The Oxford Handbook of Neolithic Europe

by Chris Fowler

  Around the entrances of caves in Puglia, deep occupation deposits often accumulated, suggesting that many of them served a convenient residential function as shelters. Cereals and domestic animals were certainly consumed in them, if not actually produced in the immediate vicinity, but local resources were also exploited, including a greater range and quantity of wild fauna compared to open-air sites.

  In the interiors of these caves, special deposits often accumulated. They are characterized by the presence of human remains, pits, hearths, large quantities of carbonized grain, selected animal bones, pottery fragments, and other artefacts, some with a high symbolic value. They might be interpreted as residues from the performance of mortuary rites accompanied by food consumption, as well as the ritual sacrifice of valued objects. They are comparable to the mortuary deposits identified at some contemporary open sites, save for the fact that (as in Abruzzo) infants and children, and also women, were buried more commonly in caves—a practice which may have contributed to the construction of a distinct social status for them compared with that of adult males.

  A prime example is Grotta Scaloria (Quagliati 1936, 118–144; Tinè and Isetti 1975–80; Winn and Shimabuku 1980). This cave is located accessibly, on the boundary between the Tavoliere Plain and the Gargano uplands. The cave system comprises two main chambers. Scaloria Alta is the large upper chamber. It extends over an area of 80 by 100m, and has a 2m high ceiling. This space was used as a burial chamber throughout most of the sixth millennium BC. The primary and secondary burials of 137 individuals were discovered here, particularly in the innermost part of the chamber, in groupings of around 20 individuals. Most were identified as young people, aged below 15–20 years, but some older adults, aged up to 49 years, were also present, and females outnumbered males here by a ratio of two to one. Some were directly associated with grave goods, including a deer antler placed behind the head of a young man, a pair of boar’s canine pendants decorated with fine geometric incisions associated with the body of an old adult, and a possible skull-cap represented by a disarticulated skull covered by numerous shiny tubular shells. These buried individuals presumably belonged to local families based in one or more of the large, nucleated, agricultural ditched villages that developed in the densely settled northern half of the Tavoliere Plain during the later Neolithic.

  The deep interior spaces of large cave systems, with extensive underground complexes of chambers and corridors, were also elaborated through the formation of more specialized ritual structures and deposits. Here, Neolithic visitors exploited and added to the existing natural morphologies of the caves (including their walls, passages, floors, fissures, stalagmites, and water pools), inheriting and reinventing a traditional way of perceiving and ritually elaborating caves previously established in the Upper Palaeolithic in Puglia (Skeates 2005). In the process, they created some powerful new forms of sacred space.

  Scaloria Bassa, the lower chamber of Grotta Scaloria, provides an outstanding example from north Puglia. This wide chamber is reached via a narrow and low gallery and terminates in a small lake. It was used in what has been described as a water cult (Tinè and Isetti 1975–80; Whitehouse 1992). A rectangular basin was carved in the centre of the chamber, apparently to collect water dripping from the stalactites on the roof. Around this were found 70 middle Neolithic fineware vessels, some still whole. All of these lay close to truncated stalagmites, some even on top of the base of broken stalagmites. Traces of a large hearth, with the remains of partially burnt animal bones (radiocarbon dated to the second half of the fifth millennium BC), were found close to the basin. A primary burial, a skull, and some other human bones were also placed in natural fissures in the lower cave. Here, one might suggest that rituals may have expressed tensions over water and death, which might have related to specific agrarian concerns over the health, fertility, and productivity of people and their agricultural resources on the adjacent Tavoliere Plain.

