by Chris Fowler
FIG. 45.1. (a) Spiral overlain by a schematic human figure. In Valle rock 4, Paspardo, Valcamonica (photo by A. Fossati). (b) Detail of figure 45.1A (photo by A. Fossati). (c) Spiral, human figures, and cup marks on the Rupe Magna di Grosio, Valtellina (photo by A. Fossati). (d) Spiral and cup marks on the Rupe Magna di Grosio, Valtellina, sector F (photo by A. Fossati, drawing by Le Orme dell’Uomo). (e) Upside-down U-shaped figures and crosses on the Rupe Magna di Grosio, Valtellina, sector AL (photo by A. Fossati). (f) Upside-down U-shaped figures on the Rupe Magna di Grosio, Valtellina, sector AL (drawing by Le Orme dell’Uomo). (g) Figure of cross on the Rupe Magna di Grosio, Valtellina, sector AL.
(Drawing by Le Orme dell’Uomo).
FIG. 45.2. (a) Rock 64 of Vite-Deria, Paspardo, Valcamonica, with many different types of topographic representations.
(Drawing by Le Orme dell’Uomo).
(b) Boulder Borno 1, Valcamonica, with superimpositions of Remedello daggers and topographic representations.
(Drawing by A. Fossati and P. Frontini).
(c) The stela-menhir Bagnolo 1, Valcamonica, with superimpositions of a topographic representation and the sun motif.
(Drawing by A. Arcà, S. Casini and A. Fossati).
(d) Topographic representations and Tecelinga-type daggers on rock 36 of Vite-Deria, Paspardo, Valcamonica.
(Drawing by Le Orme dell’Uomo).
(e) The stela-menhir of Tirano-Lovero, Valtellina, with Remedello daggers.
(Drawing by S. Casini, A. Fossati and P. Frontini).
(f) The composition called ‘Capitello dei due Pini’ with Remedello daggers and deer at Plas, Paspardo, Valcamonica.
(Photo by A. Fossati).
(g) Female statue-menhir found at Caven, Valtellina.
(Photo by A. Fossati).
(h) The statue-menhir Ossimo 5, Valcamonica, with the representation of a cloak and deer.
(Photo by A. Fossati).
(i) The three personages on the Ossimo 9 stela, Valcamonica.
(Photo by A. Fossati).
(j) Cemmo 3, a typical stela of phase 3rd A3 in Valcamonica.
(Drawing by R. De Marins and A. Fossati).
THE NEOLITHIC AND CHALCOLITHIC ART OF VALCAMONICA–VALTELLINA
Today, the rock art tradition of Valcamonica–Valtellina comprises about 300,000 engraved figures—a hypothetical estimate based on the more than 2,000 rocks with engravings known and likely to rise further, as every year new rocks with hundreds of engravings each are discovered. However, at the beginning of the twentieth century, only the Cemmo boulders in Valcamonica were known, thanks to the discoveries of the geographer Walther Laeng (1914), who found and published the boulders that local people used to call ‘the rocks of the puppets’ (le prede dei pitoti in local dialect). In fact, most discoveries in Valcamonica were made during the 1930s thanks to the archaeologist Raffaello Battaglia (1934) and the anthropologist Giovanni Marro (1930). A more scientific appreciation of the different phases appeared during the 1960s and the 1970s with the works of Emmanuel Anati (1962, 1976, 1982) and other scholars, among them especially Raffaele De Marinis (1988, 1994b). With the discovery of rock art on the east side of Lake Garda in 1964 (Pasotti 1965) and in Valtellina, a border valley in the north of Valcamonica, in 1966 (Pace 1968), it became clear that this zone of the central-eastern Alps, from Valtellina to Lake Garda, can be considered a single petroglyph area with common stylistic, thematic, and chronological characteristics. The principal area remains Valcamonica, inscribed in the UNESCO World Heritage List since 1979, with its exceptional thematic and iconographic wealth (Anati 1982; De Marinis 1988; Arcà et al. 1995). However, no comprehensive corpus for Valcamonica and Valtellina has yet been published.
Engravings on rock surfaces
The art is mainly located in the open air and on flat rocks. From Pisogne on Lake Iseo, south of Valcamonica, to the sites of Sellero-Grevo in the centre of the valley, the rocks are composed of sandstone, whilst in the upper part of the valley and in the entire Valtellina they consist of schist, and at Lake Garda of limestone. These rocks, sandstone, schist, or limestone were polished and moulded by glaciers. In these areas we find mainly engravings; only very few paintings have been discovered to date (Fossati 2001a; Hansen 2008). The engravers used hammering and scratching techniques, with hammering being the most common. Quartz tools were used to decorate the rocks: in fact, it is possible to find these artefacts, as they have been abandoned near the rocks (Fossati 1993).
