Currently, the progress beyond the state of the art consisted in defining a new approach to the excavation of bronze age domestic contexts. This has been particularly the case in the excavation of the site of ‘La Muraiola’ (Povegliano Veronese – Verona, NE Italy) – which was carried out directly by the GEODAP team – and at Oppeano ‘Via Isolo site 4D’ (Verona, Italy) – where the team worked on samples collected during previous, rescue archaeological excavations. We begun to redefine the wealth of information that can be extracted from domestic contexts by applying the four WPs of the project. Daily activities, humble ‘daily gestures’, of the communities that inhabited these sites came to light. These otherwise invisible activities included the stabling of sheep and goats within byre-houses, the processing of cereals by the use of fire, the gathering of larger herbivores in enclosures, the repeated dumping of waste in specific locations. Without the application of the high-resolution research protocol of the GEODAP project, which is based on the detailed analysis of the sediments – the ‘dirt’ – we dig, all such activities would have gone missing from the final reconstruction of the life in these sites. Traditional excavation methods, in fact, tend to focus more on the artefacts contained in the archaeological sediments that on the archaeological sediments themselves. This change of paradigm brought about by the GEODAP project is proving instead very effective in formulating new narratives about the Bronze Age, and will be further developed in the excavations that will be carried out in the remaining part of the project. The excavation of the mid neolithic site of ‘Molino Casarotto’ (Vicenza, Italy), one of the best-preserved example of housing structures of the European later prehistory, has also been integral in the development of this new paradigm and new approach. Comparison with the data that state-of-the-art excavations managed to provide in 1969-72 showed how the GEODAP approach, today, is capable of augmenting the amount of information that can be gathered by domestic stratigraphy. The presence of cereals, which was ruled out in the 1969-72 excavations, was instead established by closely studying the archaeological sediments of the site as part of WP 3 (‘Analysis of plant macroremains - seeds, fruits, and charcoal’). This, coupled with robust radiocarbon dating carried out, had significant impact on the theories of the arrival of the ‘Neolithic package’ to this part of Italy in the middle Neolithic. As mentioned above, continuing the refinement of the GEODAP approach, implementing all of the project’s WPs, making it more cost-effective and streamlining its workflow will allow us to further improve the narratives we extract from houses. Ultimately it will improve the narratives we produce, as archaeologists, about past communities and the environment they lived in. This can be done and it is happening now.
