Radiocarbon Dating and Italian Prehistory.

Barker, Graeme

In 1988, in the aftermath of the re-structuring that followed the classics review by the University Grants Commission, and of the archaeology review that followed closely on its heels, a new Department of Mediterranean Studies was established in Queen Mary and Westfield College, London, incorporating members of staff of the classics departments of Queen Mary College and Westfield College (then in the process of amalgamation) and of the archaeology department of the University of Lancaster. A particular strength of the Lancaster department had been teaching and research in Italian archaeology, which at that time was rather poorly represented in British universities (at least by staff running field projects in Italy), and soon after the inception of the Mediterranean Studies department at QMC its staff established the Accordia Research Centre as a way of carrying the torch forward, ACCORDIA standing for the Academic Coordination Centre for Research into the Development of Italy from Antiquity. The stated aim of Accordia was the encouragement of inter-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary research on Italian antiquity, and the principal mechanisms were intended to be research publications, the organization of lectures and exhibitions, and the development of library holdings in Italian antiquity building on the holdings in Italian archaeology transferred with the staff from Lancaster to QMC. Without any significant institutional support the operations had to be self-financing, dependent on subscriptions from members. Set at about [pounds]20 a year for a full member and a little over half that for students, membership entitles subscribers to a copy of an annual publication, The Accordia Research Papers, and a 25% discount on supplementary volumes, as well as invitations to lecture receptions, exhibition openings, and a newsletter.

The Department of Mediterranean Studies was never properly resourced, and after a bitter battle it was eventually closed down and the staff either re-deployed within QMC departments or transferred elsewhere within the London university system. Accordia has moved with Dr Ruth Whitehouse, the senior archaeologist of the QMC group, to the Institute of Archaeology (University College). At this critical time in its history it is appropriate to consider what Accordia has achieved so far in its core programme, the publications on the shelf, and its prospects for the future.

Accordia's publication programme was set up to provide a new outlet for the publication of research on Italian antiquity, in the belief that the breadth and variety of current research greatly outstripped the capacity of existing publication venues. Certainly Italian archaeology is not as well served by established regional journals as British archaeology, especially in the south. There are well established subject/period journals, such as the Bollettino di Paletnologia Italiana, the Rivista di Scienze Preistoriche, Origini, Studi Etruschi, and Archeologia Medievale, and the multi-period Archeologia Laziale and Dialoghi di Archeologia (the latter perhaps Italy's nearest equivalent to ANTIQUITY), but with the notable exception of Archeologia Medievale (the newest on the scene) the recent publication records of most of them have been characterized by lengthy delays. In this context, for many British archaeologists working in Italy the annual Papers of the British School at Rome have been the main venue for publishing their research reports in reasonably accessible format for their Italian colleagues, and the British School's supplementary volumes (now formalized as their Archaeological Monographs series) are an attractive venue for excavation and survey reports, and edited studies, but certainly the Papers are heavily oversubscribed and there is a similar queue of projects seeking publication as British School monographs.

For Italian archaeologists, particularly those at the inception of their careers, it is still harder to publish. A great deal of current research and interim reports of field projects by Italian scholars is published in sponsored exhibition catalogues and conference proceedings, but the invitations to contribute to these tend inevitably to go to the Great and the Good (sometimes known as the Barons!) and via them to their acolytes. It is extremely difficult for young Italian archaeologists to break into publication on their own. One of the principal purposes of the series of UK Conferences on Italian Archaeology (Lancaster 1977, Sheffield 1980, Cambridge 1984, QMC 1990, Oxford 1992) has been to provide opportunities for such people to publish outside a system characterized by academic clientship and rigid period/area/discipline divisions, bringing their work to the wider English-language readership at the same time. The Accordia Research Papers were therefore established to provide an additional annual venue for Italian as well as British scholars to publish current archaeological research in English, to fill the gap between the occasional Conferences on Italian Archaeology.

