Earliest
Italy: An Overview of the Italian Paleolithic and Mesolithic by MARGHERITA
MUSSI
Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers. 2001.
399 pages, 143 text figures. ISBN 0-306-46463-2 (£63.00)
Earliest Italy is the first English language
overview of the Italian Palaeolithic and Mesolithic, and as such should
make a welcome addition to library bookshelves. Italy has a very rich
archaeological record, and prehistoric sites are found virtually throughout
the mainland and islands, both in caves and in the open-air, along the
present-day coast, in the interior valleys, and on the high mountains.
Italy has a surface area of more than 300,000 square kilometres, with
100,000 square kilometres of mountains and 125,000 square kilometres
of hills, encircled by 9000 kilometres of coasts. In the south, Sicily
reaches the 37th parallel, the same latitude as Algeria, Tunisia and
Syria, while in the north, at a distance of 1100 kilometres, the country
extends up to the Alps at the 47th parallel, culminating at 4810 metres
above sea level with Mont Blanc, the highest peak in Europe. The country
is thus characterised by a wide range of geographic variation which
can be expected to have played an influential role in the land use of
Palaeolithic and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers.
After giving a very brief introduction to the geography
of the country and the history of archaeological research, Mussi structures
her book in six period-based chapters in each of which she synthesises
the main characteristics of the stratigraphies, faunas and stone tool
assemblages of three or four principal sites, and then comments on themes
such as settlement patterns, subsistence strategies and social systems.
I will highlight some of the salient points of each chapter, saving
most of my comments for the discussion which follows.
Chapter 2, ‘The Earliest Settlement’,
considers the evidence for the presence of the first humans in Italy.
Mussi is an advocate of a ‘short chronology’, believing
that such evidence dates to the early Middle Pleistocene, between 650,000
BP and 400,000 BP (see also Mussi 1995; for a different view, see Milliken
1999; 2004). Despite the absence of handaxes at many of these sites,
she argues that assemblages of this age are all part of the Acheulean
technocomplex, and the absence of handaxes can be explained by specialised
activities, sampling bias, and lack of suitable raw material. Although
human population density appears to have been low, it seems that a substantial
part of the Italian peninsula was explored and settled, from Liguria
in the north to Calabria in the south, and open-air sites are found
both by the sea and in the hills of the interior.
Chapter 3, ‘Real Colonization’, addresses
the late Middle Pleistocene archaeological record, between 360,000 BP
and 130,000 BP. In this period there are more dated sites, and Acheulean
assemblages are found all over the mainland, primarily in the open-air.
As in most of Europe, the first Levallois industries also appear at
this time. Mussi argues that there is no major change in site density
and exploited resources compared with the period of ‘earliest
settlement’, but there is evidence of seasonal occupation of some
mountain areas, and the first signs of successful competition with carnivores
for the use of caves.
Chapter 4, ‘On Neandertals and Caves’,
is concerned with the Middle Palaeolithic period, from 130,000 BP to
40,000 BP. Most of the Mousterian industries can be classified within
the framework established in France, as Typical Mousterian, Denticulate
Mousterian, Ferrassie or Quina Mousterian, though no industries that
could be described as Mousterian of Acheulean tradition have been discovered.
In addition there is the Pontinian Mousterian, an industry made on very
small pebbles, which is peculiar to west-central Italy. Mussi considers
the nature of Mousterian assemblage variability on both an intrasite
and an intersite level, and discusses topics such as lithic raw material
procurement strategies, the use of shell as a raw material, and regional
differentiation and chronological diversification. Unfortunately this
chapter perpetuates the fallacy that caves constituted the focus of
Neanderthal settlement patterns, whereas an exhaustive search of the
literature has shown that this is not in fact the case, with open-air
sites outnumbering cave and rockshelter sites by a ratio of at least
two to one (Milliken 2001).
Chapter 5, ‘Moderns versus Neandertals’,
addresses the question of the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition.
In Italy the lithic industries found immediately after the Mousterian
are classified as belonging either to the Uluzzian or to the Aurignacian,
and there seems to be a tacit assumption that the former were made by
Neanderthals while the latter were made by modern humans, Homo sapiens.
In fact, human remains are very rare in the Italian Early Upper Palaeolithic,
and consequently the association between different hominid species and
lithic industries remains unclear.
Chapter 6, ‘Fully Equipped Hunter-Gatherers’,
is concerned with the Gravettian and Early Epigravettian periods, between
25,000 BP and 16,000 BP. Beginning with the Gravettian, the archaeological
record becomes more comprehensive, due to the extensive array of material
found, such as works of art and the first evidence for burials. Although
human settlement was as scattered as it had been in previous occupations,
and in fact only about fifty sites can be dated to this period, the
occupation of Italy appears to have been stable. This is in contrast
to the preceding five thousand or so years, between 30,000 BP and 25,000
BP, when only isolated individuals, or small human groups, visited part
of the Italian peninsula episodically. Some of the Gravettian and Early
Epigravettian sites are multilayered settlements with thousands of artefacts
indicating frequent reoccupation of a preferred spot, while others are
short-term campsites.
Chapter 7, ‘The Great Shift’, is the final
chapter in the book, and addresses the Late Glacial and Early Postglacial
record, corresponding with the Final Epigravettian and the Mesolithic
periods, from 16,000 BP to 7500 BP. Given the presence of mountain ranges
within a short distance of the coast, Italy is ideally suited to illustrate
the great shift in human adaptation that occurred at this time. Rising
temperatures resulted in rising sea levels, which in turn caused the
coastal plains to shrink and, in some areas, to disappear. This is reflected
in a shift from marine to terrestrial molluscs in the shell middens,
and in the abandonment of many sites. On the other hand, with rising
temperatures the nearby mountain ranges became accessible to plants,
animals, and, eventually, to humans, and hundreds of sites have been
recorded between 1900 and 2300 metres above sea level, and up to the
Alpine watershed. Some of these sites were short-lived, while others
were repeatedly occupied, during summer excursions to hunt ibex and
chamois. Sicily was permanently colonised during this period, although
the evidence for pre-Neolithic occupation on Sardinia is more ambiguous.
