Modern archaeological excavation is neither haphazard nor a treasure hunt. It is a scientific business, preceded by careful survey, conducted with minute attention to levels and strata (the level in which an object is found determines its relative date; comparison with similar objects found elsewhere that can be dated determines its absolute date), and followed by scrupulous recording and publication of the evidence. A dig is not a treasure hunt. Naturally an archaeologist is pleased if he turns up gold or precious stones, but he knows in advance that an old stone age site will produce neither, but rather something infinitely more valuable, an intimate knowledge of man’s past, gained from ordinary humble objects of daily household use. To find these was Bradford’s object when he began to dig. (Williams-Hunt had meanwhile been posted to the Far East.) And he found them. Passo di Corvo, for example, yielded typical neolithic artifacts: stone axes, querns (hand-mills for grinding grain), bone points, stone sickles, pendants, spindle-whorls, and, best of all, vast quantities of potsherds, over 4,000 found in fourteen days. The potsherd is the archaeologist’s best friend. Pots are virtually indestructible, they turn up everywhere, and comparison with pots of similar shape and decoration, found elsewhere, yields precious information about dates, imports, exports, trade-routes, and the aesthetic taste of the pot’s maker and user.

S. Fuoco d’Angelone, for example, yielded typical neolithic pottery: rich brown or glossy black burnished ware, undecorated but thin-walled, symmetrical, and well-made (by hand, not on a potter’s wheel; sooner or later the use of the wheel produces shoddy commercialism). Together with it were found sherds of a fine-textured buff ware, painted with wide bands (fasce larghe) of tomato red. There were also very thin burnished bowls in cream and gray.

After excavation, the archaeologist must return to the study and to the comparative method; an exacting and exciting pursuit of parallels, especially for the pottery, in the hope of dating it and tracking down its origins. The facts are recorded in technical excavation reports, often buried in obscure or local journals. Oftener, the results of excavation are unpublished (it is always more fun to dig than to write.) In that case, the facts are treasured up in the notes or the memories of the excavator, often a local archaeologist. He belongs to a splendid breed, burning with enthusiasm, brimful of knowledge, and eager to share what he knows, in conversation if not in print.

So Bradford read and talked, and found his parallels. The wares he had excavated were familiar; they had been found elsewhere in the heel of Italy, especially opposite or in Matera, in Lucania, and Molfetta, in Puglia, between Barletta and Bari, in contexts dated 2600–2500 B.C. And this pottery proves to have affinities, too, with that of Thessalian Sesklo, a neolithic site not far from Dimini. This same type of pottery can be traced across the Balkans into Illyricum, and thence across the Adriatic to Bradford’s sites, giving in the process a glimpse of neolithic man as a more daring seafarer than had previously been thought.

And so, by patient, detailed work like Bradford’s, the newly-discovered sites are fitted into and enrich the pattern of the neolithic world. The total mapping fills a huge gap in the picture of the findspots of Neolithic sites in Italy. Before 1945, some 170 were known; now the Tavoliere alone makes up more than that number. And Passo di Corvo becomes the largest known neolithic site in Europe.

The things the archaeologists did not find are instructive, too. No weapons were found: the inference is that the Tavoliere folk were unwarlike. There is no evidence that the sites survived into the Bronze Age: it looks as though, like unwarlike peoples all too often elsewhere, they were wiped out in an invasion.

