Theory and World Archaeology: Italy (Part 2)

This part session proposes to let Italian archaeologists speak for themselves, presenting their own theoretical agenda - linked to the nature of their archaeological record and their contingent social and historical situation. The picture that will emerge is of an archaeology which reads and is aware of the debate in the English-speaking world, but does not necessarily consider it completely relevant to its own particular problems.

Is Italian archaeology theoretical?

Italian classical archaeology is, by definition, a theoretical branch of our discipline. For at least a century classical archaeologists have made much use of history, art history, philosophy and other similar paradigms to interpret their data. The problem was that field practice in this branch of archaeology was introduced quite recently.

On the other hand, prehistoric archaeology is a different story. The paper will develop previous work of the author on the history of ideas in archaeology to reconstruct a coherent picture of the development of Italian archaeological thought.

What is new in Italian palaeolithic archaeology?

Palaeolithic and Mesolithic Theory and Method in Italian archaeology

The paper reviews Italian Palaeolithic and Mesolithic theoretical and methodological issues and debates their state-of-the-art. Today, past hunter-gatherer research reflects the 'Italian pluriverse' and represents a somewhat secluded sector of archaeology, being the subject of Natural Sciences departments.

The present mainstream approach is culture historical, based on mere chronostratigraphy and artefact typology, with peculiar implications for culture change, human-(physical) environment relations, gender archaeology etc. Other perspectives, though existing, are in a minority. This situation arises from political factors and academic power control, and it is hardly representative of the rich historical research tradition.

Archaeology of the War, Archaeology through the War

The paper discusses a project on the Altopiano di Asiago (northern Italian Alps) which was one of the most important theatres of WW1. Extraordinary air photographic documentation (Italian, French and British military, both vertical and oblique) is used in a "Hi Tech" approach (Remote sensing, Image Processing, Virtual Reality, GIS etc.) to reconstruct the wartime landscape. This "archaeology as theatre" (scenery recognition of the theatre of war) is highly informative ("war as information", "Archaeology of the War") and emotionally charged.

This concentration of war infrastructure provides promising material to study the short and medium-term formation processes of the archaeological record.

Another aspect is the possibility that the wartime air photos can be used to filter out the "war layer" ("war as noise") to reveal the fossil landscapes that pre-existed the conflict ("archaeology through the War") and were shown up by the wartime deforestation, the most significant such episode of the Holocene.

Interpreting funerary ideology: the orientalising cemeteries of Pontecagnono (Salerno)

There are a number of schools of thought within European archaeology which engage with the "Anthropology of the Ancient World" and "Post-processual archaeology".

Following such an approach, this paper will discuss the complex relationship between social relations and their "reflection" in funerary practice. Cemeteries are studied as a "structured context" which offers a "metaphorical" picture of reality. Unfortunately, such analyses often pose more questions than they answer.
The starting point will be a preliminary analysis of the Pontecagnano (Salerno) cemeteries during the Orientalising period (last quarter 8^th - mid 6^th century BC.). Strategies in the use of space and funerary practice will be studied to examine differentiation between family and ethnic groups. Attention will also be paid to the action of varying ideologies within a single context, strategies of political and cultural "resistance", the relations between genders and age sets and the demographic and social "representativeness" of the sample.

Between trend and tradition: Italian Classical Archaeology in the last twenty years

The paper aims to assess the current situation in Italian Classical Archaeology from the theoretical point of view. This will be based on an historical review of the main cultural currents characterising the last twenty years. A crucial background role is clearly still played by the idealist tradition, based on frameworks devised by German and Italian philosophers in the first decades of this century. Since the 70s, Marxist formulations have introduced some new perspectives, while processual archaeology has had only minimal impact in classical studies.

This has resulted in a general backwardness in terms of approaches, methods and techniques, while specialist philological skills have continued to dominate the scene. In recent years, even if theoretical debate still attracts only a limited audience, new interations between traditional approaches and new trends are being experimented with: within a post-modern framework, a reconciliation between trend and tradition appears, at least in theory, finally possible.

Applying models in the Roman Period landscape studies

When studying Roman period landscapes, Italian scholars are loath to accept, or at least rarely apply models which were developed for less complex social structures, even though they can give interesting results with regard to a number of problems, i.e. land use, relations between town and countryside, geographical and political borders.

This is just one aspect of the problem involving theory in landscape studies: after a substantial phase of theoretical reflection - though little applied in final results - we are now in a forced pragmatic phase where the gap between theory and practice is becoming wider and wider. Model theory, being mostly applied in prehistoric and pre-Roman research, despite the results that it can give, is generally rejected and misunderstood. Some examples will be presented, with the aim of understanding if model theory may be applicable in such complex situations, and if it is worth applying despite traditional methods of reading landscape data.

Applying models in the Roman Period landscape studies

Despite a growing interest in the study of biological remains from archaeological sites, zooarchaeology has made a minimal contribution so far to the debate on archaeological theory in Italy. There is no doubt that the study of animal bones has made much progress since the not too distant days in which bones were just considered an undesirable product of archaeological excavations. At the same time the modern approach to the interpretation of the archaeological evidence seems to have taken on board the importance of the relationship between people and the other components of the human ecosystem (animals, plants, landscape etc.). However, a substantial gap still exists between theory and practice. Although methodological improvements can be of help in filling this gap, the solution is more likely to lie in a general revision of the approach to archaeology, a discipline which is still much constrained by the idiosyncrasies of the Italian academic and political systems.