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CHAPTER 47
UNDERGROUND RELIGION IN THE CENTRAL MEDITERRANEAN NEOLITHIC
ROBIN SKEATES
INTRODUCTION
FOR central Mediterranean prehistory, the term ‘underground religion’ was first used by Ruth Whitehouse (1992) with reference to the abundant archaeological evidence from cave sites for the repeated performance of rituals, particularly during the Neolithic, between the seventh and fourth millennia BC. This evidence takes various forms, including special deposits of human remains, artefacts, and burnt food residues, placed in and around special features, such as chambers and corridors, fissures, pits and cavities, hearths, springs and water pools, stalactites and stalagmites, dry-stone walls, stepping stones, and mural art. In all these cases, either wild caves or caves previously utilized by human groups were physically and culturally modified to varying degrees.
Italian archaeologists, who have dominated the excavation of these sites, have for some time recognized the ritual significance of caves (e.g. Grifoni-Cremonesi 1994; Radmilli 1975), although most have valued them primarily as places where deep soundings could be made in order to test and elaborate their traditional relative chronologies, based upon stratigraphic sequences of cave deposits and associated changing artefact typologies. However, British archaeologists have extended the interpretation of ‘underground religion’, particularly since the 1980s, using a range of archaeological and anthropological methods and theories (e.g. Malone 1985; Pluciennik 1994; Skeates 1991a, 1994, 1997; Whitehouse 1992, 2001). Ruth Whitehouse (1992), in particular, has employed some generalizing approaches to characterize and interpret the development of a distinctive ‘cave cult’ in the south-central Mediterranean Neolithic. But the majority of these studies have adopted a contextual approach, through which the variable spatial, material, historical, and social significance of particular cave sites has been considered in a wider context. Maintaining this contextual approach, the purpose of this chapter is to emphasize the diversity of the relevant archaeological evidence, beginning with some general comments, followed by a summary and comparison of a selection of archaeological examples and related interpretations from three different regions.
A DIVERSITY OF CAVES
Rather than regarding caves as a unitary category, it is important to begin by emphasizing the diversity of caves in the cultural landscapes of the Neolithic central Mediterranean and the diversity of their human uses. Natural caves, ranging from rock-shelters to relatively small and simple fissures and caves to extensive cave complexes of multiple entrances, corridors, and chambers, are found extensively throughout the limestone regions of the central Mediterranean, from the coasts to interior valleys, basins, and hills, and some (but by no means all) of these were selected for use by Neolithic groups. Significant factors in their selection included: their history of prior human use (in the Upper Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic); their positioning and views in relation to Neolithic cultural landscapes; their local accessibility (or inaccessibility); and their interior shape, size, and natural features.
Different kinds of caves, and different parts of caves, were also used for different kinds of activities, by members of small task groups, kin-groups, or larger village-based communities. Archaeologists have generally interpreted these activities in two ways. ‘Economic’ interpretations have regarded caves either as dwelling places or as seasonal shelters used by mobile hunters and herders (e.g. Barker 1981). ‘Symbolic’ interpretations, on the other hand, have highlighted the significance of caves as places for the repeated performance of ritual, including human burial and more specialized cult activities (e.g. Malone 1985; Skeates 1991; Whitehouse 1992). But these two categories do not express the full range of variation evident in the archaeology of caves in the central Mediterranean Neolithic, where many caves experienced long and dynamic life histories. Nor are they mutually exclusive. Distinctions between the rituals of daily life and rituals performed to mark special occasions in the lives of communities, families, and individuals are not always as clear-cut as archaeologists have sometimes assumed. Likewise, contrasts between human activities in caves and in other kinds of place have sometimes been over-emphasized by scholars. Indeed, in the central Mediterranean Neolithic, symbolic deposits and ritual performances in caves incorporated not only people but also a range of material symbols also used in, and referring to, the wider lived-in world. Nevertheless, some Neolithic cave contexts, such as the Grotta di Porto Badisco in south-east Italy, do stand out archaeologically as having been used overtly and repeatedly for the performance of rituals, which over centuries and millennia led to the accumulation of some distinctive material residues, and contributed to the maintenance and gradual transformation of a long-term (although not necessarily continuous) tradition of cave ritual extending from the Upper Palaeolithic to the Bronze Age and beyond (e.g. Radmilli 1962; Skeates 1997).
