How the rural world in Western Europe became modern? Who were the main agents of this change? Did these transformations had an impact on the local environment? This book explores the process of transformation of Western pre-industrial rural societies into industrialized ones through an archaeologically-driven analysis based on two villages in northwestern Iberia.

After a theoretical consideration of what is the process of modernity and how it can be approached, the book is organized chronologically, considering the transformations of the rural world in northwestern Iberia overtime from the 18th century to the COVID pandemic. Departing from a critic of the abstract and Eurocentric common approaches to modernity, this book seeks to build strong and thick narratives of the process of modernity as a historical process from a local point of view, benefitting from approaches such as microhistory and historical anthropology. Tackling the process of transformation of modern rural communities from an archaeological point of view, chapters are oriented by the analysis of different strands of material records and their changes over time, from specific materialities to archaeobotanical data and aerial photography. This book renders visible the deep roots of the transformation to industrialization that has characterized Western Europe ever since and sets forth some reflections and considerations for its future.

This book is intended for researchers in the fields of historical and contemporary archaeology as well as modernity studies, industrial archaeology and history and social history.