by Chris Fowler
Sometime in the fourth millennium, a general transition is visible throughout the region. Although abundant archaeological evidence suggests a continuous in situ development, there was a general sea-change from one kind of prehistoric society to another. The features of European society from the fourth millennium onwards include settlements which are much less visible archaeologically and were probably less substantial and more dispersed; an economy which probably included a more specialized pastoralism component, formal extra-mural cemeteries, and long-distance exchange in new media such as metals. These developments were often foreshadowed by a late or final Neolithic such as the Diana culture in southern Italy and the Lagozza-Chassey culture in northern Italy and southern France. These are marked by settlement changes, widespread horizons of material culture, and experiments in more formal burial. For these reasons, these two general periods (6000–3500 BC and 3500–2500 BC) are discussed separately in this chapter.
The body was central to social life in both periods. In this chapter I review the two most direct sources of evidence for the body in this period—burials and human representations in ‘art’—highlighting both general trends and some important local developments. Neither one gives us a universal key for unlocking the social constitution of the body, and both often reference it in very narrow contexts, but it is still useful to put them into relation.
ITALY
Burial 6000–3500 BC
For most of Italy and Sicily, Neolithic burial before 3500 BC is marked by a combination of a fairly simple basic rite and abundant, often unique variations. The published record is normalized, as single primary inhumations are traditionally identified as ‘burials’ and well-published whilst variants resulting in disarticulated or re-deposited remains tend simply to get written off as ‘disturbed burials’ without careful interpretation. Nevertheless, the general picture is clear (Robb 1994a; Robb 2007, ch. 3).
Burial happened most commonly around villages and settlements, although human bones are often found in caves as well. The basic mode of deposition was a single inhumation, lying flexed upon its side in a shallow pit with no preserved grave goods or architecture. Burials were made around houses and, in areas of southern Adriatic Italy where people lived in ditched villages, in the ditches around houses and villages as well. Such burials are often found disturbed, and this evidently happened during the Neolithic sometimes, which suggests that burials were not marked permanently above the ground and that there was little concern with maintaining them beyond a certain span of social memory.
From the start of the Neolithic, unique burial variants are known, for instance with the elaborate cremation of four individuals at the Grotta Continenza in the highland Abruzzo (Grifoni Cremonesi and Mallegni 1978). As the Neolithic developed, there was increasing experimentation with variant ritual procedures. Formal burial areas distinct from settlements are found, sometimes with burials, including cemeteries such as at Quinzano and Chiozza da Scandiano in the north and the Pulo di Molfetta in the south. Some cave sites repeatedly used for burials, such as Arene Candide in Liguria (Bernabò Brea 1946), should probably be considered as cemeteries too. One of the most interesting trends here is that earlier Neolithic sites were sometimes revisited and used as burial sites later in the Neolithic; about 15 examples are known, of which Serra Cicora in the Salentino peninsula (Ingravallo 2001) is the best-documented. This suggests that people maintained a connection between specific places and the history of their group and used burial to maintain that connection even when their actual mode of settlement had changed. Moreover, although grave goods remain far from common, there is increasing use of them, for instance at Chiozza da Scandiano in the north, where axes and pottery in graves recall practices in central Europe; burials at sites such as Serra d’Alto, Masseria Candelaro, and Vulpiglia sometimes included Serra d’Alto style vases. Third, there are a large number of non-standard settings in which human remains are found. These include, among others, as isolated or disturbed bones, as bodies with the skulls removed, as skulls removed from bodies, as exceptionally elaborate ritual depositions, as exposed, unburied bodies, and as mass burials. Although only one or a few examples are known of each, they add up to a burial programme of great variety. This probably reflects the negotiation of a conceptually simple transition from a small, local, social world of the living to the merging of the local dead and the history of the village; variant procedures probably reflect, among other things, a reaction to the contingent circumstances of death and burial (Robb 2002).
Burial 3500–2500 BC
Changes in burial are one of the most prominent parts of the fourth millennium transition. Throughout Italy, settlements become less visible archaeologically; burial sites become more prominent, to the point where the type sites for almost all Copper Age cultures are cemeteries. The shift began before the onset of the Copper Age around the mid fourth millennium; the rise of burial sites, often caves, distinct from habitation sites is evident in the last phase of the Neolithic from late in the fifth millennium, particularly in the Diana culture of southern and central Italy and the Lagozza-Chassey culture of northern Italy. Rudimentary tomb architecture is found, and an associated innovation is the deposition of several individuals within the same tomb, usually sequentially.