It is clear from the artifacts and the site-plans that neolithic man on the Tavoliere lived like neolithic man elsewhere in Italy, that the culture was on the whole uniform. He lived in a wattle-and-daub hut with a sunken floor, a central hearth, and a smokehole--the remote and primitive predecessor of the atrium-and-impluvium house of historic Roman times, whose central apartment had a hole in the roof with a pool below to catch rain water. Fortunately for us, his wife was a slovenly housekeeper: from her rubbish we can reconstruct her way of life. In his enclosures he penned the animals he had domesticated: other Italian sites have yielded the bones of the sheep, goat, horse, ox, ass, and pig. The dog has not yet become man’s best friend in the neolithic Tavoliere. Primitive man in Italy had a rudimentary religion: the Ligurian cave of Arene Candide has yielded statuettes of big-breasted, pregnant women, which probably had something to do with a fertility cult. In another Ligurian cave, Balzi Rossi, over 200,000 stone implements have been found. Not far up the Adriatic coast from Foggia, in the Vibrata valley, lie the foundations of 336 neolithic huts. We know something, too, of neolithic man’s burial customs, and macabre enough they seem: skulls have been found smeared with red ochre; apparently the flesh was stripped from the corpse--a practice called in Italian scarnitura--and the stain applied to the bared bone. All this suggests a level of culture far below that which the Near East was enjoying at the same time: Passo di Corvo’s mud huts are contemporary with the Great Pyramid of Egypt, with palaces and temples in Mesopotamia (see Fig. 1.5). But there is no evidence that neolithic man in Italy was priest-ridden or tyrannized over, as the Egyptians and Akkadians were; he is rather to be thought of as the ancestor of the sturdy peasant stock which was to form the backbone of Roman Italy.

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Bradford’s methods are scientific, but archaeology has not always been the exact science it is today. Americans may be proud that the first recorded scientific excavation took place in Indian mounds in Virginia. The date was 1784, and the excavator was Thomas Jefferson. But thereafter archaeological progress was sporadic, and relapse accompanied advance. In the mid-nineteenth century most excavations in Italy were more like rape than science, their aim being to dredge up treasures for the nobility and the art-dealers.

Thus when in 1889 the distinguished Italian anthropologist Luigi Pigorini excavated the site of Castellazzo di Fontanellato, twelve miles northwest of Parma, in the Po Valley, there was no absolute guarantee that the dig would be scientific. Yet Pigorini’s announced results have colored the whole picture of the Bronze Age in Italy, and it is only recently that they have been doubted. The story of his announced results, the growing scepticism, the re-examination of the ground, and the present state of the question is an illuminating if sobering one.

What Pigorini was after was the evidence for the prehistoric settlements which have come to be called terremare. They owe their discovery, their name, and their destruction to the fertilizing quality of the earth of which they are composed. Terra marna is the name in the dialect of Emilia for the compost heaps formed by the decay of organic matter in certain mounds of ancient date, mostly south of the Po. Farmers repeatedly found potsherds and other artifacts, often of bronze, in these mounds, and Pigorini determined to examine them before all the evidence should be dispersed. Castellazzo di Fontanellato is the most famous of his efforts.

He found clear, though meager, evidence in pottery and metal artifacts (axes, daggers, pins, razors) of a Bronze Age culture, but no report of the levels in which he found these objects survives, and indeed in this as in most terremare the farmer’s shovel has completely upset the levels. Roman terracotta, medieval pottery, and prehistoric bronze axe-heads jostle one another in confusion. Besides, the prehistoric site has been continuously inhabited, and, in consequence, the soil continuously turned over, ever since Roman times.

Pigorini apparently dug isolated, random trenches rather than the continuous ones which would have enabled him to trace a ground-plan securely. It is hard to see, without more evidence than he supplies, how the grandiose grid of his ultimate plan (Fig. 1.6) could be deduced from the disconnected series of trenches figured on his earliest one. Though he had to contend with the most vexatious swampy conditions, working in the midst of constant seepage and ubiquitous mud, in which a rectangular grid could hardly have survived, he was nevertheless able to persuade himself, at Castellazzo, of the existence of a ditch and a rampart, reinforced by wooden piling. (Post-holes and piles he certainly found, and photographed.)

By 1892 he had convinced himself that his site had a trapezoidal plan, surrounded by a ramparted ditch thirty yards wide and ten feet deep. (Some of his dimensions suggest a prehistoric unit of measure in multiples of five; others a foreshadowing of the Roman foot of twenty-nine centimeters.) Running water derived from a tributary of the Po supplied the hypothetical ditch, which was crossed on the south by a wooden drawbridge thirty yards wide and sixty yards long. South of the site Pigorini claimed to have found a cemetery (M) perfectly square in plan, for cremation urn-burials, and westward another, rectangular one.