Modern archaeological excavation is neither haphazard nor a treasure hunt. It is a scientific business, preceded by careful survey, conducted with minute attention to levels and strata (the level in which an object is found determines its relative date; comparison with similar objects found elsewhere that can be dated determines its absolute date), and followed by scrupulous recording and publication of the evidence. A dig is not a treasure hunt. Naturally an archaeologist is pleased if he turns up gold or precious stones, but he knows in advance that an old stone age site will produce neither, but rather something infinitely more valuable, an intimate knowledge of man’s past, gained from ordinary humble objects of daily household use. To find these was Bradford’s object when he began to dig. (Williams-Hunt had meanwhile been posted to the Far East.) And he found them. Passo di Corvo, for example, yielded typical neolithic artifacts: stone axes, querns (hand-mills for grinding grain), bone points, stone sickles, pendants, spindle-whorls, and, best of all, vast quantities of potsherds, over 4,000 found in fourteen days. The potsherd is the archaeologist’s best friend. Pots are virtually indestructible, they turn up everywhere, and comparison with pots of similar shape and decoration, found elsewhere, yields precious information about dates, imports, exports, trade-routes, and the aesthetic taste of the pot’s maker and user.
S. Fuoco d’Angelone, for example, yielded typical neolithic pottery: rich brown or glossy black burnished ware, undecorated but thin-walled, symmetrical, and well-made (by hand, not on a potter’s wheel; sooner or later the use of the wheel produces shoddy commercialism). Together with it were found sherds of a fine-textured buff ware, painted with wide bands (fasce larghe) of tomato red. There were also very thin burnished bowls in cream and gray.
After excavation, the archaeologist must return to the study and to the comparative method; an exacting and exciting pursuit of parallels, especially for the pottery, in the hope of dating it and tracking down its origins. The facts are recorded in technical excavation reports, often buried in obscure or local journals. Oftener, the results of excavation are unpublished (it is always more fun to dig than to write.) In that case, the facts are treasured up in the notes or the memories of the excavator, often a local archaeologist. He belongs to a splendid breed, burning with enthusiasm, brimful of knowledge, and eager to share what he knows, in conversation if not in print.
So Bradford read and talked, and found his parallels. The wares he had excavated were familiar; they had been found elsewhere in the heel of Italy, especially opposite or in Matera, in Lucania, and Molfetta, in Puglia, between Barletta and Bari, in contexts dated 2600–2500 B.C. And this pottery proves to have affinities, too, with that of Thessalian Sesklo, a neolithic site not far from Dimini. This same type of pottery can be traced across the Balkans into Illyricum, and thence across the Adriatic to Bradford’s sites, giving in the process a glimpse of neolithic man as a more daring seafarer than had previously been thought.
And so, by patient, detailed work like Bradford’s, the newly-discovered sites are fitted into and enrich the pattern of the neolithic world. The total mapping fills a huge gap in the picture of the findspots of Neolithic sites in Italy. Before 1945, some 170 were known; now the Tavoliere alone makes up more than that number. And Passo di Corvo becomes the largest known neolithic site in Europe.
The things the archaeologists did not find are instructive, too. No weapons were found: the inference is that the Tavoliere folk were unwarlike. There is no evidence that the sites survived into the Bronze Age: it looks as though, like unwarlike peoples all too often elsewhere, they were wiped out in an invasion.
It is clear from the artifacts and the site-plans that neolithic man on the Tavoliere lived like neolithic man elsewhere in Italy, that the culture was on the whole uniform. He lived in a wattle-and-daub hut with a sunken floor, a central hearth, and a smokehole—the remote and primitive predecessor of the atrium-and-impluvium house of historic Roman times, whose central apartment had a hole in the roof with a pool below to catch rain water. Fortunately for us, his wife was a slovenly housekeeper: from her rubbish we can reconstruct her way of life. In his enclosures he penned the animals he had domesticated: other Italian sites have yielded the bones of the sheep, goat, horse, ox, ass, and pig. The dog has not yet become man’s best friend in the neolithic Tavoliere. Primitive man in Italy had a rudimentary religion: the Ligurian cave of Arene Candide has yielded statuettes of big-breasted, pregnant women, which probably had something to do with a fertility cult. In another Ligurian cave, Balzi Rossi, over 200,000 stone implements have been found. Not far up the Adriatic coast from Foggia, in the Vibrata valley, lie the foundations of 336 neolithic huts. We know something, too, of neolithic man’s burial customs, and macabre enough they seem: skulls have been found smeared with red ochre; apparently the flesh was stripped from the corpse—a practice called in Italian scarnitura—and the stain applied to the bared bone. All this suggests a level of culture far below that which the Near East was enjoying at the same time: Passo di Corvo’s mud huts are contemporary with the Great Pyramid of Egypt, with palaces and temples in Mesopotamia (see [Fig. 1.5]). But there is no evidence that neolithic man in Italy was priest-ridden or tyrannized over, as the Egyptians and Akkadians were; he is rather to be thought of as the ancestor of the sturdy peasant stock which was to form the backbone of Roman Italy.
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Fig. 1.5 Comparative table of early cultures.