Abstract EN:

Rereading the texts from the archaeology, allows us to go beyond the old historiographical speech about the "continuity" or the "rupture" in the settlement history in this period. In the cities/towns referring to main secondary urban agglomerations the development of these to bishoprics and christianization cause irreversible changes in their topography. The town late-antiquity evolves, transforming and adapting itself, far from the catastrophic visions and thesis of rupture. In the country, we observe from the fifth to the seventh century many internal transformations in the evolution of the rural roman population: a slow slope, but progressive, of the ancient rural settlement, their ways of organization and the occupation of the territory. From the end of the seventh century principally during the eight and the ninth century, internal and external factors were going to provoke: the breaking-off of the ancient population and the emerging of a scattered and marginal habit on the border of the roman rural landscape and in a crowded Douro "desert". The process of territorial reorganization "asturiano-leones" from the end of the ninth century will restructure the roman settlement from the ancient bishoprics and the new monasteries; and will cause the abandonment or the exclusion of other nucleus of settlement. In the fortified habitat the constant occupation of the high located places becomes noticeable: in the moment of the arrival and settlement of the suevi; and with the expansion of the "astur-leonesa" monarchy, with a double objective: appropriation of territories and the protection of the border of Douro and internal control of the territory in connection with the fragmentation of the characteristic power of the feudalism.