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

par Dal Corso, Marta;Nicosia, Cristiano ;Balista, Claudio;Cupitò, Michele;Dalla Longa, Elisa;Leonardi, Giovanni;Kirleis, Wiebke
Référence Vegetation history and archaeobotany, 26, 1, page (5-24)
Publication Publié, 2017-01

Article révisé par les pairs

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Résumé :

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.