Human Development in Landscapes | People | Doctoral research student Marta dal Corso, M.A.

Environmental History and Development of the Human Landscape in a North-Eastern Italian Lowland during Bronze Age: A Multidisciplinary Case Study.

During the Middle and the Late Bronze Age, the civilization of terramare spread over the entire Po Plain in Northern Italy, on the emerging network between the Italian peninsula, the over-Alpine regions, and the Mediterranean. Some archaeobotanical and geoarchaoelogical studies carried out on terramare in the Southern Po Plain suggest a high impact on tree cover vegetation and on soil use due to intense cultivation and land use during the apex of this civilization. The present project aims at investigating the environmental and land use history of the lowland human landscape of the Valli Grandi Veronesi area, lower Venetian Plain, through analyses of botanical microfossils, such as pollens, non-pollen palynomorphs and phytoliths, compared with analyses of macro-remains. In this alluvial basin, nowadays devoted to crops, several terramare formed a polity among settlements. Among these, the village of Fondo Paviani (Legnago, VR), core of my research, represented a central place. This settlement was active until the Final Bronze Age, being the only element of resilience surviving the crisis that led to the depopulation of the entire Po Plain at the end of the Late Bronze Age.

The lack of mires, lakes and other proper contexts for palaeo-environmental investigations in the study area led to the integration of different archives (on-site, off-site/natural site), in order to collect information about land use and vegetation dynamics at different scales. The archaeological settlement of Fondo Paviani offered contexts in situ, where botanical micro-remains could be studied providing an overview of vegetation and plant use at a local scale. The deposits inside the ditch around the settlement have been sampled being contemporaneous to the life of the settlement since the establishment of the enclosures and the alluvial layers covering the site. Thus, these deposits are a potentially interesting archive for the period of crisis and abandonment of the village and following periods. Micromorphology and geoarchaeology enable a control on the deposition processes that formed the sampled deposits, while archaeological chronology and absolute dating through AMS radiocarbon dating provide chronological support for the palaeo-environmental study in general. The project is carried out in collaboration with the chairs of Pre- and Protohistory of Padova University, Italy, Prof. Giovanni Leonardi and Prof. Michele Cupitò, and in collaboration with the geoarchaeologists Dr. Claudio Balista and Dr. Cristiano Nicosia.

In order to avoid direct human influence and to cover a longer time frame, a continuous, natural sequence has been pursued and cored in correspondence with a peatland inside the palaeo-river valley of Menago River about 5 km northwest of Fondo Paviani in the natural park of Brusà-Le Vallette (Cerea, VR). This area corresponds to one of the few portions of the riverine landscape preserved after land reclamation affected the region beginning in the 18th century. Other natural undisturbed and continuous archives for palaeo-environmental investigations are only available when we widen the research area. Thus, a core from the shore of a small lake of glacial origin in Castellaro Lagusello (Monzambano, MN), south of Lake Garda, has been sampled. This site, even if outside the alluvial plain, provides a unique sequence in the region for the period of investigation (that can be extended to a much longer period of time). Changes in the lake level could provide information about climate, and general vegetation changes can also be followed, especially if correlated with the other studies carried out on lakes of Northern Italy. The study of this core will be carried out in collaboration with Dr. Cesare Ravazzi of the Italian team at CNR-IDPA, Bergamo.