There is both variety and common themes in Copper Age burial. In Sicily the most common form is the tomba a forno in which a short shaft leads to a small oven-shaped chamber, as at Piano Vento (Castellana 1995) and many other sites. In southern Italy, Copper Age burials occur both in rock-cut tombs and in caves. The best-understood manifestation is the Gaudo culture of Campania (Bailo Modesti and Salerno 1998), characterized by cemeteries of up to 20 collective underground rock-cut tombs (tombe a grotticelle), with one or two chambers each of which contained on average between nine and ten individuals, with abundant goods. The shaft was both for access and for ritual, with the deposition of broken vases, whilst both articulated and disarticulated skeletons and grave goods are found within the chambers. Disarticulated skeletons were rearranged and occasionally recomposed in the final phases of rituals. Detailed study of the burial rites shows that articulated skeletons are usually male, whilst disarticulated skeletons show a balance of males and females. Male gender ideology is also represented in the elaborate and fine flaked flint daggers and arrowheads. A similar pattern is found in the rock-cut tombs of the Rinaldone group in Lazio and Toscana (Dolfini 2004), which, however, are also characterized by metal goods, predominantly pins, daggers, and axes. Further north, collective burial in caves characterizes Liguria and some areas of the Alps; central Adriatic Italy and the Po Valley have cemeteries of single graves (the Conelle and Remedello groups respectively: Bagolini 1981; Barfield 1985; Cazzella 2003; Corrain 1963; Manzi et al. 1997). The latter is characterized by a standardized grave goods assemblage similar to those of Corded Ware/Beakers, with drinking vessels, flaked flint daggers, and arrowheads. Further north in the Alps, there are occasional megalithic tombs similar to those in western Europe. Copper Age burial sites vary, but it would be wrong to see collective vs. single burial as the major dividing line. Instead, both ‘collective’ and single burial cemeteries involved the creation of a particular space dedicated to the dead, with successive burials being placed within it accompanied by kits of status and gender-marked grave goods; the difference, more apparent than significant, simply results from extent to which successive burials displaced earlier ones.
The common themes are burial structures accommodating the accumulated and sometimes rearranged remains of many individuals, and familiar genres of grave goods including weaponry, ornaments, and drinking vessels. These show the increasing formalization of death and its use to mark landscapes and fix their relationship to groups of people.
The human body in art
Italy is rich in prehistoric art, with new discoveries ongoing (Graziosi 1974; Istituto Italiano di Preistoria e. Protostoria 1992). For most of the Neolithic, representations of the human body are found principally
in small clay figurines (Fig. 50.1). Between 50 and 100 of these are known, depending upon the criteria used to define them (Fugazzola Delpino and Tinè 2003; Giannitrapani 2002; Holmes and Whitehouse 1998; Robb 2007, ch. 2). Figurines are found at Neolithic sites throughout Italy and Sicily, although, unlike in the Balkans, only one or a few are found at any individual site; this may reflect the relatively small volume of excavation at Italian sites as opposed to Balkan tells, or it may reflect a genuine social cause. Figurines are normally found broken among household debris; whilst what figurines were used for is unknown, the best guess is that they were relatively context-specific paraphernalia for a periodic rite of some kind.
All Italian Neolithic human figurines for which a gender can be deduced are female; most of the rest are fragmentary and may have simply lost the gender-specific zones. A few apparently ungendered examples with elaborate coiffures may represent special persons of some other kind, perhaps in the same way as the elaborately coiffed Maltese examples a millennium or more later. Whilst they are sometimes interpreted as evidence of a ‘Mother Goddess’ tied to early farming groups’ concern for the fertility of the earth (Fugazzola Delpino and Tinè 2003), a simpler explanation is that Neolithic people probably made a variety of human representations for different purposes and by chance the ones made of a lasting material happened to be female. A more striking fact about the figurines is their stylistic heterogeneity; they differ strikingly from site to site and there are very few recurrent ‘types’. For example, they have no common template governing which parts of the body were represented and what features on them were important to depict. Following Barth’s model for the reproduction of knowledge (Barth 1987), this suggests that they were made relatively infrequently for internal, possibly private purposes, by small, highly local communities of practice. Moreover, it may be the case that the definition of the body/person was situation-specific or contextual.
