Straight-tusked elephants in the Middle Pleistocene of northern Latium: Preliminary report on the Ficoncella site (Tarquinia, central Italy)

Abstract

This article presents the preliminary results of research recently performed at La Ficoncella (Northern Latium) site. Discovered during the 1990s, the site of La Ficoncella has been inserted in recent years into a research program promoted by the fruitful collaboration between the Museum of Allumiere, Soprintendenza, the University of Rome “La Sapienza”, and CNR. The La Ficoncella site, still only at the beginning of excavation activities, has yielded various skeletal remains of Palaeoloxodon and a few other anatomical elements of other species, such as Bos primigenius and Equus sp., in association with four stone artefacts.The stratigraphic unit, still under study, contains fauna and lithic remains which could be dated to MIS 13, thanks to the presence of an ignimbritic layer at the top of the sequence, dating to MIS 12 (terminus ante quem). According to this data, the La Ficoncella site can be considered as an important source of information about the dynamics of human population and the techno-economic relationship between humans and elephants during the early Middle Pleistocene in central Italy.