All We Are Is Dust in the Wind. The Social Causes of a “Subculture of Coping” in the Late Medieval Coversand Belt.

Abstract

Practically every pre-modern society experiences a sort of risk or natural hazard. Even in the moderate climate zone of Europe natural hazards such as floods, storm surges and sand drifts threatened entire societies and could eradicate occupation and exploitation in a region. Some societies, however, were able to withstand such hazards and reduce them to natural events, while others were unable to mitigate such shocks and suffered from the disaster that followed. The question therefore remains, why some societies were able to cope and create subcultures of coping, while others could not. By combining archaeological data, OSL studies and archival material I will advance that we have to alter the current paradigm that the Campine area was predominantly struck by disastrous sand drifts from the later Middle Ages onwards. We should focus on specific combinations of the distribution of power between smallholders and elites and the level of short-termism of the social interest groups to explain why the late medieval Campine area was able to design a subculture of coping to mitigate the effects of insidious sand drifts.