  Further south, a pair of elaborately decorated cave complexes are known in the Salento peninsula, near Santa Cesarea Terme. The best-known is Grotta di Porto Badisco (e.g. Graziosi 1980; Guerri 1993; Lo Porto 1976). The cave is located at the top of a low hill slope, overlooking a small coastal inlet (Fig. 47.3). Its location today is visible and accessible, and in the later Neolithic it would have lain within easy reach of contemporary open-air sites, indicated by the presence of later Neolithic pottery on the adjacent plateau. However, its simple entrances give no indication of the great extent, complexity, and (in some parts) inaccessibility of this underground system, with its four main branching corridors, extending over a total distance of around 850m. The morphology of these corridors varies from relatively large chambers (6–10m wide) to restricted passages, some sections of which are only negotiable by crawling.

  FIG. 47.3. Porto Badisco, Puglia. The cave entrances are located by the white building on the hilltop.

  (Photograph: R. Skeates).

  The complex was first occupied and ritually elaborated during the Upper Palaeolithic. Cultural deposits of this period include a few faunal remains, stone artefacts, and objects decorated with final Upper Palaeolithic Romanellian-style incisions and red ochre. Parietal art was also produced in the cave at this time, in the form of a series of incised geometric motifs.

  The cave was then reoccupied during the middle Neolithic (from the mid-sixth millennium BC). At this time, numerous pits were cut into the Pleistocene deposits in the eastern entrance chambers. These were then filled and overlain by a rich cultural layer of soil, containing ashes, some quite sizeable deposits of carbonized seeds, a few bones, stone artefacts, and pottery fragments.

  The human use of Grotta di Porto Badisco then became overtly ritual during the later and final phases of the Neolithic. In the entrance chambers, similar but richer deposits continued to be laid down, containing more abundant animal bones, piles of carbonized cereal grains associated with grindstones, hearths, ashes, fragments of fine-ware, a ceramic ladle, a clay stamp, a pair of unusual combined spatula/awls, and some finely flaked flint arrowheads and daggers. Human remains were also deposited here for the first time, including some crouched bodies covered by a pile of stones, and a human skull and three vertebrae placed between the two inner entrance cavities. Additional mortuary deposits extended from the eastern entrance chambers, along one tunnel, to the end of another tunnel. Some spaces in the cave were also modified, perhaps especially to facilitate and control bodily movements through different parts of the cave system. Steps were cut into the deposits filling the entrance passage. Part of the second corridor, and some natural circular cavities in the cave floor, may have been artificially widened. Stepping stones were laid across a pool of drip water, and simple dry-stone walls were constructed.

  But the best-known features of this cave system are the Neolithic wall paintings, which were concentrated along three of the main corridors, in 12 morphologically distinct zones. The paintings have black-brown and red pigments, derived from bat guano, a rich deposit of which exists in one part of the cave, and red ochre materials (Cipriani and Magaldi 1979). The paintings are dominated by figurative hunting scenes, involving human and supernatural (half human/half animal) participants as well as deer and dogs. But there are also hand-prints and more abstract geometric and curvilinear motifs, many of which can be compared to middle and late Neolithic painted ceramic decoration in Puglia. These paintings accumulated over time, as indicated by the replacement of faded images and the overlapping of some of the abstract motifs. Nevertheless, according to statistical analyses of the distribution of particular motifs, a degree of spatial pattering was established along the painted corridors, partly with reference to gender (Albert 1982; Graziosi 1980; Whitehouse 1992). The sex of the human figures is not always explicitly marked, but where it is figures exhibiting a hands-on-hips posture are commonly depicted as female by the addition of a blob of dark paint in the pubic area, whilst archers and a horned figure are represented as male by the depiction of the penis. A degree o
f male bias is evident numerically: of the 14 sex-specific human figures, two-thirds are male whilst one-third is female. Furthermore, the female figures are concentrated exclusively in the central chamber of the cave system, where the entrance sector of the complex culminated, whilst the male figures also occur further along the successive corridors, together with increasingly abstract symbols. The group of around 100 handprints situated half way along the second corridor on the ceiling and wall is also worth mentioning. Ruth Whitehouse (1992) has plausibly suggested that these patterns may have been produced and inspected during the course of initiation rites into the secret phases of a male (deer) hunting cult involving elders and junior initiates, from which women were excluded. She has also highlighted the multi-sensory and emotional dimensions of such rites, with reference to themes such as access, movement, sound, touch, darkness, strangeness, secrecy, fear, and sensory deprivation (Whitehouse 1992, 2001). More generally, the repeated deposition of burnt offerings of crops in the cave entrance and the combined symbolic emphasis on wild deer hunting and on gender (and age) might be interpreted in terms of ritual performances that expressed fundamental tensions within an indigenous group with a hunter-gatherer ancestry surrounding their full transition to an agricultural way of life, including a more strongly gender- and age-based division of labour (Skeates 2012).

