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Bronze Age crop processing evidence in the phytolith assemblages from the ditch and fen around Fondo Paviani, northern Italy

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Abstract

The Terramare civilization (ca. 1650–1150 cal bce) on the Po plain in northern Italy is considered to have been an agrarian society typical of the European Bronze Age, with a subsistence economy based on arable and livestock farming, and which showed some innovations such as the introduction of millets as cultivars. Some questions are still open concerning the agricultural system, the food and non-food uses of plant resources and the organization of labour at these sites. In this paper, for the first time, phytolith analysis has been integrated with more standard archaeobotanical methods applied to material from the long-lasting settlement of Fondo Paviani, Verona. The aim of the study was to use phytoliths as a tool to investigate the cereal economy in order to detect different grass subfamilies and possibly provide hints about local crop processing activities. For this purpose, two contexts, a shallow ditch at the edge of the site that had been filled with domestic waste and a near-site fen with natural infilling, have been the objects of a multi-proxy inter-disciplinary investigation. This includes the analyses of phytoliths, pollen, NPP, sediment texture and micromorphology. The phytolith record shows remains of panicoid as well as pooid grasses, including chaff material with frequent traces of threshing that indicate the processing of cereals at the site and the possible use of chopped straw as fodder. The comparison of different kinds of evidence strengthens the interpretation and offers a new perspective on the application of phytolith analysis to Bronze Age northern Italy.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are thankful to M. Rottoli and F. Berto, who studied the macro-remains at this site, and to K. Neumann and her working group at Goethe University in Frankfurt for providing a methodological introduction to phytolith analysis. Moreover, we wish to thank S. Dazert for grain size analysis and W. A. Out and P. Anderson for data discussion. We give additional thanks to the reviewers and the editors for their constructive feedback. Thanks also to S. Needs and J. Greig for the improvements of the language. This paper is part of the doctoral research of M. Dal Corso, carried out at the Graduate School “Human development in landscapes” of Kiel University and financed by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). The samples discussed in the present paper were collected during excavation campaigns run by the University of Padova (Italy).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Prehistory and Protohistory, Kiel University, Johanna-Mestorf Str. 2-6, 24118, Kiel, Germany

    Marta Dal Corso & Wiebke Kirleis

  2. Centre de Recherches en Archéologie et Patrimoine, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Avenue F.D. Roosevelt, CP 175-50, 1050, Brussels, Belgium

    Cristiano Nicosia

  3. Geoarcheologi Associati S.a.s. 20, Via Guerzoni, 35010, Cadoneghe, Padova, Italy

    Claudio Balista

  4. Dipartimento dei Beni Culturali, University of Padova, 7 Piazza Capitaniato, 35139, Padova, Italy

    Michele Cupitò, Elisa Dalla Longa & Giovanni Leonardi

Authors
  1. Marta Dal Corso
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  2. Cristiano Nicosia
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  3. Claudio Balista
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  4. Michele Cupitò
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  5. Elisa Dalla Longa
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  6. Giovanni Leonardi
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  7. Wiebke Kirleis
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marta Dal Corso.

Additional information

Communicated by K. Neumann.

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Dal Corso, M., Nicosia, C., Balista, C. et al. Bronze Age crop processing evidence in the phytolith assemblages from the ditch and fen around Fondo Paviani, northern Italy. Veget Hist Archaeobot 26, 5–24 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-016-0573-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-016-0573-z

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