Archaeometric data on production and circulation of Neolithic Serra d’Alto ware in southern Italy during the fifth millennium BC

Abstract

Mid/Late Neolithic Serra d’Alto ware was widely diffused in southern Italy during the fifth millennium BC and shows homogeneous formal and technical features. Its wide distribution and frequent occurrence in funerary or cultual contexts have led many scholars to emphasise its exchange value. The issue of the circulation of finished pots rather than of a production model in different areas of Southern Italy, is explored by means of petrologic, mineralogical and chemical analyses of pottery samples from Apulia, Basilicata and Calabria. The mineralogical and chemical components of the Apulia and Basilicata samples fit very well with those of the Plio-Pleistocene silty clays of the Bradanic Trough, although major and trace element concentrations are significant in distinguishing different sub-groups of pottery related to their precise geographical setting. Calabrian pottery shows the exploitation of a local non-Apulian clay source. The strong similarities in technological processes and the formal analogies between pots found at distant Neolithic sites all over southern Italy does not correspond, then, to an actual exchange of finished pots produced in Apulia or Basilicata. A large network of middle-distance exchange of formal and technological models of production, between many Neolithic sites located in different geographical areas, is therefore proposed.