  Partially or entirely artificial ritual caves also began to be constructed in Puglia during the late and final phases of the Neolithic, particularly (but not exclusively) for the purposes of human burial and the performance of associated rites, which involved the sacrificial consumption of food and of some valuable portable artefacts. These developments might be interpreted in terms of the establishment, through rituals performed in significant liminal places in the cultural landscape, of even stronger reciprocal relations between members of particular living kin-groups, their ancestors, and the supernatural.

  At Grotta di Cala Colombo, for example, situated on the Adriatic coast near Torre a Mare, the walls of a natural cave entrance appear to have been enlarged artificially in the final Neolithic to form an elaborate multi-cellular burial chamber (De Lucia et al. 1977). This contained stratified mortuary deposits, which reflect an increasingly intensive mortuary use of the cave, especially between around 4200 and 3650 BC.

  In the case of the ‘Manfredi hypogeum’, located at Santa Barbara near Polignano a Mare, an entirely artificial underground structure was dug into the limestone bedrock from the inner side of a late Neolithic village enclosure ditch (Geniola 1995). It is 9m long and has a symmetrical plan. A sloping access ramp leads to two chambers, linked by a short central corridor with a square section and a step in the floor. Deer skulls (echoing the deer symbolism of Porto Badisco and Scaloria Alta) were arranged along the walls of the access ramp and first chamber, whilst small niches and a cross-shaped symbol were engraved in the walls of the second chamber. The structure contained a stratified deposit, radiocarbon dated to the first half of the fifth millennium BC, with animal bones (dominated by roe deer), small piles of limpet shells, decorated ceramic jars and cups, and artefacts, perhaps derived from ritual hunting and feasting, whilst a small trench containing a deposit of human bones was also found in the back room.

  An early example of an entirely artificial ‘rock-cut tomb’ was also established at this time at Arnesano (Lo Porto 1972). It comprised a small cylindrical chamber with an access pit dug into clay and sand. The pit was sealed by a limestone slab. Within the tomb, the body of an adult had been laid on the floor of the chamber, in a crouched position. Grave goods were placed on one side of the body, including three pottery vessels and a stone ‘idol’ that combines an overall phallic form with the carved representation of a possibly female head and necklace (Whitehouse 1992, 166). Although, traditionally, scholars have sought long-distance origins for this form of burial, a variety of prototypes for this form of tomb can be identified in the late Neolithic of Puglia (Whitehouse 1972; Skeates 2005, 2012). More specifically, the construction of this tomb (and other contemporary mortuary deposits) might reflect a growing concern with defining and fixing the status of selected deceased adult individuals, particularly as prestigious members of extended kin-groups, accompanied by some valuable and symbolic goods, in slightly more formalized sealed deposits placed in more laboriously constructed tombs, situated in significant places in the landscape.

  Malta

  The limestone islandscape of the Maltese archipelago contains a large number and variety of natural cave formations. As in Italy, a selection of these caves were used and modified during the Neolithic, alongside the occupation of open-air homesteads or villages (Skeates 2007, 2010).

