| Project Detail |
Human mobility in prehistoric mountain environments
The eastern Italian Alps are home to several hundred sites dating back to the Neolithic, the Chalcolithic and the Bronze age. Prehistoric burials in this region represent a unique source of information concerning human mobility and life histories in the mountain environment. In this context, the EU-funded MOLA project will integrate Alpine landscape archaeology with advanced bioarchaeology and spatial modelling to understand how social strategies affected human mobility and life histories from the 5th to the 2nd millennium BC in a mountain environment. The project will focus on the eastern Italian Alps by coupling a combined analysis of prehistoric cremated and inhumed human remains with data from landscape archaeology of the uplands.
Several hundred sites dating from the 5th to the 2nd millennia BC have been identified in the eastern Italian Alps making them one of the best archaeologically-mapped regions among the European mountains. However, despite the large amount of residential and productive prehistoric sites, only few funerary contexts have been unearthed, and even fewer human remains have been studied using state of the art bioarchaeology (e.g. isotope analyses, DNA, etc.). Prehistoric burials found in the eastern Italian Alps represent a unique and exceptional source of information that can provide crucial knowledge on past human mobility and life histories in mountain environment. During this 4,000-year time span an increase of social complexity and an intensification of exchange networks are documented in this region, a buffer zone between the Mediterranean and the central Europe, crossed by major north-south routes (Adige-Eisack valleys), that implied an intensive movement of people, objects and ideas. The MOLA project aims to integrate Alpine Landscape Archaeology with state-of-the-art bioarchaeology and spatial modelling to understand how social strategies influenced human mobility and life histories from the Neolithic to the end of the Bronze Age in mountain environment with a particular focus on the eastern Italian Alps. To tackle this research goal an innovative methodology based on the combined analysis of strontium (87Sr/86Sr), oxygen (d18O) and sulphur (d34S) isotope ratios in prehistoric cremated (87Sr/86Sr only) and inhumed human remains from the area and period under study is used. These are coupled with data from Alpine Landscape Archaeology on human-environment interactions (stratigraphic excavations, surveys, geomorphology, etc.) to shed light on social strategies and possible gender differences behind individual and collective mobility and life histories in the eastern Italian Alps during the Neolithic, the Chalcolithic and the Bronze Age. |
