Eneolitico e Carso triestino: dati e problemi aperti

When dealing with a specific topic in a specific area, it is fundamental to keep in mind that what we call “archaeology” is actually the combination of three main elements - practice, i.e. field discoveries, methods of inquiry and theory - as C. Renfrew & P. Bahn (2004: 21) clearly state: The history of archaeology is commonly seen as the history of great discoveries: the tomb of Tutankhamun in Egypt, the lost Maya cities of Mexico… But even more than that it is the story of how we can come to look with fresh eyes at the material evidence for the human past, and with new methods to aid us in our task. This threefold combination is reflected in this paper on the Eneolithic in the Trieste Karst, which presents a brief overview of the basic data and the interpretative problems still open. The area under study, in the easternmost region of northern Italy, is part of the Classical Karst, a limestone plateau crossed by two flysch belts, characterized by a high number of natural caves - ca. 3100 - ranging from wide horizontal ones to vertical pits. Caves had been used by human groups since prehistory, and traces of their presence had been discovered during speleological explorations as well as scientific investigations from the last decades of the 19th century till ca. the 1980s. Many of these findings remained partially or totally unpublished till the early 1990s, when systematic revisions started on the most important complexes, ca. 30 till the present, out of about 180 with anthropic/paleontological evidence. The revisions are based on a traditional typological-comparative approach, which has allowed to increase considerably the database of various categories of material culture. In the case of the local, Danilo-Vlaška Neolithic (ca. 5600-4000 BC), this has meant the possibility of recognizing it as a coherent entity with identified components whose basic association, when it varies, is likely to be site-use-specific. On the contrary, the following two millennia are still quite blurred, because after the disappearance of the Danilo-Vlaška components it is more difficult to detect a shared material culture, somehow rooted in the territory, that could have interacted with elements of foreign origin (stone and possibly pottery) or influence (pottery) (Ferrari et al. 2018: 70-71). This difficulty is due to elements related to all the three basic components of archaeology, as defined above: field discoveries, often carried out in ways that are not considered appropriate according to modern standards; methods, of recovery as just said, but also of study, when this is limited to typology, inevitably highly subjective; theory, because the elements whose presence in an archaeological context would allow scholars to label it as Eneolithic are disputable and disputed, in Italy and abroad. For S. Forenbaher, for instance, the concepts of culture and period should be dismissed in favour of that of style, an idea discussed in detail in a recent paper edited in 2018, Ljubljana and Cetina: Pottery Styles of the Third Millennium BC in the Eastern Adriatic. Some richly decorated bowls on cross-shaped foot, discovered between the last decades of the 19th century and the 1970s in the Trieste Karst, had been traditionally related to the Ljubljana Culture of Slovenia, although it had been soon noticed that the Karst bowls are similar but different from the Slovene ones. Since the typological-comparative approach alone is insufficient to verify this impression, new methods of study have been recently introduced, based on archaeometric analyses already used to investigate polished stone axes - in some cases associated also with bowls - by an interdisciplinary international team based in Trieste. These analyses have opened up new prospects, and new research is in progress to check them.