Northern Italy is one of the regions affected by the so-called “Alpine pile-dwelling phenomenon”; until now about 120 settlements across the southern slopes of the Alps, from the regions of Piedmont (west) to Friuli (east) are known – 19 of them are inscribed as components of the UNESCO site Prehistoric pile-dwelling around the Alps. They belong from the Neolithic to the end of the Bronze Age, but the greatest and most extensive diffusion of pile-dwellings took place between the 22nd and 15th centuries BC during the Early and Middle Bronze Age in the area around the Lake Garda, the most densely inhabited in the period.
Dendrochronology has enabled the construction of many site chronologies, spanning the period from the 22nd to the 14th century, which can be dated by the wiggle-matching technique (a combination of radiocarbon dating and dendrochronology). Regional chronologies also facilitate the identification of different felling phases, allowing us to follow their parallel development and elaborate a provisional model of settlement dynamics. The results achieved in tree-ring research in Italy are of great importance for the study of pile-dwellings throughout all the Alps, because of the different periods of settlement in wetland environments. The flourishing of Italian pile-dwellings occurred in two periods from around 2050 to 1900 BC and from 1500 to 1300 BC, when north of the Alps the lake shores seem to have been temporarily abandoned.
The paper will illustrate the main advances of dendro-archaeological research on pile-dwellings in the region, both in absolute dating and in structure reconstruction, with a special focus on the sites the western area, such as the well-known submerged villages of Il Sabbione and Viverone V1, two of the few which have been entirely mapped.

Location

Norcroft Centre, University of Bradford