Between 1990 and 1994 Accordia has published nine volumes, all about 200 pages in length in A4 size with card covers, the format favoured by most non-commercial archaeological publishing in the UK. Three volumes of the Research Papers have in fact been published (Volume 1 in 1990, Volume 2 in 1991, and Volume 3 in 1992), each edited by Edward Herring, Ruth Whitehouse & John Wilkins. Accordia has also published the four volumes of papers stemming from the Fourth Conference of Italian Archaeology, two in 1991 and two in 1992. All of these volumes have been edited by the same team as the Research Papers. Accordia published its first monograph in 1992 (Ruth Whitehouse's Underground religion: cult and culture in prehistoric Italy) and has just co-published with the British School at Rome Radiocarbon dating and Italian prehistory, edited by Robin Skeates & Ruth Whitehouse, the proceedings of a conference on this topic held at the School in 1991 accompanied by a gazetteer of all the Italian 14C dates on prehistoric archaeological material.

Each of the three volumes of the Accordia Research Papers contains eight papers, 19 of them in the field of archaeology, four in history, and one in linguistics. Many papers are collaborative, linking British and Italian scholars -- the 24 papers are the work of 28 British, 25 Italian and two scholars of other nationalities. Period coverage is appropriately broad -- there are six papers on prehistory, five on protohistory and Etruscan archaeology, six on Roman Italy, and four on medieval Italy (the latter a reflection of the success of Archaeologia Medievale in dominating the market, as it publishes much in English as well as Italian). There are also three multi-period papers, the annual reports of an Anglo-Italian collaborative project linking, in particular, the Department of Mediterranean Studies and archaeologists of the University of Padua, the Alto-Medio Polesine field survey. In fact, 14 of the 24 papers have been written wholly or partly by Department of Mediterranean Studies staff or their students, a dominance by the 'home team' that is a common and perhaps inevitable feature of many new journals, but a measure of the success of Accordia in the future will be its ability to attract broader representation. In addition to the annual reports of the Alto-Medio Polesine project, many of the papers are Accordia lectures, and whilst the promise of publication is an important strength for a major lecture series, some of the lectures published in the Accordia Research Papers are inevitably presentations of in-progress research published accessibly elsewhere.

Six of the eight papers of the first volume are based on Accordia lectures held at QMC in 1988 and 1989. The paper by Ruth Whitehouse (Caves and cult in neolithic southern Italy) was a precursor for the ideas discussed at length in her book on the same topic published by Accordia two years later, and the paper by Simon Stoddart (The political landscape of Etruria), based on his Ph.D research on Etruscan territoriality, develops ideas discussed briefly in his Etruscan Italy book with Nigel Spivey published in 1990 by Batsford. There is a short paper by Daniele Manacorda (the inaugural lecture of the Accordia series) that is a useful summary in English of his major excavations in the Crypta Balbi in Rome, a study by John Wilkins on Nation and language in ancient Italy: problems of the linguistic evidence (or 'linguistic evidence' as the headers unfortunately put it!) -- and an Accordia lecture by Richard Hedges on British archaeologists in Italy (Glyn Daniel, the Great Divide, and the British contribution to Italian archaeology). The most substantial paper of the volume is the translation into English of an important pottery report by Hugo Blake & Francesco Aguzzi (Eleventh century Islamic pottery at Pavia, north Italy: the Torre Civica bacini) published a year earlier in Italian in a less accessible venue, a book on Pavia published by an Italian bank.

The second volume has two papers summarizing aspects of unpublished theses, by Keri Brown (A passion for excavation: labour requirements and possible functions of the 'villaggi trincerati' of the Tavoliere, Apulia), and Edward Herring (Socio-political change in the south Italian and classical periods: an application of the peer polity interaction model). There are two papers based on Accordia lectures given in 1990, one written with typical gusto by Nigel Spivey on The power of women in Etruscan society, and an assessment of Pompey's character and representation in the ancient sources by Michael Edwards, together with a paper by Ross Balzaretti publishing his post-doctoral work during the tenure of a British School at Rome scholarship -- for which PBSR would have been the expected venue -- on History, archaeology and early medieval urbanism: the north Italian debate. The main paper is an excellent report by David Gadd & Bryan Ward-Perkins summarizing in English the spectacular results of excavations of waterlogged medieval remains in Ferrara in advance of their full publication in monograph form in Italian.

