出版社：Dipartimento di Storia Culture Civiltà - Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna
摘要：The SPR appeared in the scientific literature at the beginning of the 1980s (Sherratt 1981; Id 1983) when Sherratt proposed a theoretical model to analyse the economic, political and social changes that occurred between the end of the Neolithic and the beginning of the Bronze Age in the Near East and in Europe: the driving force behind these changes is identified in a changed human approach to the exploitation of the animal resource, no longer bred to be slaughtered as a source of primary products (meat, skin and bone), but kept alive to provide a range of secondary products (milk, wool, labour power) that do not involve killing the animal. The force of Sherratt's model lies in the fact that the series of innovations he considered in the SPR model "spread and interacted with each other so as to cause major economic changes" (Sherratt 1981, p. 183). The change of scale in the exploitation of the animal resource results in a strong intensification of agricultural production and likewise of the mobility of goods and people: the animal-drawn plough makes sustainable the working of a series of lands previously considered too poor and thus leads to an expansion of the occupied areas. At the same time the adoption of the cart makes it possible to reach areas which were previously unreachable and to establish a system of long-range trade for specialised productions (wool, metallurgy...). The more rapid cycle of utilisation of agricultural areas also left sufficient fallow land available for pastoralism, which was becoming increasingly important. Phenomena that had begun to emerge in the earlier millennia with the domestication of plants and animals, only now underwent a leap in magnitude: and it is precisely this that characterises the SPR. It is therefore not a matter of investigating the places and times when milk, wool, ploughs, carts, etc. were first attested, rather of trying to understand how much the combination of these factors led to the appearance of those phenomena of deforestation, expansion of settled areas, increase in cultivated and grazed areas, increase in population that, in a continuous and constant biunivocal relationship with each other, allowed the rise of that system of production and exchange of products that “marked the birth of the kinds of society characteristic of modern Eurasia” (Sherratt 1983). Although we now know that the exploitation of milk certainly predates Sherratt's hypothesis, it is the formation of a “package of products” that we wish to focus on here. From this point of view, therefore, we agree with the idea of “big workshop, where the first experiments were carried out with those technologies and practices that were later perfected and used in the Bronze Age with a scale jump.” (Rapi 2013, p. 526; English translation by the author). In this methodological framework, the origin and diffusion of the different “products” in Europe and Italy will be analysed, and an attempt will then be made to grasp the moment in which they became part of a system.