Why certain caves, and why the deepest, darkest, innermost zones of those caves in particular, should have been chosen for and transformed through ritual practices is a key question. From the outside, certain caves could
have stood out in the cultural landscape as ancient, permanent, and relatively unchanging physical structures or monuments, helping to demarcate significant boundaries along the margins of the most intensively settled and domesticated agricultural landscapes (as opposed to the wilder, more forested, interiors and uplands of the region). And inside, an awe-inspiring sense of otherness or liminality (particularly compared to the familiar and comforting sense of place associated with the interior spaces of open-air dwelling places) might have been afforded by their relatively cool, humid, dark, and resonant environments, and by the appearance, scale, and feel of their elaborate karst formations. From both perspectives, these caves, and their dark zones in particular, could have been perceived as liminal points of contact or transition between lived-in (or domesticated) and supernatural (or wild) cosmological domains.
Interpretations of rituals that took place within the caves range widely: from votive, sacrificial, and foundation rites, to fertility rites, to rites of passage, including mortuary and initiation rites. However, these general categories fail to express and explain the full variety of ritual practices identified archaeologically in the central Mediterranean Neolithic, not to mention the range of multi-sensory human experiences through which they would have been perceived. This diversity, as well as some shared cultural dynamics, is clearly illustrated by the archaeology of Neolithic caves in a sample of three regions.
THREE REGIONAL EXAMPLES
Abruzzo
In the east-central Italian region of Abruzzo, two groups of known Neolithic cave sites (lowland and inland) exhibit clear contrasts and complementarities to each other and to known open-air sites, particularly in terms of their location, form, cultural material, human uses, and—more specifically—their ritual uses (Skeates 1991a, 1997). In general, these cave sites might best be regarded as extensions of contemporary open-air sites in different parts of the region, extending inland from the Adriatic coastal lowlands to the Apennine intermountain basins and valleys, albeit with slightly more specialized economic and ritual roles, particularly during the later Neolithic.
Half of the known Neolithic cave sites in Abruzzo are situated within the lowland hill zone, between 25 and 40km inland from the Adriatic coast, in fairly inaccessible and hidden locations along the sides of steep river gorges. Examples include Grotta dei Piccioni and Grotta Sant’Angelo. Both are large caves, and both contained deep habitation deposits in their central areas and ritual deposits in their interiors. The latter are characterized by the disarticulated bones, and especially skulls, of children (as opposed to a predominance of adults at contemporary open-air agricultural settlements in the lowlands), scattered over floor surfaces or placed as secondary burials in small stone circles or pits, and accompanied by the residues of food consumption and sacrifice, as well as some special artefacts.
FIG. 47.1. View from Grotta dei Piccioni along the Orta gorge, Abruzzo.
(Photograph: R. Skeates).
FIG. 47.2. Modified triton shell from Grotta dei Piccioni, Abruzzo.
(Photograph: courtesy G. Cremonesi).
Grotta dei Piccioni, for example, lies under an hour’s walk from a broadly contemporary final Neolithic open-air village at Piano d’Orta, but is separated from the core zone of Neolithic agricultural settlement in the lowlands by its position high up on the side of the Orta gorge (Fig. 47.1). The earliest evidence of human activity in the cave, radiocarbon dated to the late sixth millennium BC, is represented by an early Neolithic foundation deposit of the articulated body of a child (Radmilli et al. 1978). Over the next thousand years or so, represented stratigraphically by an accumulation of deposits some 2m in depth containing a succession of hearths and pits and a large quantity and wide range of artefacts and faunal remains, the cave appears to have been used primarily as a dwelling place. Indeed, these material remains are similar in character to those found at open-air sites in the lowlands, with the exception of the relatively high proportion of wild animal species (especially deer) found in the cave. Then, in the late Neolithic, in the innermost and darkest part of the cave, close to the back wall, the remains of four more children were found in a relatively structured deposit in the ‘Level of the Circles’. This lay on a large slab of rock, and comprised a line of eleven small circles of stones (30–80cm in diameter), surrounded by a shallow layer of soil containing charcoal and ashes, artefacts of stone, bone, and shell, large quantities of animal bones (predominantly from meat-bearing parts of the body), and fragments of pottery vessels (especially bowls), some of which are likely to have been used in food sharing and consumption. At one end of the line, a stone circle contained the articulated remains of an infant, whilst at the other end two whole child skulls and fragments of a third were left open to view. The largest concentrations of cultural materials were found close to these human remains, including a rare red painted triton shell (Charonia nodifera), imported from a distant sea and modified for use both as an object of visual display and as a conch shell trumpet, whose sensory impact would have been particularly impressive if sounded during the course of ritual performances in the cave (Skeates 1991b) (Fig. 47.2). Although ritual themes such as fertility, ageing, death, and the supernatural, spring to mind, no single interpretation can be easily ascribed to these special deposits. One particular interpretation of the rituals, with their combined emphasis on food and human remains, is that they symbolically highlighted a cultural contrast between life and death, and more specifically a concern, expressed in reaction to the threat of death, with the fertility of the living, and of subsistence resources critical to the reproduction of the community. Another approach is to focus on the marginality and secrecy of the cave’s location and on the intentionally selected mortuary remains of children, to suggest that these rituals comprised rites of liminality that involved the seclusion and initiation of children into adulthood.
