From the Neolithic to the Bronze Age in Central Italy: Settlement, Burial, and Social Change at the Dawn of Metal Produc
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From the Neolithic to the Bronze Age in Central Italy: Settlement, Burial, and Social Change at the Dawn of Metal Production Andrea Dolfini1
© The Author(s) 2019
Abstract The Late Neolithic and Copper Age were a time of change in most of Europe. Technological innovations including animal traction, the wheel, and plow agriculture transformed the prehistoric economy. The discovery of copper metallurgy expanded the spectrum of socially significant materials and realigned exchange networks away from Neolithic “greenstone,” obsidian, and Spondylus shells. New funerary practices also emerged, signifying the growing importance of lineage ancestors, as well as new ideas of personal identity. These phenomena have long attracted researchers’ attention in continental Europe and the British Isles, but comparatively little has been done in the Italian peninsula. Building on recent discoveries and interdisciplinary research on settlement patterns, the subsistence economy, the exchange of socially valuable materials, the emergence of metallurgy, funerary practices, and notions of the body, I critically appraise current models of the Neolithic-Bronze Age transition in light of the Italian regional evidence, focusing on central Italy. In contrast to prior interpretations of this period as the cradle of Bronze Age social inequality and the prestige goods economy, I argue that, at this juncture, prehistoric society reconfigured burial practices into powerful new media for cultural communication and employed new materials and objects as novel identity markers. Stratified political elites may not be among the new identities that emerged at this time in the social landscape of prehistoric Italy. Keywords Prehistoric Europe · Social archaeology · Inequality · Late Neolithic · Copper Age · Chalcolithic · Italy
* Andrea Dolfini [email protected] 1
School of History, Classics and Archaeology, Newcastle University, Armstrong Building, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, UK
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
Journal of Archaeological Research
Introduction In much of Europe, the late fifth to the late third millennia BC was characterized by four sweeping changes that fundamentally altered the fabric of Neolithic society (Broodbank 2013; Heyd 2007; Kristiansen 2015; Robb and Harris 2013; Whittle 1996). The first was the gradual transformation of landscapes of settlement, as long-lived villages were generally abandoned, and more mobile economic regimes and lifestyles emerged. The second, occurring in lockstep with the first, was the new prominence of burial as a social practice, including the establishment of formal cemeteries, new funerary structures (e.g., megaliths and chamber tombs), and mortuary rites that centered on two seemingly contrasting principles: the breaking up and mixing of ancestors in collective tombs, and the expression of personal identity in individual burials. The third was the intensification of human mobility and social interaction, as evidenced by the long-distance exchange of prized materials such as Alpine “greenstone
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