy of cayolar infrastructure depicted within the 1830 cadastral maps, it did not provide adequate information on the social interactions that define the institution and link resources to etxe households. Thus, our analysis of pasture land use drew on an addendum to the 1830 cadaster that lists indivisible inholdings in Larrau's communal pastures that correspond with cayolars. The addendum notes herder names, the number of shares they hold in the cayolar, and their village of origin. We additionally relied on household archives, agricultural census data, and household-level tax and subsidy records from the 1970s onward to understand more recent land uses changes. To relate our understanding of the socioeconomic aspects of the pasture land use to the question of socioecological sustainability, we reviewed evidence of landscape resilience toward grazing and burning. These included: (1) visual and analytical characterization of soil horizons from excavated soil pits in paired forest-pasture sites at similar landscape positions [60], and (2) ethnographically informed Bayesian models that backcast the relationships between landscape topography, pastoral fire use, and land use change [65,66].