The author of any archaeological textbook, and in
particular of one that is trying to make available to the English-speaking
world information that has largely been published in a foreign language,
bears a heavy responsibility: to present a clear, accurate and unbiased
account of the facts, and of the various ways these facts have been
interpreted. On the whole I believe that Mussi has achieved this, though
not consistently throughout the book, and there are some unfortunate
omissions and inaccuracies. It is not possible in the space of this
short review to flag up all of these, so I will restrict my comments
to just a couple of themes in order to illustrate the kind of reservations
I hold.
It would have been useful, for example, to have been
provided with more tables which collate information, such as an inventory
of Neanderthal skeletal remains. This table would have shown that these
have been found at twenty-eight sites (and not from ‘a dozen or
so sites’, p.113), and Italy in fact occupies second place, after
France, for the greatest number of sites with such remains. In Italy,
as in the rest of Europe, the first Neanderthal fossils were discovered
towards the end of the nineteenth century. They were found at the site
of Caverna delle Fate in Liguria in 1887-1888, although the bones were
not identified as being Neanderthal until much later, since at that
time the characteristics of this species were still poorly known. Caverna
delle Fate, which is not mentioned at all by Mussi, is an important
site, not only because of its role in the historical development of
prehistoric studies in Italy, but also because of the number of Neanderthal
remains found there: sixteen fossils representing numerous individuals,
both adults and children (Giacobini et al. 1984). Another striking
omission from Mussi’s book is the complete Neanderthal skeleton
that was found at Grotta Lamalunga near Altamura, Apulia, in 1993 (Pesce
Delfino & Vacca 1994). These two sites aside, the majority of the
Neanderthal remains in Italy consist of the odd bone or the odd tooth.
The fragmentary nature of the Neanderthal remains from the Italian sites
is interpreted by Mussi as supporting the idea that burial of the dead
was not practised, since mortuary behaviour in the Palaeolithic is generally
assumed to have involved the burial of the entire corpse of the deceased.
The fact that usually only a few bones or teeth are found is interpreted
as being the result of natural processes, in this case carnivore scavenging
activities. But I would argue that just as the assumption that articulated
skeletal material constitutes prima facie evidence for deliberate mortuary
practices is flawed, so too is the assumption that the absence of articulated
skeletal material implies the absence of mortuary behaviour. We cannot
exclude the possibility that, at least at some of these sites, we are
witnessing mortuary practices based on disarticulated Neanderthal bones
resulting from manipulations on corpses of the deceased (Milliken 2001).
Another table which Mussi could usefully have included
would have been one showing the radiometric dates of Uluzzian and Aurignacian
sites. This would have revealed that the Uluzzian sites in the south
appear to be more or less contemporary with (or even later than) the
Early Aurignacian sites in the north, while the Early Aurignacian sites
in the south are more recent than those in the north, a pattern which
has been interpreted as indicating a slow migration of anatomically
modern humans from the north to the south (Bietti 1997). Such a table
would also have revealed that there are, however, only three dated Aurignacian
sites in the north, and only five in the centre/south. Instead, what
Mussi actually tells us is that “in Italy the full Upper Palaeolithic
(i.e., the Aurignacian) is found everywhere by 31 ka” (p. 208).
On the whole the text is well written, though Mussi
has adopted the first person plural rather than singular, which is an
odd stylistic choice for a single authored book, in particular since
many of the views she expresses are not widely shared. My main criticism,
though, beyond the omissions and inaccuracies, resides with what one
can only describe as shoddy editing and proof reading: at a price of
£63, and published by a reputable company such as Kluwer Academic/Plenum
Publishers, one neither expects, nor deserves, a book which has numerous
typographic errors, superimposed and consequently illegible text, maps
which have been printed upside down, blurred photographs, and indecipherable
charts.
Despite the reservations which I have briefly outlined
here, the English-speaking student of the Italian Palaeolithic and Mesolithic
should nevertheless find much useful information in this book.
Sarah Milliken
Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford
References
Bietti, A., 1997. The transition to anatomically modern humans: the
case of peninsular Italy. In Clark, G.A. & Willerment, C. (eds),
Conceptual Issues in Modern Human Origins Research. New York, Aldine
de Gruyter,132-150
Giacobini, G., de Lumley, M.A., Yokoyama, Y. & Nguyen, H.V., 1984.
Neanderthal child and adult remains from a Mousterian deposit in Northern
Italy (Caverna delle Fate, Finale Ligure). Journal of Human Evolution
13, 687-707
Milliken, S., 1999. The earliest occupation of Italy. Accordia Research
Papers 7, 7-36
Milliken, S., 2001. The Neanderthals in Italy. Accordia Research
Papers 8, 11-82
Milliken, S., 2004. Out of Africa or out of Asia? The colonization of
Europe by Homo erectus. Athena Review 4 (1), 21-34.
Mussi, M., 1995. The earliest occupation of Europe: Italy. In Roebroeks,
W. & van Kolfschoten, T. (eds), The Earliest Occupation of Europe.
Leiden, University of Leiden Press, 27-50
Pesce Delfino, V. & Vacca, E., 1994. Report of an archaic human
skeleton discovered at Altamura (Bari), in the Lamalunga district. Human
Evolution 9, 1-19
Review Submitted: April 2004
The views expressed in this review are not
necessarily those of the Society or the Reviews Editor.
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