The other group of known Neolithic cave sites in Abruzzo is located further inland, in the intermountain Fucino lake basin. In contrast to the lowland caves, all of the Fucino caves lie within easy access of contemporary local open-air settlements sites, along the lower mountain slopes which flank the southern edge of the basin. All the caves are relatively small and accessible, and may have been used more narrowly as communal burial places for a relatively large number and (age-) range of deceased individuals derived from indigenous communities with a Mesolithic ancestry based in the Fucino basin, whose remains were deposited during the course of relatively simple mortuary rites.
At Grotta Continenza, for example, early Neolithic mortuary deposits were found both in the exterior rock-shelter and in the interior cave (Barra et al. 1989–90). They exhibited a degree of continuity with a series of Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic levels which contained human burials, pieces of red ochre, and shell and bone ornaments, as well as occupation deposits containing faunal remains and stone artefacts indicative of a relatively sedentary complex hunter-gatherer group. Throughout the Neolithic deposits, the remains of some 15 adults and 15 children were found as articulated bodies in graves or scattered as disarticulated bones. In the rock-shelter, the articulated bones of two children were placed in a niche in the central wall, whilst the cremated remains of another two children and one adult, together with a small quantity of red ochre, were deposited inside and on top of a group of intact pottery vessels positioned along a side wall. And in the interior cave, with its low ceilings and stalactites, some circles of stones and pits, and the articulated skeletons of two sheep and a dog, were found. The latter might be interpreted as sacrifices of valued (and novel) domestic animals, offered as reciprocal gifts to ancestral or supernatural inhabitants of the underworld by members of an inland early Neolithic community that still engaged in traditional hunting and gathering. More generally, the religious significance of the Neolithic mortuary rituals performed in Grotta Continenza might be interpreted in two ways. On the one hand, ritual participants may have been concerned, in the face of death, with the promotion of the health, fertility, and nutr
itional welfare of a group in transition between a traditional hunter-gatherer economy and an agricultural lifestyle. On the other hand, the repeated performance of rituals within the cave, and its establishment as an ancestral burial place or monument, might have helped leaders promote an ideal of group unity and continuity amongst an indigenous social group that may (in the early Neolithic) have remained relatively mobile and fluid.
Puglia
In the south-east Italian region of Puglia, two broad groups of Neolithic caves and related open-air sites can also be distinguished: one in the north, associated with well-established agricultural communities settled on and around the Tavoliere Plain; the other in the centre and south, associated with more transitional early farming communities exhibiting stronger continuities with the indigenous culture of the final Upper Palaeolithic/Mesolithic. In fact, stratigraphic continuity between final Upper Palaeolithic/Mesolithic and early Neolithic occupations has been claimed by the excavators of some caves in the centre and south. Nevertheless, the human uses of caves throughout this region were transformed significantly over the course of the Neolithic. Indeed, as social life became more complex and potentially stressful in Puglia, ultimately due to the full adoption of an agricultural lifestyle and the establishment of an increasingly widespread and competitive system of social interaction and exchange, increasingly formalized cave rituals may have been used to express and confront these social and economic tensions, with particular reference to old and new social and cosmological orders.
All of the Puglian Neolithic cave sites appear to have been located on, and may therefore have contributed to the definition of, the margins of the agricultural landscape. However, the underworld was never far removed from contemporary open-air sites and the mainstream of agricultural life (Skeates, in press). In the south, for example, contrasts and connections can be drawn (as in Abruzzo) between occupied Neolithic caves and open-air sites, and between different caves (Skeates 1994). The open-air sites are all situated in the lowlands, generally within a few kilometres of the sea. They can be interpreted as small homesteads or villages, composed of houses and related structural features (including primary and secondary burials), in and around which mixed farming was practised, as well as some hunting and fishing. The cave sites, by contrast, are situated marginally in relation to the open-air sites, either on the coasts or inland, along the edge of the uplands. They can be interpreted as having been used as sheltered bases for subsistence strategies that involved more herding, hunting, and gathering than the mixed farming of the open-air sites, and as liminal places for the performance of rituals. Compared to the open-air sites, a slightly larger quantity and range of special objects was deposited in the caves, including stone lamps; small polished greenstone axes; a wide range of perforated sea shell ornaments; pieces of red ochre; a small bird-shaped shell figurine; a smoothed boar’s tusk; a clay stamp (or pintadera); the articulated leg bones of a cow in a pit in the interior part of Grotta delle Venere; and decorated pottery (including pottery vessels deposited in a water pool in Grotta della Zinzulusa, or placed under stalactites in Grotta di Porto Badisco and Grotta Santa Maria).