Figurines go out of use at the end of the Neolithic, except for a very few examples (including, intriguingly, two male ones at Ortucchio and Piano Vento). However, human representations are known from parietal art and statue-stelae. Cave paintings at Porto Badisco cave (Graziosi 1980) in the Salentine peninsula show males hunting deer with bows and females (indicated by a dot between the legs) in a repeated posture, possibly dancing. They are not definitively dated but the best guess from pottery found in the cave is the late Neolithic/transition to the Copper Age.
FIG. 50.1. a. Early-middle Neolithic figurines: Arene Candide (redrawn after Graziosi 1974, fig. 114c), Catignano (redrawn after Tozzi and Zamagni 2001, fig. 50.1), and Rendina (redrawn after Cipolloni Sampò 1982, fig. 39); b. Cave art, Porto Badisco (Graziosi 1974, fig. 157).
Aside from a few other caves with isolated paintings, the other site is Levanzo, off the western tip of Sicily, dated very shakily to the Copper Age, where a panorama of paintings represents possible anthropomorphs, abstract motifs, and what may be the world’s earliest representation of a tuna (Graziosi 1962). At more or less the same time, petroglyphs on exposed rock faces begin to be made in the Alps, particularly at Valcamonica and Valtellina (Fossati, this volume). These continue until the Iron Age, and the phasing is not entirely clear. It appears that Neolithic representations include a relatively restricted range of geometric motifs and anthropomorphs, some in the ‘orante’ position with hands raised; a line of women (indicated again by a dot between the legs) at Naquane may be engaged in a dance. In the Copper Age the repertory was broadened with images of weaponry, particularly daggers, ‘solar’ motifs of concentric circles or circles with radiating lines, and animals. Inasmuch as the cave and rock art lends itself to social interpretation, it underlines the renewed social (if not economic) importance of hunting as a gendered activity in the fourth millennium BC.
FIG. 50.2. Statue-menhirs and statue-stelae. a. Lunigiana (Italy) male and female (Robb 2009, fig. 3); b. Trentino (Italy) (front and reverse shown) (Robb 2009, fig. 3); c. Valcamonica (Italy) (Robb 2008, fig. 3); d. Laconi, Sardinia (Atzeni 2004, fig. 52 (female), fig. 16 (male)); e. Dolmen de Soto, Huelva (Shee Twohig 1981, fig. 71; for orientation see Bueno Ramirez 1995, 115).
Statue-stelae are a new genre of human representation which appears to arise in many places in Europe in the third millennium BC (Casini et al. 1995; Casini and Fossati 2004) (Fig. 50.2). These are flat, tabular stone statues, generally 1–1.5m tall, which were erected in groups or alignments in open countryside. They are visually simple, following a very schematic template for depicting the body. Gender is shown in a straightforward binary way indicated by weaponry for males and breasts and necklaces for females (Robb 1994b; Whitehouse 1992); occasionally clothing is depicted too. Elsewhere in Europe they were associated with burial sites, and they may represent ancestral beings. The association with burial is clear for two of the five Italian groups dating entirely or partially to the third millennium (Robb 2008). The Val d’Aosta/Canton Valais group which spans the Italian–Swiss border is known at two megalithic burial sites (St. Martin de Corleans and Sion, the latter with both pre-Beaker and Beaker components). The numerous Valcamonica/Valtellina group has been termed ‘statue-menhirs’ (e.g. unshaped or only crudely shaped blocks with anthropomorphic designs carved upon them, in contrast to the carefully shaped ‘statue-stelae’). They also differ markedly from the other groups in having a much less rigid anthropomorphic template, sometimes appearing simply as accumulations of imagery akin to the rock art of these two valleys. Whilst they may have had other roles, careful excavations at Osimo-Anvoìa (Fedele 2004) have shown that they were used in rituals during which some previously cremated human bone was re-deposited. Among the other groups, there is the Alto-Adige group north of Trento of about two dozen stelae; the Lunigiana group of stelae in the hinterlands of La Spezia which continues through the Iron Age; and in the far south a group of about a dozen stelae at Bovino in Puglia.
