Theory and World Archaeology: Italy (Part 1)

This part session deals with the contribution British archaeologists have added to the theoretical debate in Italian archaeology. A number of approaches to the Italian data have been made over the years, but recent work incorporating gender, ritual and acculturation and other post-processual theory have been amongst the most exciting, controversial and influential work in Italian prehistory, attracting both criticism and praise from Italian scholars.

Will post-processual archaeology ever catch on in Italy

In a paper given to the 13th International Congress of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences in Forli in September 1996, Alessandro Guidi discussed processual and post-processual trends in Italian archaeology. He argued that archaeology of broadly processual type has taken root in Italy, although restricted in the main to groups of scholars working in Rome and the Veneto. Post-processual archaeology, on the other hand, has had very little impact in Italy so far. Guidi explains this terms of:

a) the idealist character of post-processualism, which, while novel to Anglo-Saxon archaeologists in the 1980s, was already familiar to Italian archaeologists. However, it is not regarded favourably by Italian scholars, who attribute the long delay in introducing scientific and interdisciplinary methods to archaeology to the inheritance of Benedetto Croce's idealism
b) the commitment of Italian scholars interested in archaeological theory (still a small minority) to the approaches of processual archaeology.

Further reasons can be adduced, including those that have militated against the development of archaeological theory of any kind, such as the dominance of classical and historical traditions in archaeology, at the expense of anthropology and other social sciences. More controversially perhaps, it can be argued that the abuse of archaeology for political purposes during the fascist period has contributed to the post-war development of the subject as a purely empirical discipline, with no relevance to anything beyond itself.

This paper looks at possible ways in which Italian archaeology might develop in future. While it is unlikely, and undesirable, that Italian archaeology will simply follow the British journey from processualism to post-processualism, there are other possible approaches and new areas of study, including the symbolic/cognitive and social/political realms addressed by post-processualism. These are traditions well-rooted in Italy itself. One of these is the Neo-Marxist school long established in archaeology. Up to now Marxist archaeology in Italy has been mostly associated with processual approaches, but it contains elements which resonate with the structural Marxism of some French and British scholars and has the potential to be taken further in this direction. Another tradition has as yet had no impact in archaeology, but is found elsewhere in Italian scholarship: this is the Italian feminist school, developed in philosophy, theatre studies and literature. Mary Baker has recently suggested that the approach of Italian feminists has much to offer archaeologists and could lead to entirely new ways of thinking and writing about the past. Both these 'native' traditions, perhaps in combination with ideas taken from Anglo-Saxon post-processualism, have the potential to open up a new era of Italian archaeological research directed at subjects rarely addressed so far, including cognitive and gender archaeology.

It's all in the game: gender in Italian prehistory

As archaeology is embedded in contemporary society, gender is entangled in archaeological practice. Gender biases have become embedded in archaeological discourse. Archaeological knowledge is constructed along lines of reasoning that have become fairly traditional. Taking these traditions in archaeological reasoning for granted, archaeologists (re)produce the gender biases inherent in archaeological discourse. An engendered perspective on past societies, therefore, requires a calling into question of the narratives, concepts, ideologies and signifying practices that make up an archaeological discourse.

Recent work has put gender theory into the practice of Italian pre- and protohistory. A rather essentialist approach to gender which, for example, Robb and Whitehouse have adopted, (re)produces the gender biases inherent in archaeological discourse. More sophisticated approaches in terms of gender to Italian prehistory expose traditional lines of archaeological reasoning, but seem not to reflect on gender as part of archaeological discourse in general. That's where engendering Italian archaeology should start from