Spirals and necklaces are probably the most ancient figures attributed to the Neolithic. Spirals are a rare motif in Valcamonica, but more widespread in Valtellina: five figures are engraved on the Rupe Magna of Grosio (Fig. 45.1c, d; Fossati 1995). The same rock also shows some so-called cross figures (Fig. 45.1e, g) and some necklaces in the shape of an upside-down U (Fig. 45.1e, f), also known from the female final Neolithic statue-stelae of the region, such as the famous Caven 3. These three signs—upside-down U, spirals, and crosses—have definite connections with the megalithic art of western Europe, where they sometimes appear together in the slabs engraved in the passage graves of Ireland (see Jones et al., this volume), whilst in Brittany spirals are rarer. In Ireland, spirals can be associated with other spirals, but also with ‘spots’, U-shaped figures, or cup and ring marks (Eogan 1986); U-shaped figures are often associated with other megalithic symbols, such as combs and stars (Shee Twohig 1981). All these signs appear together on the stelae-menhirs of the Valcamonica–Valtellina group, such as Caven 3 and Ossimo 4 and 10 (Fedele and Fossati 1994). Spirals are sometimes found near cup and ring motives in Carschenna (Graubünden, Switzerland) (Schwegler 1997). On rock 4 at In Valle (Paspardo, Valcamonica), a spiral is overlain by a human figure in the so-called ‘praying’ position.
The interesting collocation of the five spirals on the Rupe Magna at Grosio (Valtellina), almost aligned in the central part of the rock, can perhaps be paralleled with the dislocation of these signs in Irish megalithic art. According to Eogan (1986), this choice of putting the spirals almost always outside the mounds, whilst other signs are inside, could reflect a characteristic and ritual function in the Irish megalithic art. At present we do not know of any settlements belonging to the second phase of the Square Mouth Vessel culture (VBQ, Vasi a Bocca Quadrata), the Neolithic period when pottery bears a characteristic decoration in the so-called meander-spiral style. Probably, spirals and U-shaped motifs in Valcamonica and Valtellina are a production of this culture, whilst topographic figures could be a rock art manifestation of the third and last VBQ phase, a period for which two different settlements are known in Valcamonica, one at Breno Castle (BS; Fedele 1988) and another at Coren Pagà at Rogno, the latter with influences of the Lagozza culture (Ferrari and Pessina 1997).
The so-called topographic figures are found from around the second half of the fourth millennium BC onwards. These are probably the first representations or maps of land as territory, whose execution on cliffs is perhaps tied to a real division of agricultural lands sanctioned by the ritual practice of rock art production (Arcà 2005; Fossati 1994, 2002). The existence of topographic representations in the Valcamonica rock art tradition was first reported by Raffaello Battaglia during the first International Congress of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences held in 1932 in London, when he announced the discovery of the Bedolina Map. This composite design is the best known topographical representation in the Alpine archaeological literature. Battaglia describes the map as ‘careful representations of fields and fences’, dating it to the Iron Age (Battaglia 1934). This was in concordance with his general dating of the rock art phenomenon, and for the Bedolina Map has been confirmed by recent research (Turconi 1997). Much later, Battaglia and Acanfora (1954) published the boulder of Borno 1 with the oldest known topographical representations; their proposed date today is the fourth millennium BC. Giovanni Leonardi (1950) reported topographical figures from a rock at a site called ‘Saint Rocco bridge’, a rocky surface that emerges directly from the river Oglio. Thes
e publications are important, as scholars at the time were usually more interested in publishing figures of animals, warriors, or artefacts. Figures that may be considered ‘less figurative art’, like the topographical ones, were of less interest.
The first attempt to establish a more complex and acceptable chronology was made by Emmanuel Anati. He divided the Valcamonica rock art into several phases (Anati 1966, 1982) and positioned the topographical representations between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age, although some are now known to be more recent (see above). In recent years, these figures have again received interest due to new discoveries (Sansoni and Gavaldo 2009; Arcà 2003; Arcà et al. 1995). The main motifs can be summarized as follows (Fig. 45.2a, b):
•spots are represented by sub-rectangular pecked areas and appear on both flat rocks and boulders. This motif appears to be the oldest;
•double rectangles (and sometimes single rectangles) have mostly been drawn in contour, but sometimes have a dot in the centre or are completely pecked;
•groups of dots, or lengthened dots (also called ‘macaroni’);
•oval shapes, sometimes associated with other forms, such as spots and rectangles, and often connected with lines;
•‘mushrooms’, a composition of different motifs: double rectangles, oval shapes, rectangles, dots;
•the ‘bandolier’ or shoulder-belt figure is a circular map with a single or double contour line. Two or more semi-circular lines, sometimes cut in the middle, occur inside or outside the circle. It is the strangest figure in the repertoire of the topographical representations.
