[204] Over the habitable world there have been repeated migrations. With negligible exceptions, even the most undesirable regions have had repeated contacts with outsiders and have experienced changes brought about by the transfer of culture entailed in such movements of peoples. As both sedentary and migrating groups of farmers are tenacious of their culture traits, usually there is not an elimination of those of either (unless one population is obliterated as were many tribes of American Indians), but only a partial elimination and an amalgamation of the residues.

The process of amalgamation is ordinarily not difficult, for migrating farming groups do not bring entirely different attitudes to the areas of their choice. As they do not wander aimlessly and choose casually, but rather select areas to their taste, the ideas and techniques that they bring with them are fitting to the situation. Unless forced, such migrants choose regions that are environmentally satisfactory to their knowledge, equipment, and techniques. Thus one might expect that cultivated areas would exhibit few radical changes in the fundamental [206] forms of land use throughout their historical development, and that their inhabitants would likewise show few radical differences in attitudes toward the exploitation of the land from those people who preceded them. This conclusion seems to be borne out in Iberia.
 

The relative importance of Iberian areas seems to have changed but little through all of the time of their development. Through history and the periods of time illuminated for us by archaeology, the peripheries have been prized and the interior has been an area of little appeal, except for the centuries of Visigothic control. These Romanized herders preferred the grazing lands of the bleak meseta to the productive agricultural lands of the fringes. On the peripheries the Mediterranean coasts have been consistently underlined, since the first Neolithic farmers arrived there, as the premium area of all of the peninsula. The area of the northern mountains, while not so heralded as the Mediterranean zone, has supported a relatively dense population throughout all time for which there is information. The Romans found large numbers of people who had been long rooted there, and even the recent industrialization of parts of this zone, which has made dramatic social and economic changes, has not brought about an important shift in the balance of population of the peninsula. The west coast has consistently had less appeal for migrants -- perhaps because it lies farther from the source of immigration -- but the population density has been surprisingly high, at least in the northwest, since the late Neolithic period.

On the other hand, the historical zones of disinterest remain unattractive for habitation. The meseta has always been an area of sparse settlement, an area of the import of ideas and technical improvements from the peripheries, where contact with other cultures has begotten political and military ferment but hardly cultural originality. Even the reconquest, although [208] chiefly the achievement of meseta kingdoms, was given its first impulse in the northern periphery by men of the north or possibly the northwest; ⁽¹⁾ it was aimed at the profit to be had from the southern peripheries. It has been, and is, an area of strong local cultural character, not because of its own ferment, but because it is an area in which the contrasting ideas of disparate peripheries can be blended. Aside from simple geography, this fact is the basis of its political importance.

Whatever knowledge we have of the historical and prehistorical backgrounds of the peninsula indicates that changes have been "more of the same." Migrations and cultural introductions have come from comparable environments, and the areas chosen by immigrants have been elected in terms of environmental preference. Changes have been mostly of degree, not of kind. The developments of culture and techniques have increased earlier capacities of the areas involved, but have not changed their relative importance. Humid Iberia has been dominantly Central European in the basis of its culture for as far back as we have knowledge. This equates with the facts of climate, soils, and vegetation, which are closely similar to those of Central and northern Europe. The same can be said for the south. The Iberian Mediterranean bears the same relation to the eastern Mediterranean in its physical nature and in its cultural development.

The population pattern of the present is approximately that of all earlier time, insofar as we know it, with unimportant exceptions. For example, during the "desolation" of Alfonso I and the succeeding centuries, in parts of the meseta the population was reduced. This change, however, merely accentuated the normal condition, sparsity in the meseta as opposed to the well-populated peripheries. Today the areas of slowest increase in population are meseta provinces, which have a history of the lowest population densities of the peninsula. ⁽²⁾ Even Madrid [210]does not bring about an exception to the general historical situation. Its growth, comparable to the recent world-wide urban growth and the growth of political capitals, has been great. If the figures for the present city are added to those of the meseta, the relation between meseta and periphery is somewhat altered, but insufficiently to shift the balance. The areas of greatest increase are the historical and prehistorical zones of attraction along the fringes.

The same conclusion may be bolstered more specifically in the case of Portugal. For example, the interest of the Mediterraneans became attenuated with the decrease northward of the summer dry period. The Carthaginians limited their activities almost entirely to the south and southwest coasts. The Greeks may have traded with the north, but the last of the Greek -oussa names toward the north was that near Lisbon, at the beginning of the transition from Mediterranean to north European climate. The Mediterranean Romans showed an avid interest in Galicia at the outset, ⁽³⁾ but after the gold sands were worked out they paid scant attention to any of the north except for purposes of strategic control. The same lack of interest was true of the Visigoths, and the Moslem distaste for the rainy lands was obvious. They could not have been evicted so quickly had they wanted to hold the north.

On the contrary, the Central Europeans made their strongest mark in the north country that was similar to their homeland in Central Europe. Not only did they like it but they needed the forests for their animals, ⁽⁴⁾ whereas the Mediterraneans, with their more casual interest in the care of animals, had no such point of view. This forestland exploitation was a feature of the life of the pre-Indo-European immigrants as well as that of the Celts and of the Swabians.

The middle region of Portugal, between the Tejo and Douro [211] rivers, is transitional geomorphologically, in climate, soils, and Vegetation. Culturally it shows a mixture of traits, derived from the north on the one hand and from the south on the other. This is clearly indicated in the maps taken from Lautensach's study of Arabic and Germanic topographic names. ⁽⁵⁾

A review of the history of land-use in the peninsula indicates a considerable conservatism for all major areas.

1. See above, Chap. 11.

2. Luis de Hoyos Sáinz, La Densidad de población y el acrecentamiento en España, pp. 178-179.

3. Juan Maluquer de Motes. "Los Pueblos de la España céltica," Historia de España, Tomo I, Vol. III, Pt. 1, 9, 79.

4. Grahame Clarke, "Farmers and Forests in Neolithic Europe," Antiquity. XIX, No. 74 (June, 1945), 67, 70.

5. Hermann Lautensach, "Uber die topographischen Namert arabischen Ursprungs in Spanien und Portugal," Die Erde, Nos. 3-4 (March-April, 1954), pp. 219-243.