The potential of impasto pottery studies for understanding regional settlement dynamics, cultural transmission and connectivity in Bronze Age landscapes in Italy
The bulk of ceramic assemblages found on sites of protohistoric date in Italy is of atype of handmade pottery called impasto. Its study is labour-intensive as only limitedreference assemblages exist and few studies on its production are available. Moreover,impasto shapes were often produced over long periods. The study of the potteryderived from surveys carried out in northeastern Calabria (Italy) by GIA’s RaganelloArchaeological Project (RAP) since the 1990s is a case in point. In these surveys,113 pottery scatters dating between the Bronze- and Iron Ages were recorded. Of thesescatters, 30 could be assigned to specific periods, having yielded potsherds that couldbe related to chrono-typological studies. The potsherds of the remaining 83 scattershad no obvious reference to such typological frameworks, and painstaking analysis ofthe materials was needed to increase the number of datable sherds. In this paper, wediscuss the approach taken in our study of the pottery from the RAP surveys, whichwe based on the morphological characteristics of the material and on an extensivesearch for parallels from a range of published archaeological contexts. This approachresulted in new and important knowledge on the diachronic settlement developmentin the Raganello valley and in an assessment of its cultural connectivity across time andspace, raising questions about how underlying mechanisms of cultural transmissionwere constituted
