The Chora of Croton 1: The Neolithic Settlement at Capo Alfiere

Chapter Eight. Stone Tools

89 8 Stone Tools This chapter will consider the three types of worked stone found at Capo Alfiere: chipped stone, polished stone, and ground stone. The nomenclature for the last two categories is somewhat arbitrary, but it serves to separate two functionally distinct types of artifact. In the first instance, all these stone artifacts are considered as tools. Treating objects in this way is undoubtedly a simplification on our part. Later consideration will be given to possible symbolic or value functions that stone objects may have manifested. The long distances traveled by the raw materials used for these pieces makes a consideration of their concurrent social aspects particularly intriguing. Chipped Stone After pottery, the chipped-stone or “lithic” industry in the Mediterranean is the second major aspect of the artifactual assemblage from a Neolithic site. For the Middle Neolithic of southern Italy, this is a blade industry, but there does not seem to have been much interest in further modification of the blades beyond breakage into suitable lengths for the task at hand. Hence come comments such as that for the Eolian material, that “Lo stentinelliano classico è caratterizzato da un’industria litica banale” (Bernabò Brea and Cavalier 1980: 659).1 Orsi was equally unimpressed, noting that at Stentinello itself the lithic industry “è in piena antitesi colla sviluppatissima e veramente eccellente arte ceramica.” (Orsi 1890, 183).2 Thus, one does not generally find much resembling the modified trapezes and other fine retouched work characteristic of the geometric microliths of the preceding Mesolithic period (Bernabò Brea 1957). Tusa (1983) has suggested that in an early Neolithic phase leading into the Stentinello proper, such pieces are found representing a transitional development. The Neolithic does represent the first widespread use of obsidian in the western Mediterranean, as op1 “The classical Stentinellian culture is characterized by a banal lithic industry.” (JR) 2 “Is in full antithesis with the highly developed and truly excellent art of pottery.” (JR) posed to cherts and other siliceous materials. Small quantities of this material have been found in earlier contexts on Sicily.3 There, its use for the manufacture of objects typical of the Mesolithic industry in association with occasional ceramic vessels of an early type led to the suggestion of hunter-gatherer use of pieces derived from the first Neolithic farmers (Bernabò Brea 1957, 37). Ammerman has devoted considerable attention to the mechanics of the subsequent movement of obsidian during the Neolithic, particularly in Calabria (Ammerman 1979, 1985a; Ammerman and Andrefsky 1982). His initial surveys there found that obsidian constituted 90% or more of the chipped stone recovered from the surface of sites with impressed wares on the west coast. In the Crotone region, by contrast, he reported obsidian making up 40% or less of such surface collections (Ammerman 1979). As with the pottery, the discovery of the existence of a stratigraphic sequence at Capo Alfiere required revising assumptions about the complete collection of chipped stone, including that found in the plough soil and in previous recovery from the site surface. Interesting comparisons between levels with a direct investigation of chronological variation could now be attempted. The problem then became one of sample size. Although the quantity of material from the site as a whole is good, with sieving reducing the bias towards larger finds, the severe plough damage meant that the number of pieces recovered from securely stratified contexts was relatively small. This made it more challenging to develop a fine degree of detail and confidence for categorizations. As with the ceramics, the lithic examination begun in 1987 was set up to allow a preliminary analysis to come up with an overall characterization of the assemblage quickly. As the majority of the material must remain in Italy, the necessity of achieving as much as possible while in the field dictated this course of ac3 Mesolithic use of obsidian in Sicily is in fact very poorly attested; a few pieces are known from Perriere Sottano near Catania but may potentially be intrusive from Neolithic levels at the site. (JR) 90 Stone Tools tion. The level of analysis attempted was only of the nature of a preliminary breakdown by material type and simple reduction categories. Recognition of formal tools and deliberate modification of debitage was included, as was the distinction of blades, microblades, and elements thereof. Once the more complicated nature of the assemblage was realized, further analysis was planned. In the summer of 1991, Yin Lam of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alberta spent six weeks...