The Archaeology Of Grotta Scaloria

Grotta Scaloria, a cave in Apulia, was first discovered and explored in 1931, excavated briefly in 1967, and then excavated extensively from 1978 to 1980 by a joint UCLA-University of Genoa team, but it was never fully published. The Save Scaloria Project was organized to locate this legacy data and to enhance that information by application of the newest methods of archaeological and scientific analysis. This significant site is finally published in one comprehensive volume (and in an online archive of additional data and photographs) that gathers together the archaeological data from the upper and lower chambers of the cave. These data indicate intense ritual and quotidian use during the Neolithic period (circa 5600-5300 BCE). The Grotta Scaloria project is also important as historiography, since it illustrates a changing trajectory of research spanning three generations of European and American archaeology.

This significant site is finally published in one comprehensive volume (and in an online archive of additional data and photographs) that gathers together the archaeological data from the upper and lower chambers of the cave.

This book draws on the complementary fields of visual cultural studies and interpretative archaeology to examine how successive generations transformed their visual culture to construct themselves. It explores this process through an extended case-study of art and social life in prehistoric south-east Italy, between the Upper Palaeolithic and the Bronze Age. A central argument of the book is that a wide range of visually communicative artworks were consumed and produced in the cultural process. Such objects range from portable artefacts, to installations within sites, to monumental structures in the landscape - all of which were interwoven with people's bodies in the experiences of daily life and special performances. More specifically, it is argued that these powerful aesthetic objects were actively used by people across space and time to perceive the world around them and to reproduce their social lives. They helped people to establish personal and collective boundaries, identities and relationships, to acquire and exercise power, to promote ideologies, and to contest them, especially at time of social tension.

This volume contains the results of archaeological research carried out at Grotta Mora Cavorso, a fascinating cave in the still-pristine landscape of the Simbruini Mountains along the Upper Aniene River Valley, central Italy. The book is written by archaeologists for archaeologists, as well as for lovers of archaeology, history and speleology; it describes and critically discusses a wide range of scientific and anthropological analyses carried out over the last 15 years, while integrating them within the contemporary theoretical debate. The first of three volumes, it covers the Historic and Protohistoric periods of human occupation of the cave, revealing its complex and multi-layered use as a burial and ritual place, a possible monastic hermitage, stables and even a war refuge. This book serves to fill the gap in cave archaeology at both a local and wider geographical scale, while demonstrating the key importance of a previously neglected area, thus adding to the overall understanding of the use of caves in Mediterranean Europe.

Archaeological interpretation is an imaginative act. Stratigraphy and artefacts do not tell us what the past was like; that is the task of the archaeologist. The diverse group of contributors to this volume address the relationship between archaeology and imagination through the medium of historical fiction and fictive techniques, both as consumers and as producers. The fictionalisation of archaeological research is often used to disseminate the results of scholarly or commercial archaeology projects for wider public outreach. Here, instead, the authors focus on the question of what benefits fiction and fictive techniques, as inspiration and method, can bring to the practice of archaeology itself. The contributors, a mix of archaeologists, novelists and other artists, advance a variety of theoretical arguments and examples to advance the case for the value of a reflexive engagement between archaeology and fiction. Themes include the similarities and differences in the motives and methods of archaeologists and novelists, translation, empathy, and the need to humanise the past and diversify archaeological narratives. The authors are sensitive to the epistemological and ethical issues surrounding the influence of fiction on researchers and the incorporation of fictive techniques in their work. Sometimes dismissed as distracting just-so stories, or even as dangerously relativistic narratives, the use of fictive techniques has a long history in archaeological research and examples from the scholarly literature on many varied periods and regions are considered. The volume sets out to bring together examples of these disparate applications and to focus attention on the need for explicit recognition of the problems and possibilities of such approaches, and on the value of further research about them.

Through time people have lived with darkness. Archaeology shows us that over the whole human journey people have sought out dark places, for burials, for votive deposition and sometimes for retreat or religious ritual away from the wider community. Thirteen papers explore Palaeolithic use of deep caves in Europe and the orientation of mortuary monuments in the Neolithic and Bronze Age. It examines how the senses are affected in caves and monuments that were used for ritual activities, from Bronze Age miners in Wales working in dangerous subterranean settings, to initiands in Italian caves, to a modern caver’s experience of spending time in the one of the world’s deepest caves in Russia. We see how darkness was and is viewed at northern latitudes where parts of the year are spent in eternal night, and in Easter Island where darkness provided communal refuge from the pervasive sun. We know that spending extended periods in darkness and silence can affect one physically, emotionally and spiritually. How did interactions between people and darkness affect individuals in the past and how were regarded by their communities? And how did this interaction transform places in the landscape? As the ever-increasing electrification of the planet steadily minimizes the amount of darkness in our lives, curiously, darkness is coming more into focus. This first collection of papers on the subject begins a conversation about the role of darkness in human experience through time.

Since 2007 the Jaffa Cultural Heritage Project has endeavored to bring to light the vast archaeological and historical record of the site of Jaffa in Israel. Continuing the effort begun with The History and Archaeology of Jaffa 1, this volume is a collection of independent studies and final reports on smaller excavations that do not require individual book-length treatments. These include overviews of archaeological research in Jaffa, historical and archaeological studies of Medieval and Ottoman Jaffa, reports on excavations by the Israel Antiquities Authority at both the Postal Compound between 2009 and 2011 and the Armenian Compound in 2006 and 2007, and studies of the excavations of Jacob Kaplan and Haya Ritter-Kaplan in Jaffa on behalf of the Israel Department of Antiquities and Museums from 1955 to 1974.

Archaeology and Women draws together from a variety of angles work currently being done within a contemporary framework on women in archaeology. One section of this collection of original articles addresses the historical and contemporary roles of women in the discipline. Another attempts to link contemporary archaeological theory and practice to work on women and gender in other fields. Finally, this volume presents a wide diversity of theoretical approaches and methods of study of women in the ancient world, representing a cross section of work being carried out today under the broad banner of gender archaeology. The geographical and chronological range of the contributions is also wide, from Southeast Asia and South America to Western Asia, Egypt and Europe, from Great Britain to Greece, and from 10,000 years ago to the recent past. An ideal sampler for courses dealing with women and archaeology.