All these types appear not only on rock surfaces but also on final Neolithic monuments (boulders, stelae, and menhirs) in Valcamonica, whilst in Valtellina only the ‘bandolier’ has been engraved and the other types are present only on rock surfaces.
In terms of chronology, the ‘spots’ (maculae in Italian) are often covered by figures belonging to later periods, for instance the so-called Remedello dagger. This is the case at the Borno 1 boulder (Fig. 45.2b), where three daggers overlap two spots. This type of dagger is very important for dating, since its chronology is very well understood. It appears in tombs of the eponymous Remedello culture and is frequently engraved on the menhirs and stelae of the final Neolithic (Arcà and Fossati 1995; Pedrotti 1993; De Marinis 1994a) and in some rock shelters, such as in the important composition of Les Oullas, Ubaye Valley (France) (Muller et al. 1991). The radiocarbon dates of the Remedello tombs with the daggers give an approximate age of 2900–2500 BC (De Marinis 1997), i.e. the Remedello 2 period, which marks the end of the Neolithic and the beginning of the final Neolithic in the north Italian archaeological chronology (Fossati 1994). The topographical representations covered by depictions of this weapon are hence older than this period. The spots are sometimes overlain by the double rectangle. On the boulder at Bagnolo 2, the double rectangle is overlaid by a solar disk attributed to the final Neolithic (third A1, Remedello 2 phase), which implies that this type of image also appeared before Remedello 2 (probably around the first half of the fourth millennium BC), perhaps during the Remedello 1 phase (3400–2900 BC; De Marinis 1997) (Fig. 45.2c). Sometimes this type of figure has the shape of a grid, as on rock 13 at Vite (Paspardo) (Arcà 1994).
The groups of dots, or lengthened dots and oval shapes, are often associated with the double rectangle, forming strange figures that we have called ‘mushrooms’ and which appear on large surfaces and on boulders. Whilst investigating rock 36 at Vite, Paspardo (Fig. 45.2d), where such a figure is present in connection with a couple of daggers with triangular blade and squared pommel (similar to the type called Tecelinga, dating to the fourth and third millennia BC), a votive hoard containing a polished stone axe dated to the Neolithic, flint artefacts, and pottery sherds (White Ware type) was discovered at the base of the rock (Fossati 1997). If there is a connection between hoard and rock art—which seems to be the case—this is important for the chronology of the imagery, as well as the interpretation of the maps. Recently, this hypothesis has been confirmed by the discovery of a decorated boulder (called PAT 29) inserted into stone circle n.174 at the megalithic site of Pat near Ossimo (Valcamonica). The circle dates to the first half of the fourth millenium BC, whilst the boulder shows topographic figures of the double rectangle type and a Tecelinga-type dagger (Poggiani Keller 2009).
The ‘bandolier’ usually appears on final Neolithic monuments. Its association with motifs from different final Neolithic phases, such as the Remedellian dagger, or the Villafranca halberds dated to the Bell Beaker phase of the final Neolithic (2500–2200 BC), helps us to assign this type to the topographical figures belonging to the final Neolithic. These figures appear not only on boulders and stelae, but also on flat rocks, as on Vite rocks 20 and 21, often surrounding the usual double rectangles (Fossati 1994).
Boulders, Stelae, and Menhirs
The final Neolithic (fourth to third millennium BC, the so-called third A Camunnian style) is characterized by the appearance of stelae in the form of slabs, boulders, menhirs, and immovable blocks from landslides (the so-called ‘monumental compositions’) (Casini and Fossati 1994). As demonstrated by the work of Francesco Fedele (2006) at the site of Anvòia and more recently by the discoveries at Pat, both near Ossimo in Valcamonica (Poggiani Keller 2009), stelae and engraved boulders were erected to create alignments near flat cairns, with the engraved side of the stelae facing east (Fedele and Fossati 1994). These sites had certainly ritual and maybe religious functions for small communities or families, representing also a nodal point for boundaries and intertribal relations (Casini and Fossati 1994; Fedele 2006).
