Robin Skeates

Neolithic Italy at 4004 B.C.: people and places

in «Accordia Research Papers», 13, 2013, pp. 1-29

According to James Ussher, the creation of the world began on Sunday 23rd October, in the year 4004 BC (Ussher 1658). Ussher (1581–1656) was the Anglican Archbishop of Armagh in northern Ireland, and he deduced this date from his interpretation of the Old Testament, as a contribution to the long-running Christian theological debate on the age and history of the Earth (Barr 1985; Ford 2007). His creation date of 4004 BC was widely accepted in England in the eighteenth century, particularly when it was included in annotated editions of the influential King James Bible, although it was increasingly rejected by geologists and theologians in the nineteenth century, and is now a classic date remembered by historians of archaeology (e.g. Daniel 1975: 27), not to mention American creationists. For my purposes, it is also a convenient date upon which to base an experiment to establish what we can (and cannot) say about Neolithic Italy at a very specific point in time, focussing on the archaeological data from a sample of radiocarbon dated sites, whilst not ignoring the longterm trends with which archaeology is usually concerned. At the same time, in the context of this volume dedicated to Rethinking the Italian Neolithic, my aim is to question some old and new archaeological narratives on Neolithic Italy, with particular reference to a theme of ‘people and places’. This is a pun on the title of the longrunning ‘Ancient Peoples and Places’ series of books, originally edited by Glyn Daniel and published by Thames and Hudson, in which leading scholars summed up what was known about the archaeology of different parts of the world within a culture-historical theoretical framework where human migration was often evoked as a causal factor in cultural (and especially ceramic) change (e.g. Barfield 1971; Bernabò Brea 1957; Trump 1966). This tradition lives on in much of the work published by Italian archaeologists on Neolithic Italy, which can often be characterised in terms of an obsession with typometric description of ceramic and lithic artefact attributes and their stylistic affinities (e.g. Volante 2003) – an approach which is consciously down-played here. My own theoretical perspective can be described as ‘interpretive’ (Shanks & Hodder 1995), and is, in part, informed by some of the ideas about cultural landscapes developed by social geographers, anthropologists and archaeologists since the 1980s (e.g. Ashmore & Knapp 1999; Bender 1993; Cosgrove 1984; Eyles 1985; Feld & Basso 1996; Hirsch & O’Hanlon 1995; Muir 1999; Tilley 1994; Ucko and Layton 1999). For archaeologists, these ideas encourage a change of analytical emphasis: away from a focus on what people do to the land and how it aids or constrains them, towards a focus on different people’s experiences and perceptions of the landscape and of meaningful places within it. According to this way of thinking, landscapes are always in a dynamic process of being constructed and transformed by people, both physically and conceptually: almost unconsciously, through their everyday routines of dwelling, work and mobility; and more strategically, as with the construction of monuments in the landscape. And, where the forces of nature do bring about significant environmental change, what is important is how human groups understand and choose to respond to that change. Furthermore, as Tilley (2004) emphasises, landscapes are not just something looked at or thought about, but synaesthetically experienced through the body’s senses, to the extent that people are part of landscapes and landscapes part of us (c.f. Skeates 2010a: 76–123). John Robb, in particular, has produced some very good examples of the application of this theoretical approach to the archaeology of Neolithic Italy (e.g. Robb 2007; Robb & van Hove 2003). But there is still a limit to the depth to such studies, particularly in terms of their consideration of the growing body of data relating to mid-Holocene climate and vegetation, which deserve greater integration into discussions of Neolithic cultural landscapes… leggi tutto