The Prehistoric Quarry of La Pietra (Roccastrada, Grosseto, Tuscany) Copper Age Lithic Workshops and the Production of Bifacial Points in Central Italy

The authors present the preliminary results of the research carried out at the prehistoric quarry of La Pietra, which is located in the Farma valley (province of Grosseto, Tuscany), within the ‘Tuscan Mining Geopark’. From a geological perspective La Pietra is a Late Jurassic radiolarite outcrop belonging to the Ligurian Domain. The present paper is concerned with the lithic material collected from the surface during a field survey in the 1990s. However, an excavation project of the site is currently in progress. Evidence for intensive exploitation of the quarry by prehistoric communities is attested to by the huge amounts of discarded material covering a large area surrounding the outcrop. Among the artefacts collected during the field survey there are different kinds of blanks and transformed products such as unifacial and bifacial preforms, abandoned at different stages of their manufacturing, slabs at an initial stage of the knapping process, a few tools, and a lot of technical flakes. La Pietra shows characteristics that are very similar to those of the radiolarite quarry of Valle Lagorara in Liguria and it was exploited, as was Valle Lagorara, during the Eneolithic/Early Bronze age period for the manufacture of preforms devoted to the making of flat retouched artefacts, mainly projectile points for weapons. Both the large amount of processed material and the small number of unbroken and finished artefacts suggest that most of the finished preforms was produced for trade. In the surrounding area several Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age cave sites yielded leaf-shaped points made from radiolarite, mostly associated with burial contexts. Radiocarbon dating results from these sites range from 3650 to 2351 cal. BC and form a good chronolo­gical point of reference for La Pietra. At present no archaeometric study has as yet been carried out to establish the origin of the artefacts recovered from these sites but a characterisation project of the radiolarite from the different Tuscan outcrops has been undertaken, using completely non-invasive methodologies. According to the authors, this massive production of flat retouched tools could be connected to specialised craftsmen who worked on commission, as is also suggested by the high quality of the lithic components among grave goods. In the final discussion the authors provide a synthesis of current knowledge about Eneolithic settlements, burial contexts and lithic workshops in central Italy, extending the field of investigation to the remainder of the Italian Peninsula, as far as workshops are con­cerned. According to data emerging from this account a large number of sites defined in the past as ‘Campinian’ can now be identified as workshops devoted to the production of leaf-shaped arrowheads. The authors argue that a critical revision, based on technological and functional analyses, of the old concept of ‘Campinian’ is needed. Equally, the assemblages from the Gargano and the Monti Lessini areas should be revisited from a comparative perspective based on an adequate interpretative framework. This paper highlights the way in which the new scenario that has progressively emerged from the discovery and the study of workshops such as Valle Lagorara and La Pietra could substantially change the social-economic framework related to the Eneolithic/Early Bronze Age communities from several standpoints. Although the phenomenon of the Copper Age/Bronze Age knapping workshops needs to be further investigated, it is nonetheless obvi­ous that the emergence of several production centres, mainly aiming at armature production from the Late Neolithic/Early Eneolithic on, is recorded across the Italian territory. This innovative explanation of the function of these workshops, combined with the occur­rence of a large number of weapons in the burial evidence, can be seen from a new social, behavioural, and economic perspective, with particular emphasis on the role played by the development of projectile points as a proxy for increasing bellicosity during the Copper Age and the ensuing Early Bronze Age.