Events, Social Memories, and Community in a Final Bronze Age Building’s Biography at Sant’Aniceto, Calabria, Italy

ABSTRACT

Archaeologists investigating Middle Bronze to Early Iron Age periods (1600–900 b.c.) in southern Italy often explore linkages between emerging inequality and foreign trade connections, establishing a coupled trope of “change emerges from external forces” and “waiting for civilization to arrive”. Based on excavations at the Recent/Final Bronze and Early Iron Ages (RFBA/IA, 1200–900 b.c.) site of Sant’Aniceto in Calabria, we offer an alternative narrative in which hierarchy and institutionalized inequality held little sway in this community. By employing a building biography approach, we examine the variety of ways people sustain their communities through the creation and value of difference (e.g., age, knowledge, or skill) that characterize daily life, even when political hierarchy is absent. Our research at Sant’Aniceto centers on understanding the locally-grounded experiences and lives of people by approaching social difference through the lens of the materialities of everyday life.

KEYWORDS:

• Italy
• building biography
• late prehistory
• difference
• new materiality approaches
• taskscapes

Acknowledgments

The authors thank first and foremost the discoverers of the Sant’Aniceto site, Dott. S. Stranges and L. Saccà, and the landowners Drs. E. and A. Mollica for their gracious permission to excavate at Sant’Aniceto. This work benefitted from the support and guidance of Drs. Caterina Greco, Rosella Agostino, and Emilia Andronico of the Soprintendenza Archeologica della Calabria. Special thanks go to Giovanni Iiriti, Tito and Nunziella Squillaci, Silvana Scordo, Roberto Scordo and his family, Franca Meduti, and Annunziata Caracciolo. The authors thank Peter Attema, Emma Blake, Gert-Jan Burgers, Hamish Forbes, Lin Foxhall, Helen Foxhall-Forbes, Paula Lazrus, Alessandra Molinari, and Alessandro Vanzetti, all of whom provided insightful comments on earlier drafts. We are also grateful to our field crews, whose hard work made this research possible.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on Contributors

Meredith S. Chesson (Ph.D. 1997, Harvard University) is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. Her research interests focus on daily life and personhood in the past and present.

Nicholas P.S. Wolff (Ph.D. 2014, Boston University) is an independent scholar residing in Vermont. His research interests include micromorphology and Italian archaeology.

John Robb (Ph.D. 1995, University of Michigan) is a Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge University. He has researched the prehistory and history of southern Calabria for twenty years, with interests in the landscape experience of social processes.

David Yoon (M.Phil. 1991, City University of New York) is an Associate Curator at the American Numismatic Society. His research interests include Roman and Medieval settlement patterns and political economy in southern Italy.

Kostalena Michelaki (Ph.D. 1999, University of Michigan) is an Associate Professor in Arizona State University’s School of Human Evolution and Social Change. Her research interests focus on the sociality of technology and the links between material culture and personhood.

Ivana Fiore (Masterclasses 1995, Sapienza Università di Roma) collaborates with the Services Bioarchaeology at the Museo delle Civiltà, Rome

Mark Gillings (Ph.D. 1990, Bradford University) is a Professor of Archaeology at Leicester University. His research interests include the theory and practice of landscape archaeology.

Antonio Tagliacozzo (Masterclasses 1995, Sapienza Università di Roma) retired as Director of the Laboratorio di Archeozoologia at the Museo Nazionale Preistorico Etnografico “Luigi Pigorini” in Rome for many years. Now he collaborates with the Services of Bioarchaeology at the Museo delle Civiltà, Rome.

Jeremy Taylor (Ph.D. 1996, Durham University) is Lecturer in Landscape Archaeology at Leicester University. His research interests include the theory and practice of landscape archaeology, geophysical survey, and investigating rural social change in Iron Age Britain and the western Roman provinces.

Chantel E. White (Ph.D. 2013, Boston University) is an Archaeobotanical Teaching Specialist at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Her research interests include prehistoric foodways, and links between plants and humans in the past and present.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this research was provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities (Grant # RZ-51699-14); the National Geographic Society; the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, Nanovic Institute for European Studies, and the Department of Anthropology; SSHRC (Canada) Strategic Research and Research Development Initiatives and the Department of Anthropology, McMaster University; and Cambridge University’s McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.