Neolithic (c.6000 BC)
Cardium Ware (c.6000-c.5300 BC) is a Neolithic pottery decorated with the edge of a Cardium (cockle) shell. It is sometimes called Impressed Ware because the impressions can be made with a different sharp object. This pottery style gives its name to the main culture of the Mediterranean Neolithic.
Molfetta is a Neolithic settlement in Apulia, originally a circular cave over 100 metres across, but now open to the sky after the collapse of the cave roof. An Early Neolithic village had small round huts with stone footings and wattle-and-daub walls. A Middle Neolithic village and a cemetery nearby provide a type site for the south Italian Impressed Ware, dated to around 5200 BC. In c.1600 BC it was occupied by a Bronze Age people bringing an early version of the Apennine culture.
Agriculture could have been introduced into Apulia by farmers from Illyria on the opposite coast. The evidence suggests that Apulia during the fifth and fourth millennia BC supported a substantial farming population organised into many small villages. Passo de Corvo, a Middle Neolithic village in Apulia, has traces of about one hundred circular huts. Each dwelling is surrounded by a circular ditch to protect domestic animals, and the whole village circumscribed by a large irrigation circle. (c.5000 BC). Several hundred enclosures of this type are known on the Tavoliere Plain. From c.3500 BC desiccation of the Tavoliere led to expansion north and west, including a settlement at Sasso di Furbara (Lazio)
Lagozza is the Late Neolithic culture, named after the type-site lake village in the Po Valley, dated to c.3600 BC, which was established in the north and spread down the Adriatic coast to Marche and Ripoli (a Neolithic ditched-settlement in Abruzzo) in the Late Neolithic and to Ariano (Campania) by the Copper Age, surviving there to give rise to the Apennine culture. Copper axes from the Lagozza di Besnate site are among the earliest copper objects found in Italy.
Chalcolithic (Copper) Age (c.3500 BC)
Gaudo (c.3500 BC) is the type site of a Chalcolithic culture in Campania. Sites are almost entirely limited to burials in rock-cut tombs. These consist of an entrance shaft (which would have later been blocked with stone rubble) leading to a chamber containing collective burials, accompanied by pots, flint or copper daggers, and arrowheads.
Remedello (c.3300 BC) is the type-site in Lombardy of a Chalcolithic culture of the Po Valley and Veneto. It has 117 flat graves with individual inhumations, and grave goods that include triangular copper daggers, axes and awls. Rinaldone, a cemetery in Lazio, has eight flat graves and is the type-site of the Remedello culture in Tuscany and Lazio.
Similaun Man (c.3300 BC), known as ‘Otzi the Iceman’, found in the Similaun Pass in the Otztal Alps on the Italian-Austrian border, is the oldest complete human body ever recovered in Europe and has provided a useful insight into the lives of Chalcolithic Europeans. He appears to have become air-dried at high altitude before being enveloped by a glacier.
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