Periodic Reporting for period 2 - GEODAP (GEOarchaeology of DAily Practices: extracting bronze age lifeways from the domestic stratigraphic record)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2023-04-01 al 2024-09-30
What was daily life like in the European Bronze Age? In contrast to large-scale narratives based on artefacts, often prestige items from funerary contexts, this project focuses on the practices of daily domestic life, recorded in the sediments upon which it took place. These constitute the domestic stratigraphic record. This project, therefore, shifts the scale and the object of archaeological investigation, and aims at bringing interdisciplinary scientific analyses into dialogue with anthropological understandings of lifeways and households. Its main objective is the formulation of an innovative narrative of the Bronze Age addressing social, economic, and environmental aspects of a culturally interconnected region of Europe. The daily practices and life histories of bronze age people will be the pixels of this new picture that challenges previous depersonalized narratives relying on material culture. The region between the Carpatho-Danubian basin, the Balkans, and northern Italy was selected due to its important cultural interactions during the Bronze Age. Ten key archaeological sites in six European countries constitute the project’s database. Its innovative interdisciplinary approach integrates geoarchaeology (micro-stratigraphic analysis), organic chemistry (biomarkers) and archaeo-botany (phytoliths, seeds, fruits, and charcoal) to reconstruct with unprecedented accuracy the daily practices from domestic stratigraphy. This information will be compared with the story told by material culture and integrated with local paleo-environmental records. The project, in fact, challenges also previous reconstructions that called in environmental mega-events (volcanic eruptions, glacial advances, aridity events) to aprioristically explain broad cultural phenomena of the Bronze Age. Their inherent complexity can only be faced by crystallizing detailed micro-histories and site-specific environmental reconstructions into a broader synthesis based on hard scientific data.
In the first half of the project, two laboratories crucial for the GOEDAP work packages have been set up at the Dept. of Geosciences of the University of Padova. These are the "laboratory for micromorphology" (WP 1), which has been built from scratch, and the "Laboratory for Palynology and Phytoliths" (WP 3) which already existed but needed major renovation and instrumental updates. Both laboratories are now fully up-and-running and the laboratory for micromorphology has also its own laboratory technician (Dr. F. Sartor). The implementation of such laboratories implied the acquisition of several machines, often specifically adapted to the uses required by the GEODAP project.
As far as fieldwork is concerned the GEODAP team conducted several excavation campaigns. As foresaw in the project proposal, some excavations were carried out entirely by the GEODAP team, i.e. from project design, to fieldwork, to the processing of the data and of the samples in the post-excavation phase. In the first period the following excavation campaigns were carried out by the GEODAP team:
- Four excavation campaign of four to five weeks each were carried out at the Middle Bronze Age site of ‘La Muraiola’ (Povegliano Veronese – Verona, NE Italy) between 2022 and 2023,
- One excavation campaign at the site of Late-Final Bronze Age site of Codroipo-Gradiscje (Udine, NE Italy).
- One at the Mid-Neolithic site of Molino Casarotto (Vicenza, NE Italy) in 2022.
The GEODAP team carried out sampling for the various WPs of the project at several other archaeological sites, dug by collaborating teams, such as:
- Frattesina di Fratta Polesine, Italy (2022 and 2023)
- Coppa Nevigata, Italy (2022)
- Villamarzana, Italy (2023)
- Oppeano – Via Isolo site ‘4D’, Italy (excavated in 2015-16)
- Rabe ‘Anka’ Siget, Serbia (2022 and 2023)
- Fidvar-Vráble, Slovakia (2022)
- Santovka, Slovakia (2022)
We moreover carried out a series of environmental coring campaigns, aimed at reconstructing the ‘broad scale’ of the Bronze Age environment based on the study of pollen and other indicators contained in the cores:
- Coring in bogs and lakes in the alpine area between the Trentino and Veneto regions in North Italy (2023)
- Coring at the Early Bronze Age pile dwelling site of ‘Pascolone’, south of the city of Vicenza (Italy) with the aim of preparing an excavation campaign as foreseen in the project proposal (2024).
- Coring near the Middle Bronze Age site of Oppeano – Via Isolo site ‘4D’, south of the city of Verona (Italy) to ascertain the size of the site and study the alluvial episodes that brought to its abandonment (2024).
As far as fieldwork is concerned the GEODAP team conducted several excavation campaigns. As foresaw in the project proposal, some excavations were carried out entirely by the GEODAP team, i.e. from project design, to fieldwork, to the processing of the data and of the samples in the post-excavation phase. In the first period the following excavation campaigns were carried out by the GEODAP team:
- Four excavation campaign of four to five weeks each were carried out at the Middle Bronze Age site of ‘La Muraiola’ (Povegliano Veronese – Verona, NE Italy) between 2022 and 2023,
- One excavation campaign at the site of Late-Final Bronze Age site of Codroipo-Gradiscje (Udine, NE Italy).
- One at the Mid-Neolithic site of Molino Casarotto (Vicenza, NE Italy) in 2022.
The GEODAP team carried out sampling for the various WPs of the project at several other archaeological sites, dug by collaborating teams, such as:
- Frattesina di Fratta Polesine, Italy (2022 and 2023)
- Coppa Nevigata, Italy (2022)
- Villamarzana, Italy (2023)
- Oppeano – Via Isolo site ‘4D’, Italy (excavated in 2015-16)
- Rabe ‘Anka’ Siget, Serbia (2022 and 2023)
- Fidvar-Vráble, Slovakia (2022)
- Santovka, Slovakia (2022)
We moreover carried out a series of environmental coring campaigns, aimed at reconstructing the ‘broad scale’ of the Bronze Age environment based on the study of pollen and other indicators contained in the cores:
- Coring in bogs and lakes in the alpine area between the Trentino and Veneto regions in North Italy (2023)
- Coring at the Early Bronze Age pile dwelling site of ‘Pascolone’, south of the city of Vicenza (Italy) with the aim of preparing an excavation campaign as foreseen in the project proposal (2024).
- Coring near the Middle Bronze Age site of Oppeano – Via Isolo site ‘4D’, south of the city of Verona (Italy) to ascertain the size of the site and study the alluvial episodes that brought to its abandonment (2024).
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.