Archaeobotany

Abstract

In 1987, the Institute of Classical Archaeology conducted a program of archaeobotanical research along with its first campaign of archaeological excavations at Capo Alfiere. This project was also continued in the second excavation campaign during the summer of 1990 (Morter 1990, 1992, 1994; Morter and Iceland 1995). The archaeobotanical component was designed to identify the main crops of the agrarian economy of the Neolithic community via the recovery of charred botanical macroremains. Prior to this study, the data on the prehistoric agriculture of Calabria was limited to a few grains of barley and indeterminate cereals collected at the Neolithic site of Piana di Curinga, which revealed little or nothing about the ancient crops (Ammerman et al., 1976). However, as Tinè (2004) emphasized in his survey of the Calabrian Neolithic, the archaeological research begun in the early 1970s in the central and southern areas of the region was limited to surface surveys that covered large swathes of territory around Acconia, Crotone, and Stilo. The excavation at Capo Alfiere therefore offered a unique opportunity to obtain precious data on the agriculture practiced by the populations that occupied the Ionian side of central Calabria between the Middle Neolithic (Stentinello facies) and the Later Neolithic (Diana facies). Two concerns-the well-known problem of conserving botanical remains from Neolithic deposits in southern Italy, and the considerable disturbance of the archaeological deposits by intensive agricultural activity in the post-war period-dictated a procedure that allowed the archaeobotanical project to proceed alongside the archaeological excavation. Previous experiences at Pizzica Pantanello (Costantini and Costantini Biasini 2003) and at Scamuso (Costantini et al. 1997) had demonstrated that the results (in terms of the number of macroremains recovered) were closely linked not only to the sampling strategy and the method of soil processing, but also to a direct and immediate comparison between the preliminary results and observations made during the flotation of the soil samples and the archaeological evidence from the contexts from which the samples had been drawn.