Raising the dead: statue menhirs in their ritual context

Statue menhirs, or statue stelae, are a defining feature of the North Italian Copper Age. These monumental stone carved anthropomorphic figures have been interpreted as the localised manifestation of a pan European deity, either a mother goddess figure, or an Indo-European sky god. However considerable variation in the iconography and morphology of statues exists. Traditional interpretations have relied upon iconographic analysis alone without paying adequate attention to the archaeological context of figures and in particular fail to account for the apparently deliberate breakage and reuse of images which suggests that they may have had a prescribed lifespan of efficacy. This paper draws upon the ethnographic record to examine the context of monumental anthropomorphic representations across a range of small scale societies. An alternative interpretation of statue menhirs is offered arguing that they may be better considered as representations of ancestors and that they arise as part of the social dynamic originally initiated by the neolithisization of western Europe in which lineage, kinship, and the creation of, and attachment to, place were significant structuring principles. The rendering of human figures in stone may have served as a means of presencing the ancestral dead in ritual contexts designed to facilitate communication between the worlds of the living and the dead. In this way the small scale pre-literate societies of the North Italian Copper Age utilised items of material culture in a performative fashion as a means of constructing social memory drawing upon metaphors of human anatomy, architecture, and the landscape as a means of presencing the past in the present.

Health, activity, wealth and status in Iron Age Pontecagnano

In Italy, joint analysis of funerary assemblages and skeletal biology has rarely been done, in spite of the obvious insights to be gained from such an approach. In this paper, I compare grave goods with skeletal markers of health and stress in a sample of over 300 Iron Age individuals from Pontecagnano. The statistical results portray a complex situation. On the one hand, there was almost no relationship between grave goods and indicators of childhood health and nutrition (stature, enamel hypoplasia, cribra orbitalia). On the other hand, markers of adult health sometimes vary between sub-groups who were buried with different grave goods; in the clearest example, a group of 5th-4th century BC males buried with no grave goods also had much higher rates of trauma, periostitis and Schmorl's nodes, suggesting a highly stressful adult lifestyle. This analysis suggests that when skeletal and archaeological data are used together, the result is a more complex interpretation of society than can be gained from either source alone.

Time and Space in Italian Archaeology

For some time now, the concepts of time and space - traditionally vital in archaeological investigation - have been at the centre of a review in archaeological theoretical thought. This paper analyses archaeological perceptions of time and space in Italian archaeology, exploring the way in which they have affected archaeological research and interpretation. The paper suggests ways in which new perceptions of space and time in archaeology could benefit the study of Italian archaeology, and puts forward new ways of looking at the landscape evidence in Veneto at the end of the Late Bronze Age.

"Sleeping with the enemy". Mixed residency patterns in pre-Roman Southern Italy

This paper deals with the evidence for the Greeks living in Native communities and Natives living in Greek communities from the first Greek settlement of the area until the Roman take-over. From the theoretical point-of-view this is a culture contact situation. However, it is usually discussed from what can be regarded as a diffusionist perspective (i.e. the spread of Greek culture to the Natives), although rarely are theoretical frameworks explicitly defined. The problems inherent in such an approach are compounded by the traditions of Classical archaeology which inevitably favour Greek culture. Thus, Classical archaeology has tended to regard the acculturation of Greek culture by the Natives as both natural and inevitable. This descriptive and generalising approach offers no real explanation of the processes of acculturation. My approach can be seen as taking a post-processualist view of the individual as an important social actor. In looking at the role of individuals living among the other community, I hope to cast some new light on how acculturation may actually have worked.

Collecting Italian Prehistory

This paper will consider changes in the concept and process of collecting Italian prehistory, and in particular the way in which collections of prehistoric objects have been used to represent competing national, regional and local identities over the last two hundred years of Italian history. Using a wide-ranging contextual approach, which draws upon museological, archaeological, political and socio-economic sources of information, it will focus upon the strategies played out by individual collectors and interest groups for control of prehistoric objects, and the conceptual frameworks and institutional contexts within which collections of these objects were placed and assessed.

This paper will consider changes in the concept and process of collecting Italian prehistory, and in particular the way in which collections of prehistoric objects have been used to represent competing national, regional and local identities over the last two hundred years of Italian history. Using a wide-ranging contextual approach, which draws upon museological, archaeological, political and socio-economic sources of information, it will focus upon the strategies played out by individual collectors and interest groups for control of prehistoric objects, and the conceptual frameworks and institutional contexts within which collections of these objects were placed and assessed.