Neglected by chronicles and situated in the background of the political scene, Middle-Eastern Extremadura seems to have hardly been studied in the context of Al-Andalus from the 8th to the 13th century. Away from the big cities of the fertile plains of the Guadiana and the Guadalquivir where populations, attracted by the agriculture richness, gathered, this area remained out of the preoccupations of the successive centres of power. Representing an outlying zone, it was also both a crossing area and a border area, and the history of its populating had only just begun so far. If the textual sources -whether Christian or Muslim- reveal a hardly populated environment for this zone, the survey of new or already existing sites, together with the study of the material, led us to qualify the emptiness of the countryside and to redefine the role of the urban environment. Even if this work favours the data collected on the sites, the other sources have not been set aside. As a matter of fact, numismatic and epigraphy happened to be important elements in order to understand the fenomena linked to the cultural, ideological and economical changes. The chronological development highlights the adaptation of peasant communities faced with the dismantling of the system of exploitation from late Antiquity and the fenomenon of the fortification in the countryside, and leads us to wonder about the different political factors which could influence it. The description of the main spatial and diachronic tendencies of the system of organisation allows to understand whether they are different from the established models, particularly as far as the Eastern lands of the Peninsula are concerned.
