Le
Industrie Litiche del Giacimento Paleolitico di Isernia la Pineta: la
Tipologia, le Tracce di Utilizzazione, la Sperimentazione, ed. CARLO
PERETTO
Cosmo Iannone Editore. 1994. 493 pages, 197
figures, 68 tables; ISBN 88-516-0003-1 (€35.10)
The Lower Palaeolithic site of Isernia la Pineta (region
of Molise, Italy) was discovered in 1978 during the construction of
a main road running across southern Italy from Vasto, on the Adriatic
coast, to Naples. It is an open-air site where dense concentrations
of stone artefacts and animal bones have been found on four distinct
but penecontemporaneous surfaces or ‘living-floors’, and
was first brought to the attention of international scientists by a
paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science in
1981. The paper reported the results of potassium/argon dating of deposits
of volcanic origin lying in direct contact with one of the ‘living-floors’,
which produced an age of around 730,000 years (Sevink et al. 1983),
while potassium/argon dates produced by a different laboratory gave
almost identical results. The following year an article in Nature
reported the outcome of palaeomagnetic analyses, which correlated the
base of the stratigraphic series with the Matuyama Chron of reversed
polarity, and therefore to a phase older than 780,000 years, in the
Lower Pleistocene (Coltorti et al. 1982).
In the 1980s, most people were comfortable with the
idea of a hominid presence in Europe during the Lower Pleistocene. However,
during the early 1990s some archaeologists proposed a ‘short chronology’
for the occupation of Europe, arguing that at sites apparently dating
before 500,000 BP the finds almost invariably consisted of a few isolated
pieces collected from a disturbed, coarse matrix and, by implication,
may not have been genuine artefacts at all. The apparent absence of
any hominid remains dating before 500,000 BP was read as further proof
that there was no concrete evidence for human occupation in Europe before
this date (Roebroeks & van Kolfschoten 1994; 1995). Isernia la Pineta
was one of the sites of which the apparently Lower Pleistocene age came
to be questioned, primarily because of the micromammal fauna. According
to Roebroeks and van Kolfschoten, the presence of the water vole,
Arvicola terrestris cantiana, suggested a Middle Pleistocene date,
younger than 600,000 years. Although the validity of this ‘vole
clock’ as a chronological marker has still to be verified, and
the agreement between two laboratories suggests that the potassium/argon
dates may in fact be reliable (Aitken 1995), further support for an
early Middle Pleistocene date comes from more recent palaeomagnetic
dating, which failed to find any evidence for reversed polarity in more
than 110 samples studied (Gagnepain et al. 1999). The presence
of hominids in Italy during the Lower Pleistocene has, nevertheless,
been established at other sites, such as Monte Poggiolo (Milliken 1999).
Three volumes have been published on the results of
the first fifteen years of excavations at Isernia la Pineta, and all
three contain English summaries of parts of the text. The third volume
presents the spatial distribution of the artefacts and faunal remains
on the four ‘living-floors’ (Peretto 1999); the second volume
presents the data on the animal bones, focusing on the evidence for
intentional breakage and butchery marks (Peretto 1996); and the first
volume, which is the subject of this review, presents the lithic industries.
After a brief introduction, Chapter 2 gives an account of the history
of research at the site from 1978 until 1993, and the excavation techniques
used, and Chapter 3 gives a summary of the main characteristics of the
site: the stratigraphy, the dating (as it was understood in 1994), the
faunal remains, the pollen analyses, the environment, and the distribution
of the finds on the ‘living-floors’. The remaining chapters
present very detailed information on various aspects of the lithic industries:
Chapter 4 discusses the stratigraphic provenance and physical condition
of the artefacts; Chapter 5 describes the mineralogical and petrographic
characteristics of the different raw materials (chert and limestone)
used to make them; Chapter 6 presents comments on the lithic technology,
and details of the refits; Chapter 7 describes the knapping experiments
that were carried out by the researchers in order to understand the
way the local raw materials fractured; Chapter 8 gives a very detailed
technological and typological analysis of samples of the artefacts from
all of the ‘living-floors’; and Chapter 9 presents the results
of the microwear analyses carried out on a sample of artefacts from
one of the ‘living-floors’. The concluding chapter provides
a summary of the main points emerging from the previous chapters.
This volume was published in October 1994, exactly
one year after three of the young researchers responsible for the analysis
of the lithic industries (Corinne Crovetto, Martino Ferrari, and Fabio
Vianello), tragically perished in a plane crash while working at the
site. Their untimely death explains why many aspects of the analyses
appear unfinished, and Carlo Peretto, director of the excavations at
Isernia la Pineta, is to be commended for having managed to interpret
their notes and produce this volume. It is well-illustrated, with abundant
photographs and line drawings, but there is, however, an awesome amount
of data, and only small parts of the text have been translated into
English: there is a brief summary at the end of Chapters 5 through 9,
and only the concluding chapter has been translated in full. I fear
that the non-Italian speaker will therefore find that much of this book
is of limited use.
Though incomplete, the results of the analyses of
the lithic assemblages are nevertheless of great interest for our understanding
of the Lower Palaeolithic occupation of Europe. The artefacts are made
from local flint and limestone, and refits have been found which indicate
that knapping took place at the site. The limestone artefacts consist
of cobbles from which a few flakes have been removed, while the flint
artefacts, which number several thousand, consist of unretouched flakes
and flakes with a denticulate retouch; handaxes are absent. It was initially
assumed that the unretouched flakes were simply waste products resulting
from the manufacture of the flakes with denticulate retouch, thought
to be the tools. However, microwear analyses carried out on 218 artefacts
from one of the ‘living-floors’ revealed traces of use on
all of the 134 unretouched flakes examined, and on only very few of
the eighty-four artefacts with denticulate retouch. These analyses revealed
that the unretouched flakes had been used for cutting meat, fresh hide,
and hard animal matter such as bones, cartilage and tendons. The knapping
experiments showed that the denticulate artefacts are in fact none other
than the end result of an intense exploitation of the blocks of flint
using a prevalently bipolar, or anvil, technique. Together with the
results of the microwear analyses, this suggests that the real tools
at the site are therefore the unretouched flakes.
In many parts of Europe, tool replication experiments,
refitting and microwear analysis had increasingly become normal procedure
in Palaeolithic research since the 1970s, but in Italy in 1994, when
this book was published, such a processual approach to understanding
the lithic industries represented a radical departure from the norm,
which focused on the typology of the retouched tools in order to attribute
assemblages to cultural facies. Italian Palaeolithic research has been
influenced by two distinct sources: the naturalist perspective of French
Palaeolithic archaeology; and the humanistic-historical perspective
of classical archaeology. The concept of culture is derived from the
humanistic branch: cultures are archaeological facies, characterised
by industrial assemblages made up of particular types of artefacts which
represent the normative ideas and mental templates of past people. The
influence of the natural sciences is reflected in the importance given
to the idea of the evolution of these cultural facies, and changes through
time are monitored by changes in the industrial assemblage, marked by
the presence/absence of particular tool types as well as by their relative
percentages or ratios (Bietti 1991).
Ten years have passed since this book on the Palaeolithic
industries at Isernia la Pineta was published. While many Italians continue
to follow the traditional research agenda, it is becoming increasingly
clear that many others have been influenced by the approach adopted
in this book and in the two volumes which followed. This is reflected
in recent articles in the Rivista di Scienze Preistoriche,
which can perhaps be considered to be the Italian equivalent of PPS,
and in other journals, where the chronotypological approach has been
abandoned in favour of a processual one. This book therefore represents
a landmark in Italian Palaeolithic research.
Sarah Milliken
Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford
References
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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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