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The chalcolithic cemetery at Manerba del Garda

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

L. H. Barfield
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Extract

The south-western shoreline of Lake Garda is for the most part low and shelving, but at Manerba an outcrop of triassic limestone forms a dramatic, high promontory projecting into the lake (FIG. 1 ). This geological formation is stepped in two levels : the higher, inland part, called the ‘Rocca’, occupied during the Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age and Roman periods, as well as being the site of a medieval castle (Borrello, 1973 ; Brogiolo, 1973), and the lower level, the Sasso, comprising a sheer cliff dropping some 90 m down to the lake edge, with, at its foot, a chalcolithic cemetery, as well as traces of both earlier and later use by man.

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Antiquity , Volume 57 , Issue 220 , July 1983, pp. 116 - 123
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd. 1983

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Footnotes

In the 100 years since the excavations at Remedello relatively few finds of chalcolithic date have come to light in Northern Italy. Then in the 1970s three major sites were discovered at Aosta, Spilamberto and Manerba. The excavations of the chalcolithic cemetery in the Riparo Valtanesi, Manerba del Garda, although started in 1976, did not reach extensive undisturbed deposits until 1981–just when the project was about to be abandoned. We are indebted to Lawrence Barfield, Department of Ancient History and Archaeology, University of Birmingham, for this illuminating account of the collective burials in wooden chambers, complex burial rituals, new forms of material culture and evidence for trade, which add a new dimension to our understanding of human settlement in Northern Italy during the third millennium bc.

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