As a form of representation, statue-stelae underline several aspects of the fourth/ third-millennium BC transition mentioned above (Robb 2008, 2009). Whilst gender associations such as the association of weaponry with males probably pre-existed the Copper Age, the statue-stelae underline the politicization of such values. Moreover, emphasis in depicting the body shifts from showing it as heterogeneous and corporeal to showing it as following a standardized template in which body parts are subordinated to a vision of the whole; the body itself is reduced to a flat surface for display. Display focuses upon key pieces of material culture which are known from other contexts such as burial, exchange, and dress in everyday life and which probably formed part of an individual’s habitus. The effect may be to replace a situation-specific concept of personhood with a standardized, cross-context personhood based upon political relations, exchange, and display. The statue-stelae also underline the trend seen throughout Europe at this time (for instance in megalithic structures) of decorating the broader landscape with large stone references to ancestral presence.
The Ice Man
One cannot discuss the body in Neolithic Italy without mentioning the most famous and intensively studied prehistoric European body of all, ‘Ötzi’ or the Ice Man, from the South Tyrol (Höpfel et al. 1992; Spindler 1995; Spindler and Osers 2001). This body, naturally mummified beneath a glacier, which not only has soft tissues such as hair and skin preserved but is also associated with an assemblage of clothing and personal gear, was found in 1991 about 100m inside Italian territory, just south of the Alpine watershed between Italy and Austria. The Ice Man was an adult male who lived sometime between about 3300 and 3000 BC, at the transition between the Neolithic and the Copper Age. From isotope studies and stomach contents, we know that he lived in the high Italian valleys south of where he was found. He died at around 45–50 years of age, a considerably advanced age for the time, in unusual circumstances. When he died, probably in late spring, he was carrying a complete kit of travelling gear including cold-weather clothing, weaponry (including a bow and quiver-full of arrows, a copper axe, and a bifacially flaked stone kni
fe kept in a woven grass sheath), fire-making equipment, some general-use stone tools, and some items whose purpose we do not understand. Puzzlingly, his arrows and bow were unfinished and unready for use. Shortly before he died, he was shot in the left shoulder with a stone-tipped arrow whose head remains embedded in the body; he may also have a cut wound on the hand. He was not buried, but appears to have died of wounds and hypothermia where he was found, in a remote, uninhabited high Alpine pass. These circumstances have inspired a rife ‘What killed Ötzi?’ industry, with many hypotheses about him fleeing warfare and the like.
What have we really learned from this sensational discovery? The body itself has been influential in putting a face upon people of this time, particularly in details such as how his hair and beard looked. It provides the earliest evidence for tattooing known, in the form of small lines and crosses upon his lower back, knees, and ankles; these have been interpreted as medical therapy for osteoarthritis, but the logic of this is not particularly convincing and it is more likely that they represent some social marking of the body (Renaut 2004). Arguably more important has been the remarkable ensemble of things in wood, leather, fur, and grass found with the body. The remarkable organic preservation allows them to demonstrate many things we could otherwise only guess at, such as how knives were carried attached to the body (in a small woven grass sheath probably hung from the belt). Similarly, the Ice Man provides virtually our only vision of Copper Age costume; he was wearing an under-layer of a belt, loincloth and leggings, a striped knee-length tunic of strips of dark and light animal skin sewn together, a voluminous woven grass cape for outer insulation, a bearskin hat, and leather over-shoes lined with grass. Interestingly, it includes no woven cloth, just animal skins; whether or not this has implications for the ‘secondary products revolution’ depends upon how much weight one wishes to put upon a single example. Moreover, the Ice Man’s kit is a remarkable assemblage in that, unlike settlement finds, it is a set of items associated with a single individual at a single moment; unlike burial goods, however, it is not consciously assembled for ritual purposes. It thus tells us much about how ordinary life was lived; for example, it reinforces the association of weaponry with males, and shows that the armed, potentially violent body depicted in stelae was also lived in other contexts. Similarly, not only do the Ice Man’s clothing and kit provide him with a well-made, functional outfit for high-altitude mountaineering; they also show a keen use of colour, design, and citation to create a social body in a way which bears strong parallels to bodies depicted in the slightly later statue-stelae of the region (Robb 2009).