Anthropomorphism is suggested by the distribution of the engraved motifs on the rock (e.g. ornaments and weapons appear in positions where they would have been worn on a living person) and sometimes by the bevelling of the upper part of the stelae, schematically outlining the shoulders (Fig. 45.2e). The representation of a single person is rare and in the majority of cases these objects appear to be a composition of different figures which show elements differentiating them from the monuments of other Alpine stelae groups, such as the Lunigiana, the Aosta-Sion, and the Trentino-Alto Adige monuments. Moreover, in the Valcamonica–Valtellina group the process of engraving may have been stretched over decades or even centuries, with the addition of new figures that complete or efface previous ones. We can distinguish three different periods of carving within the third A phase: a first phase called third A1, characterized by symbolic figures; a second phase called third A2; marked by anthropomorphic figures; and finally the very short third A3 phase, which very probably has to be attributed to the early Bronze Age (end of the third millennium BC) (De Marinis 1994a).
The iconographic repertoire of the most ancient phase (the third A1 style) is typified by the representation of the so-called Remedello dagger with its well-defined triangular blade and half-moon-shaped pommel (Fig. 45.2f). It is attested in contemporary tombs at Remedello (2900–2500 BC) and on final Neolithic Alpine stelae at Aosta, Sion, Arco, or Lunigiana. Other figures are associated with this dagger, such as weapons (axes and halberds of metal or stone), animals (deer, dogs, foxes, wolves, chamois, ibex, boars, bovines), and a few other symbolic figures (Fig. 45.2e) (Casini and Fossati 1994). Chariots and ploughing scenes may appear in these compositions. The weapons are always associated with the figure of the sun, an aspect that symbolizes the emergence of a hierarchy, whereby people probably represented themselves as descendants of the divinities. Even in the statue-stelae of the other Alpine groups, the association between sun and weapons refers to male personages always indicated by the daggers (Gallay 1996). In contrast, the double spiral pendant reproduces a copper ornament symbolically connected with the females (Fig. 45.2g) and ultimately originating from the Carpatian Basin, from where female ceramic figures, which have sometimes been interpreted as Mother Goddesses, also spread in the Neolithic (see Nanoglou, this volume). The copper spiral is hence an element of a ceremonial and status dress, perhaps even
representing a goddess (Casini 1994). Other adornments (eye pendants, necklaces, combs) are associated with these feminine representations. The third important symbol is a rectangle filled with vertical lines or a chess-board like formation, adorned on the vertical sides with fringes (Fig. 45.2h). This motif is often associated with animals: compositions of deer with does (harem), usually placed below, and a series of wild dogs and chamois, disposed vertically along the sides (Camuri et al. 1993). This symbol is probably masculine, as during the anthropomorphic phase (style third A2) it is represented by an anthropomorph with a phallic symbol. The presence of the fringes suggests an interpretation as a cloak. This is also confirmed by the statue-stelae of the Trentino-Alto Adige region, where a similar motif is represented on the shoulders of the stelae. In this element it is possible to recognize a particularly significant attribute of a god which can represent him as a pars pro toto. These three main symbols (dagger, spiral pendant, cloak) recur singly or together on the same stone, as if a stone could represent a sort of statue of one single divinity, or of two or three gods (Casini and Fossati 1994). The interpretation of a divine figure is here preferred to the idea of the menhirs as ancestor-heroes or even living people, as the human figures represented here are shown in conjunction with solar attributes (i.e. a man surrounded by a solar crown) and always show a massed appearance of weapons such as daggers, halberds or axes, whilst contemporary male graves of the Remedello culture contain only one such item. It is likely that this repetition was intended to stress the power of the solar god.
The iconographic repertoire of phase third A2 is not as wide as in the previous period. The symbols now become anthropomorphic, but some artefacts remain, such as the weapons. These are always important for the chronology of the monuments, in particular the daggers of Bell Beaker type (e.g. the so-called Ciempozuelos type) and halberds of Villafranca type. These are the typical weapons of the Bell Beaker period (2500–2200 BC) (De Marinis 1994a). Animals and human figures are now represented with more realism in a semi-naturalistic way. In general, we witness a cult focused on a divine triad of two males and one female (Fig. 45.2i) (Casini and Fossati 1994) in Valcamonica, and one male and two females as suggested for Valtellina (Casini et al. 2007). Period third A3 shows only anthropomorphic figures dancing in circles and daggers of the early Bronze Age (Fig. 45.2j) (De Marinis 1994a).