The third volume includes a useful study of unpublished collections of prehistoric stone axes and their implications for models of exchange (Robert Leighton), a stimulating paper on gender representation and interpretation in Italian prehistory by Ruth Whitehouse, a comparison of pottery chronologies and 14C dates for the South Italian Iron Age (Edward Herring), and a rigorous analysis (originally an MA dissertation, remarkably) by M. Carmen Vida Navarro of the artefactual and biological evidence for gender in the Pontecagnano iron age cemetery. Maurizio Harari discusses aspects of Etruscan art in relation to Greek art, there is a substantial paper developed from an Accordia lecture by Francesca Longo Auricchio on The contribution made by the Herculaneum Papyri to our knowledge of Epicurean philosophy, and a study by Thomas Wiedemann of Descent, succession-lists and genealogies in classical culture.

The four volumes of papers from the Fourth Conference of Italian Archaeology are the best produced of the Italian Archaeology conference series, and their 66 papers are a convincing demonstration of the high level of archaeological research activity in Italy, including a number of collaborative Anglo-Italian field projects. The first two volumes are subtitled The archaeology of power, with the papers organized into five sub-themes: The spatial organisation of power and Power and ideology in volume 1, and Status of individuals, Trade and exchange and Social change in volume 2. The second two volumes are sub-titled New developments, the papers divided under sub-themes of Methodological and scientific developments, Multi-period studies and Prehistory in volume 3 and The classical period and The post-Roman period in volume 4. Inevitably many of the papers could as easily fit under different sub-themes from the one where they have been placed. Of the 66 papers, 15 are on prehistory, 14 on protohistory and Etruscan archaeology, 18 on the classical period, 12 on medieval archaeology, and 7 (all field surveys) are multi-period. 55 of the 84 authors are Italian and 20 British, the rest being Dutch (3), American (2), Australian (1), Brazilian (1), French (1) and German (1). The dominance of Italian and British speakers at the conference is a reflection of the very strong Anglo-Italian research network that has built up over the years -- there are archaeologists from most of the northern EU countries currently working in Italy, but without the diversity of regional, period and discipline interests that underpins the work of British archaeologists in Italy.

It is invidious to pick out particular papers of the 66, but the range of approaches and level of activity by British and Italian individual scholars and teams are very striking. For example, inferences about social relations in the Archaeology of power volumes are drawn variously from inter-site and intra-site variability discerned in Neolithic and Bronze Age caves (Whitehouse) and open settlements (Brown; Tusa), Bronze Age nuraghi (Trump), Iron Age hillforts (Cazella; Attema) and cemeteries (Domanico & Miari; De Santis; Suano; Zifferaro), Etruscan ritual sites (Edlund-Berry), classical cities (Laurence), medieval fortification systems (Andrews; Christie) and churches (Maccabruni), and ploughzone survey data (De Guio; Perkins; Potter), as well as from Sardinian bronzes (Tronchetti), Etruscan metalwork (Giardino, Belerdelli and Malizia), archaic pottery (Beijer) and metalwork (Kohler & Naso), and Roman inscriptions (Lomas), architectural reliefs (Strazzulla) and silverwork (Painter). Trade and exchange are approached in volume 2 through studies of Iron Age metalwork (Pearce; Bartoloni) and pottery (Herring) and Roman pottery (Fontana), and in volume 3 by provenance studies of obsidian (Bigazzi, Meloni, Oddone & Radi), polished axes (Leighton & Dixon), Neolithic pottery (Skeates) and metalwork (Caneva & Giardino), and by medieval faunas (Clark). There are interim reports of new field surveys near Rome (Enei; Arnoldus Huyzendveld, Gioia & Pascucci), in the Rieti basin (Coccia & Mattingly), on the southern (Pearce, Calandra & Diani) and northern (Tozzi & Harari) sides of the Po valley, and in Friuli in the far northeast (Cassani), and the range of new excavations reported briefly in volumes 3 and 4 likewise covers the full chronological spread from Palaeolithic to medieval.

Ruth Whitehouse's Underground religion: cult and culture in prehistoric Italy has already been reviewed in detail in ANTIQUITY (67 (1993): 686-7), and it suffices to say here that it is one of the two most important monographs on Italian prehistory published in English in recent years, alongside Anna-Maria Bietti-Sestieri's study of the Osteria dell'Osa cemetery published in 1993 by Cambridge University Press (reviewed in ANTIQUITY June 1994 (68: 448-51)). Radiocarbon dating and Italian pre-history also deserves to be reviewed separately, but again it fills an important gap and its gazetteer is likely to be a key data base over the next decade.