“Grotta Scaloria is the cave that everybody knows and nobody knows” (p. 369); yet readers finishing this comprehensive report will have reason to doubt the second clause of that statement by the volume's editors. Ernestine S. Elster, Eugenia Isetti, John Robb and Antonella Traverso have produced a meticulously detailed account of research at a site that is important both for Italian prehistory and for the history of archaeology more generally.
Scaloria Cave is located in Puglia on a marine terrace overlooking the coastal plain between the Adriatic Sea and the Gargano Promontory near the famous Neolithic ditched villages of the Tavoliere Plain. It is a steeply sloping interstratal cavern of irregular form originally entered through a sinkhole that leads down to the first of the cave's two chambers. This entrance collapsed in antiquity, obscuring the cave's existence until 1931 when Scaloria's Upper Chamber was accidentally revealed during the construction of an aqueduct. Archaeological reconnaissance by Quintino Quagliati recovered Neolithic pottery vessels of many styles, stone tools and human remains. Among the finds, pots with fine trichrome decoration were designated as ‘Scaloria’ wares and became a fixture in the Italian Neolithic pottery typologies of the twentieth century.
The Lower Chamber, below and beyond the Upper Chamber, is accessed with some difficulty by a low, narrow gallery and terminates with a shallow lake. Discovered in 1967 by amateur cavers and studied immediately by the late Santo Tiné, it became famous as the ‘Cave of the Waters’ thanks to dramatic evidence for the ritual collection of stillicide waters. Here, Tiné found some 40 groups of Middle Neolithic pottery vessels that were once filled with water dripping from the stalactites above. All were positioned close to broken stalagmites, some even placed directly atop the bases of truncated examples, with subsequent stalagmites issuing from them. Most groups were found near a small, water-filled basin cut into the chamber's floor or near the lake at the bottom of the chamber. The Lower Chamber of Scaloria provides one of the most spectacular examples of Neolithic cult practices known from Italy.
The archaeological potential of Scaloria Cave was recognised by Marija Gimbutas. She and Tiné collaborated in 1978 and 1979 to excavate the cave's exterior, its sinkhole entrance and the Upper Chamber, with work supervised by Shan Winn and Daniel Shimabaku, following a plan that employed then-new methods of American archaeology. The project was never fully published for various reasons, not least the fact that by then Gimbutas's interests had definitively shifted to the ‘goddess’ studies that preoccupied the rest of her career. Other than Robb's 1990 bioarchaeological study of the human remains, no further research was conducted at Scaloria, until now.
This volume brings together everything known about Scaloria, especially the unpublished Gimbutas-Tiné campaign. Old data are summarised and new studies are presented in a handsome volume that does not stint on colour illustration. The book is divided into seven chapters, each save the last comprised of two or more separate contributions, with short summaries in Italian. Ten online appendices provide a wealth of additional information including early excavation reports, daybooks and a portfolio cataloguing all finds and illustrations.
Chapter 1 introduces us to the cave with reflections by Elster and Tiné. In Chapter 2, Isetti takes up Scaloria's discovery and exploration in greater detail, while Bianchi, Isetti and Traverso recount research conducted in the adjacent Occhiopinto Cave. Robb's analysis of Scaloria's radiocarbon dates rounds out the introduction by locating the cave's occupations in time. Chapter 3 (‘The ancient cave and its human occupation’) includes revelatory geoarchaeological studies by Rellini, Ciampalini, Firpo and Hellstrom; a palaeoenvironmental analysis by Fiorentino and D'Oronzo; and Bartosiewicz and Nyerges's deft reanalysis of zooarchaeological data originally collected by the late Sándor Bökönyi. Next, in the most explicitly theoretical of all the volume's contributions, Hamilton, Thomas and Whitehouse explore the sensory, experiential qualities of the cave and the journey from the dense Neolithic landscape of the Tavoliere to the Grotta Scaloria. The chapter concludes with a summary of the contextual evidence for rites and cults by Isetti, Traverso and Sisto.
Chapter 4 (‘The cave's occupants in life and death’) is a stimulating presentation of skeletal, isotopic and taphonomic evidence by Robb, Tafuri, Knüsel, O'Connell, Fullagar, Souter and Libianchi, with four contributions by sets of these authors. We learn that 22–33 individuals were buried at Scaloria; they are found in single burials and, more often, in collective secondary burials. Carbon and nitrogen isotope studies show a terrestrial diet emphasising vegetable sources of protein. Strontium isotope signatures in bone and tooth enamel from Scaloria and two neighbouring sites show the limited extent of the movement of people between villages, but Scaloria's greater variability suggests a catchment that went beyond a single village. Taphonomic study of the burials from the Upper Chamber reveals that people from several communities were brought together and, in one popular Middle Neolithic rite, their bones were defleshed, cleaned and discarded in secondary deposits, a practice not observed previously in Neolithic Italy. (Something similar, but in the following millennium, may have taken place in the Late Neolithic at Grapčeva Cave, on the Adriatic island of Hvar.)
Chapters 5 and 6 concern material culture, beginning with studies of pottery form and decoration by Traverso and Isetti, ceramic technological analysis by Muntoni and Eramo, and Gimbutas's original notes on, and drawings of, Scaloria pottery. Chipped stone assemblages from the 1978 and 1979 excavations are considered from a typological standpoint by Conati Barbaro, and from technological, functional and economic perspectives by Elster. Ground and polished stone tools, including greenstone axes, are discussed by Garibaldi, Isetti, Molinari and Rossi. Bone tools and shells are analysed by Pian and Reese respectively. These studies indicate that in addition to having been used for specialised ritual purposes, the cave was also used for habitation during the Neolithic.
Concluding the volume in Chapter 7, Robb, Elster, Isetti and Traverso take stock of what we now know about Scaloria, its relationship to landscape and community in the Neolithic, and its ritual uses. Noting that rituals in the Upper Chamber aimed to collect bodies and produce clean bones, while rites in the Lower Chamber sought to collect water dripping from stalactites, Robb et al. ponder the relationship, if any, between the two. Homologies between bones and stalactites are suggested as an answer, “but we don't insist on it” (p. 381) as it is still not known whether the Middle Neolithic funerary, domestic, and ritual uses of the cave were really contemporary.
For over eight decades, Scaloria Cave has attracted waves of archaeological attention. Each brought its own problems, methods and attitudes towards the past. This book documents a succession of approaches—culture-history, 1970s ‘New Archaeology’, post-processualism and early twenty-first-century eclecticism—and finds value in each. Elster et al. are highly conscious of this passage of time and have done an outstanding job of situating their work historically, and, with their re-publication of older materials along with the new, have cast an eye towards future history as well. The book certainly belongs in a series called ‘Monumenta Archaeologica’.
