Elena Scarsella

The Later European Prehistory Group of Cambridge is excited to invite you to submit an abstract to our conference “A Blessing and a Curse: Mediterranean mountains between idyll and violence in later Prehistory”
Mountains are indeed double in their nature: on one hand, they are places of idyllic refuge, where to escape the stress of urban and civilised life, uncontaminated corners of beauty and loci amoeni; on the other, they are liminal places, places of anxiety, where phenomena of colonisation, globalisation and normalisation happened at a different pace, or never at all, frictional landscapes where the rules are dictated by a harsh and unforgiving environment.

When Roman writers wrote about Pre-Roman Central-Italy, they consigned to History a picture made of epic wars and brave warriors. Indeed, the Archaic period is the golden age of the Pre-Roman aristocracy and warrior ideology played a crucial role in building it. In this paper I will focus on the specific case of the Vestini Cismontani, a Sabine tribe of modern Abruzzo, in order to define the role of war and its display within communities of the same ethne. The high number of weapons and warriors, along with the widespread fortification of the territory, even in areas supposed to be within the borders, are indicators of a society where fighting and rivalries are part of the wider diplomatic balance of the region. In this paper I will explore settlement patterns and archaeological evidence in order to define the role of war and inter-communal aggression in a mountainous and harsh landscape.

Sharing food and drinking has a special role in the Orientalising and Archaic Italian burial practices. This is clear from the huge amount of drinking, storage and eating vessels in the Etruscan, Latin, Sabine and Picene tombs. The mosaic of small peoples of the Middle-Adriatic region makes no exception and, along with general similarities, some minor and still significative differences can be detected. In this presentation I will show these differences and similarities in order to trace a frame as detailed as possible of the meaning of food in the funerary ritual and its role in asserting identity of the Middle-Adriatic Italic peoples.

This paper will have at its focus the complicated connection between the production and circulation of copper and the control over it exercised by political elites and religious authorities. During the Late Cypriot period, copper production and trade were a central source of wealth and internal development on the island. This can be seen in terms of external trade, but also in relation to an ideological control of this metal by religious authorities in the urban centers. Indeed, workshops were situated in close vicinity to sanctuaries, and symbols iconographically related to metallurgy are attested specifically at Enkomi, with notable specimens being the Ingot God statuette and the miniature bronze ingots. The transition between the LC IIC and LC IIIA periods marks a phase of radical transition all over the East Mediterranean, characterized by the decline of economic exchanges, as well as a destruction horizon clearly visible in many macro-regions of the Mediterranean. On Cyprus, a destruction level is attested in many large settlements, but such discontinuity cannot be ascribed to several sites of crucial cultural importance, such as Enkomi, Kition and Palaepaphos, which enjoyed a new floruit. This paper aims to define the cultural sequence for the transition to LC IIIA in a critical light.

The last few years, in the history of studies on Late Bronze Age Mediterranean, archaeology has been particularly productive in the investigation of the ancient economy and trade, having brought to light a complex system of connections, both maritime and terrestrial. The existence of a wide and systematic network regulated by laws, norms and a value system, although in nuce, is now evident. Within this network, commodities, people and ideas freely circulated and a certain degree of safety seemed to be assured. These connections were mostly in the hands of the palaces, as testified by the written sources, but nonetheless it is possible that some commodities circulated by different means, external to the palatial control. In this talk we will enquiry the possibility of the existence of a private agency in the Eastern Mediterranean trade and its relationship with the palatial controlled economy. In order to do so, two kinds of data will be taken into consideration: written sources and pottery. The first piece of evidence will consist mostly in tablets coming from Ugarit and the Amarna letters, and an overview of possible traces of trade in the Linear B tablets will be made, along with a short reference to some interesting new interpretation of the miniaturized inscribed ingots coming from Cyprus. For the latter, the case study in exam will be the Mycenaean pottery, mainly due to its wide distribution and the large amount of available data, but also because presumably out of the palatial control, as it is not mentioned in the archive records. The analysis of the pottery will be mainly quantitative and focused on an area that includes Anatolia, Syria, Cyprus and Levantine coast during a chronological span that goes from 1450 to 1200 ca. BC (LH IIB-LH IIIC in relative chronology). In this area, the imports include fine examples of drinking pottery and stirrup jars, these latter intended for the transport of wine and perfumed oils. As the results of this research will show, the distribution pattern of this kind of pottery is not homogeneous and varies in time and space.

espanolEl estudio arqueometalurgico y arqueometrico de objetos manufacturados metalicos en la Italia medio-tirrenica se esta realizando en el marco de una vision conjunta que tome en consideracion las relaciones, bien interregionales que internacionales, que surgen en las distintas areas del Mediterraneo Occidental y Oriental, en un periodo que abarca desde la primera Edad del Hierro y la Epoca Clasica, entre los siglos X-IX y V-IV a.C., hasta el inicio del proceso de romanizacion, el cual supondra una radical transformacion de la dinamica comercial del metal conocida en el Mediterraneo. Esta investigacion se centra en un estudio interdisciplinar, en el que se conjuga los analisis arqueometalurgicos con los arqueometricos y arqueologicos, de los objetos de cobre, bronce, hierro, plomo, oro y plata procedentes del area territorial de Etruria (conjuntos de Veio y santuario de Pyrgi) y de la zona de la Lazio (necropolis de “Poggio dei Cavallari” en Satricum) con el objetivo de profundi...