Alimenti vegetali a Bilancino e a Kostienki 16: il progetto dell' IIPP "Le risorse vegetali nel Paleolitico"

Istituto Italiano di Preistoria e Protostoria has approved financial support for a Project entitled ”Vegetable resources in the Palaeolithic time”. The background to the Project is set by a number of studies, currently being carried out in the Bilancino Gravettian site near Florence by some of the proponents of the project; these have led to the discovery of evidence of vegetable remains on lithic implements/artifacts (Noailles Burins and grindstone). The Project aims to apply new non-destructive techniques for the recovery and the identification of vegetable remains in Palaeolithic sites, in particular, the project focus on tools made from unknapped stone likely to be used in the treatment of plant-substances, such as pestles, grinders, grindstone, hearth-stones, etc. with the aim to acquire new evidence on the importance of the use of plants in the Palaeolithic and gain a better understanding of the economy and the diet of these most ancient humans. The procedure to analyze sediments eventually preserved on utilized pebbles is absolutely not invasive. Amog the numerous pebbles selected from the most important Italian Paleolithic sites only a grindstone and a pestle-grinder from Bilancino and a pestle-grinder from Kostenki have given starch residues. The discovery in Italy and Russia of a technique for the production of vegetable flour during the early phases of the Upper Paleolithic provides new evidence of a polycentric origin of such innovation anticipating by over 20,000 years the so-called Neolithic Revolution. The results obtained are also encouraging the systematic search for microresidues of vegetable origin in Paleolithic sites: for this aim we propose a protocol about the sampling and analysis modalities of vegetal residue from excavation to laboratory.