The beginning of the Neolithic in the Po Plain (northern Italy): Problems and perspectives
Introduction
According to the opinion of non-native scholars, much of the work published by the Italian archaeologists on the Neolithic of Italy during the last decades “can often be characterized in terms of an obsession with typometric description of ceramic and lithic artefact attributes and their stylistic affinities” (Skeates, 2014: 1) and that Italian prehistory is “still married to an exclusively chrono-typological model” (Pearce, 2014: 157).
Furthermore, as remarked by foreign colleagues (Pearce, 2013: 11) a further difficulty is that much important archaeological literature about Italian prehistory is published in Italian and in local editions that have little circulation even in Italy and none at all abroad.
Bearing in mind the above premises the scope of this paper is an attempt to update our knowledge on the Early Neolithic period in the Po Plain of northern Italy in a wider perspective. The paper focuses mainly on the discussion of the data retrieved from radiocarbon dated sites that started to be discovered already just after the middle of the 19th century (Chierici, 1875a, Chierici, 1875b, Chierici, 1877). Its aim is to provide the international audience with an updated view of the topic, based on a series of new, unpublished radiocarbon dates, discussing the previously available results, in order to frame the earliest producing communities of the Po Valley into the more general picture of the Neolithization of Italy. As a consequence, the present paper does not deal exclusively with material culture remains. In contrast, it takes into consideration subsistence economy, environmental resources, data gathered from archaeometric analyses and technology.
Section snippets
The present and the past landscape: environment and resources
The Po Valley is one of the major landscape physiographic units of Italy. It extends approximately 650 km in an east-west direction, running from the Western Alpine arc, where the Po River, the longest watercourse of the Peninsula, originates, down to the Adriatic Sea (Fig. 1). It covers an area of ca. 46,000 square kilometers including its Veneto extension not actually related to the Po River basin. The flatlands of the Veneto and Friuli regions are considered apart since they do not drain
The chronological frame
Unfortunately, the reliability of the radiocarbon results obtained prior to the introduction of the AMS method is questionable, and many important sites and sequences should be re-dated (Skeates, 2014). This is the case for the radiocarbon dates combining several charcoal species that, among many others, bear the inherent risk of ‘old wood effect’. The available data obtained from sites attributed to the Fiorano and Vhò cultural aspects are listed in Table 1 and plotted in Fig. 2, together with
Settlement distribution
The location and distribution of the Early Neolithic settlement of the Po Plain (Fig. 1) have been described in detail already in the 1990s (Biagi et al., 1993a, Biagi et al., 1993b). Considering that little step forward has been made during the last 25 years we can confirm that their distribution and preservation conditions vary according to their location either in the northern or southern part of the plain, two territories with quite different physiographic characteristics (Biagi et al.,
Where did they live and where did they die?
The Neolithic archaeology of northern Italy was centered for more than a century on the problem of the so-called “hut floor foundations” or fondi di capanna in Italian (Malavolti, 1953; for a discussion see Barfield, 1972). Groups of pits of different size and shape began to be discovered already during the second half of the 19th century in both Emilia and Lombardy, and soon after their excavation started (Chierici, 1875b, Parazzi, 1890, Castelfranco, 1892). These structures were later
The origin of the Neolithization process in northern Italy
Northern Italy is one of the many countries that fall into the general debate that affected for long the archaeological literature, between diffusionists, indigenists, and the followers of the more recently proposed arrhythmic model (Guilaine, 2000, Berger and Guilaine, 2008, Van der Linden, 2011). To make an example, some of the researchers who worked on the Neolithisation process of Liguria believe that Castelnovian, Late Mesolithic hunter-gatherers played a certain role in the earliest
Subsistence economy
The advanced cereal agriculture practiced by the Early Neolithic villagers of the Po Valley is inferred by both the lithic tool-kit that comprises sickle inserts and querns, and especially charred seeds represented by different species of domestic pulses (Rottoli and Castiglioni, 2009).
A pilot project was promoted at Isorella, an Early Neolithic Vhò site of the central Po Plain, located ca. km 27 south-southeast of Brescia (Fig. 1, n. 9), where one large shallow pit, 30 cm deep, covering ca. 20
Material culture remains
Regarding the ceramic and lithic production, if we exclude the inner Alpine regions, the Early Neolithic of northern Italy can be divided into three main macro areas: the first corresponds to the Impressed Ware culture of the Ligurian coast (Bernabò Brea, 1950, Bernabò Brea, 1956, Biagi and Starnini, 2016a), the second to the Impressed Ware culture of the Adriatic coast, whose eastern stream saw the later spread of the Dalmatian Danilo culture into the Trieste-Slovene Karst and eastern Friuli (
Discussion
At the present stage of knowledge, according to the evidence at our disposal, the Early Neolithic of northern Italy should be interpreted as an intrusive phenomenon attributable to the demic diffusion or folk migration (Pearce, 2013: 207) of groups belonging to two main cultural traditions: 1) the Impressed Ware, which was responsible for the Neolithization of the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian coasts, though following different modalities of spread and different speed (Biagi et al., 1993a, Biagi
Acknowledgments
The Authors are grateful to S. Colledge (University College, London, UK) for the information about the unpublished AMS results, and to T. Fantuzzi (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, I) for the calibration plot of Fig. 2.
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2022, Journal of Archaeological Science: ReportsCitation Excerpt :This makes it clear that the latter complement the information available so far, especially for the end of the 4th millennium and the first half of the 3rd millennium cal BC, since these periods are not particularly well dated for the region. This data suggests the beginning of farming activities in Lake Varese area around ca. 5000-4850 cal BC, which fits well with the state of the art for the western Lombardy area (i.e. Banchieri et al., 2015b; Biagi, et al., 2020), where these first activities are documented ca. 5200-5000 cal BC at sites such as Isorella (Starnini, et al., 2018) or Vhò – Campo Ceresole (Biagi, et al., 2020). Actually, the dates would apparently fit well with the arrival of the Neolithic populations from the east but the crop spectrum found at Isolino (without traces of glume wheats) does not fit with agricultural practices in the Friuli area or the Balkans (Rottoli and Castgilioni, 2009, Antolín, et al., 2021, Antolín, et al., 2020, de Vareilles et al., 2020, Kreuz and Marinova, 2017).
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2019, Quaternary Science ReviewsCitation Excerpt :The bottom of the studied sequence (∼146.5 cm, deepest XRF sample) is dated to approx. 7150 yrs cal. BP, falling therefore within the Early Neolithic period (Starnini et al., 2018). Due to visible stratigraphic similarities between cores CAV4 and CAV12 (Fig. 3), we opted to incorporate dating Poz-76077 (CAV12) into the age-depth model of core CAV4.
The time is ripe for a change. The evolution of harvesting technologies in Central Dalmatia during the Neolithic period (6th millennium cal BC)
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