  A few relatively large and accessible caves were occupied in the early Neolithic (from around 5200 BC), when the Islands were intentionally colonized by groups of farmers from southern Sicily, for whom cave use was already a long-established cultural tradition. Neolithic deposits in these caves contained hearths, trampled earth, fragments of pottery vessels, tools, body ornaments, animal bones, and mollusc shells. Archaeologists have generally interpreted these remains in terms of the use of caves as convenient dwelling places by newly arrived Neolithic settlers (e.g. Bonanno 1987). Certainly, the locations of the these cave-sites suggest that they were good places to live in and around, offering commodious and permanent shelters, with physical and visual access to adjacent freshwater springs, fertile agricultural soils, valleys, and natural harbours. Nevertheless, there is also evidence that small-scale rituals were performed in the interior of Għar Dalam (Fig. 47.4). This cave opens off the side of a narrow valley, and extends as a straight tubular passage some 144m into the overlying hill. A special deposit was found 34m in from the cave entrance, below a cluster of stalactites that demarcate a natural zone of transition between the relatively light outer and dark interior sections of the cave. It contained traces of burning, some disarticulated human remains, animal bones, decorated pottery fragments (including two broken zoomorphic vessel handles), a miniature and polished greenstone axe-blade, two finely made bone awls, three perforated dog teeth, and some sling-stones (Despott 1918, 220). This assemblage might be interpreted as a special, symbolic, deposit of things placed in the liminal zone of the cave, which might have been perceived as an ambiguous boundary and point of contact with chthonic forces. Its deposition might also have contributed to a cultural process of defining the boundaries of newly domesticated parts of the Maltese islandscape.

  FIG. 47.4. Stalactites and stalagmites in Għar Dalam, Malta. (Note Giuseppe Despott’s initials engraved on the right-hand wall.)

  (Photograph: R. Skeates).

  Għar Dalam continued to be occupied throughout the Neolithic. However, a notable development in the fourth millennium BC final Neolithic was the construction of small clusters of artificial rock-cut tombs, carved out of the soft Maltese limestone, and repeatedly filled with ochre-stained ‘collective’ deposits of human remains accompanied by faunal remains and some special artefacts. Although it has been argued that these structures may have originated locally out of an attempt to reproduce natural caves (Evans 1955–6, 56), in the context of the Maltese final Neolithic Żebbuġ culture it seems more likely that they represent innovations connected to, and influenced by, contemporary people elsewhere in the central Mediterranean. These tombs were situated in prominent locations: away but not far from contemporary settlements, on the sides and crests of hills. Their significance might be interpreted in terms of a growing social concern with defining the (separate) place of the dead, caring for them, and maintaining good relations with them as ancestral members of enduring kin-groups. Mortuary rites were performed in sanctified ancestral places, set apart from but overlooking the domestic landscape, which provided reference-points for establishing and remembering the distinct histories and territories of those groups.

  Archaeological excavations at the Xagħra (or Brocktorff) Circle rock-cut tomb have revealed some specific details of the ritual process (Malone et al. 1995). In Chamber 1, an
initial foundation deposit of valued artefacts was placed at the very back of the tomb. In both chambers, the mortuary deposits then appear to have been formed by the repeated placing of individual corpses and accompanying domestic animal bones (especially the skulls and mandibles of sheep or goat), body ornaments, broken pottery vessels (a few decorated with schematic anthropomorphic figures), and a few stone artefacts, in spaces close to the tomb entrance, cleared by pushing aside the remains of previous inhumations. The buried individuals comprised a minimum number of 54 adults, 15–28 adolescents and children, and one infant. All of the deposits were stained with a large quantity of blood-red ochre, probably imported from Sicily. The entrance hole of Chamber 2 was sealed by wedging a stone slab against it, whilst an eroded and slightly damaged stone ‘idol’, with a schematic human face marked by incisions and drill-holes (comparable to that found in the Arnesano rock-cut tomb in Puglia), was found directly beneath this entrance, where it may have fallen when the tomb was reopened during the successive Temple Period, presumably having previously marked and guarded the entrance to the tomb.