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The goal of this paper is to discuss the social and political role of early medieval high-status settlements in the framework of landscapes of power. The identification of elite residence is one of the major challenges of early medieval archaeology because there is a profound asymmetry between the relevance and the density of aristocracies in the written record and the elusive and problematic definition of high-status settlement in material terms. European comparative analysis has shown that relationship between social status and the morphology of domestic spaces is not straightforward. In this paper it is argued that a social practice approach, aimed at exploring what has been done rather than how they might look like, would provide new insights to the understanding of this topic. Considering some case studies of early medieval Castile it is suggested that legitimation practices deployed at local and supralocal scale have determined the nature and the role of elite residences. In addition, it is explored how aristocracy identity have shaped high-status sites and the limits of the normative definition of these sites.

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