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Prehistoric Italy
In May of 1945 two young British Army officers, John Bradford and Peter Williams-Hunt, based with the R.A.F. at Foggia in the province of Puglia, near the heel of Italy, found that the World War II armistice left them with time on their hands. Both trained archaeologists, they readily prevailed upon the R.A.F. to combine routine training flights with pushing back the frontiers of science. The result of their air reconnaissance was to change profoundly the archaeological map of Italy.
The value of air-photography for archaeology had long been known; as early as 1909 pictures taken from a balloon had revealed the plan of Ostia, the port of ancient Rome. But the English, especially such pioneers as Major G. W. G. Allen and O. G. S. Crawford, early took the lead in interpreting, on photographs taken usually for military purposes, vegetation-marks showing the presence and plan of ancient sites buried beneath the soil, and invisible to the groundling’s eye. Where the subsoil has been disturbed in antiquity by the digging of a ditch, the increased depth of soil will produce more luxuriant crops or weeds; where soil-depth is decreased by the presence of ancient foundations, walls, floors, or roads, the crop will be thin, stunted, lighter in color. Air-photographs taken in raking light, just after sunrise or just before sunset in a dry season, especially over grassland, will highlight these buried landscapes. The Tavoliere, the great prairie where Foggia lies, thirty by fifty-five miles in extent, suits these conditions admirably; its mean annual rainfall is only 18.6 inches (0.6 in July) or half that of Rome, and Rome is a dry place, at least in summer. So Bradford and Williams-Hunt had high hopes for their project.
In a Fairchild high-wing monoplane, in which the position of struts and nacelles does not interfere with the operation of a hand-held camera, they took oblique shots at 1,000 feet with an air camera of 8-inch focal length. For vertical shots they used, at 10,000 feet, air cameras of 20-inch focal length, mounted tandem to produce overlap for stereoscopic examination, which makes pictures three-dimensional. The thousands of resulting photographs were at a scale of about 1:6000, or ten inches to the mile, over four times as large as the best available ground maps (the 1:25,000 series of the Italian Istituto Geografico Militare.)
Bradford, realizing the archaeological value of the millions of air-photographs taken during the war by the British and American Strategic Air Commands, prevailed upon the authorities to deposit prints, giving complete coverage for Italy, in Rome (with the British and Swedish Schools) and the American Academy. The initiative of Prof. Kirk H. Stone procured a similar set for the University of Wisconsin. The stereoscopic study of these collections will mean great strides in Italian archaeology. The accuracy of the data obtained is amazing: ditches estimated from the photographs with a good micrometer scale to be four feet wide proved when measured on the ground to be precisely that.
What the photographs revealed, scattered over the 1650 square miles of the Tavoliere, were over 2000 settlements, some up to 800 yards across, surrounded by one to eight ditches. Within the ditched area, and approached by in-turned, tunnel-shaped entrances, were smaller, circular patches, which looked like hut-enclosures, or “compounds.” Three examples of the sites photographed will illustrate typical settlements. At a site identified on the map ([Fig. 1.1]) as San Fuoco d’Angelone, eight miles northeast of Foggia, the photographs showed a ditch-enclosed oval measuring 500 × 400 feet, and an inner circle 260 feet across, with what proved to be the characteristic funnel-shaped opening. At Masseria Fongo, four miles south of Foggia, the oval was estimated at 480 yards long, with a 12-foot entrance and 12-foot ditches. At Passo di Corvo ([Fig. 1.2]), eight miles northeast of Foggia, the enclosure measured 800 × 500 yards, and the details were revealed by masses of flowers, yellow wild cabbage, mauve wild mint, white cow-parsley.
So much for results from the study of photographs. The next step for Bradford was to spend a fruitful season in the study. Archaeology is a comparative science: to know one site is to know nothing; to know a thousand is to see some factors unifying all. Thus the settlement-shapes of the Tavoliere are reminiscent of the fortified stronghold of Dimini in Thessaly ([Fig. 1.3]), dated by its excavation in the late neolithic age, which in Greece means about 2650 B.C. They also look like the fortified site of Altheim near Munich ([Fig. 1.4]), also late neolithic, which in Germany means about 1900 B.C. Culture in Europe moved from east to west; in general the farther west the site, the later it reached its successive levels of culture. The Tavoliere sites, lying geographically between Dimini and Altheim, might well be intermediate in date also; by their shape, at any rate, they are almost certainly to be dated sometime in the neolithic period. So much can be guessed before the indispensable next step is taken. The next step is excavation.
Prehistoric Sites in Italy
| Arene Candide | 12 |
| Balzi Rossi | 14 |
| Bologna | 11 |
| Cagliari | 27 |
| Caltagirone | 31 |
| Campo di Servirola | 7 |
| Canale | 30 |
| Capestrano | 17 |
| Castellazzo di Fontanellato | 5 |
| Como | 1 |
| Cozzo Pantano | 34 |
| Dessueri | 37 |
| Este | 4 |
| Foggia | 22 |
| Golasecca | 2 |
| Lipari Is. | 29 |
| Masseria Fongo | 23 |
| Matera | 25 |
| Milocca | 35 |
| Molfetta | 24 |
| Ostia | 19 |
| Padua | 3 |
| Pantalica | 33 |
| Parma | 6 |
| Passo di Corvo | 20 |
| Plemmirio | 36 |
| Reggio Emilia | 8 |
| Rimini | 13 |
| Rome | 18 |
| San Fuoco d’Angelone | 21 |
| San Giovenale | 16 |
| Spina | 9 |
| Su Nuraxi | 26 |
| Thapsos | 32 |
| Torre Galli | 28 |
| Vibrata Valley | 15 |
| Villanova | 10 |