A calendar of meetings, voices and research to reread the origins
- Prehistory Meetings in Italy They return with a new calendar of events that will accompany the final part of 2026 and will open the path to 2027.
As always, this is not just a conference program, but a shared journey, a space for research, dissemination, and participation where archaeology, anthropology, prehistoric art, ethnomusicology, history of religions, studies on the sacred feminine, and contemporary reflection meet.
Prehistory in Italy also stems from this desire: to look at origins with a mind free from androcentric automatisms, to recognize the complexity of ancient societies and to give voice to signs, bodies, places and memories that have often remained on the margins of dominant narratives.
Many of the speakers who will lead this journey are founding members of the Association, scholars, archaeologists, anthropologists, authors, and fellow travelers who have contributed, with their work and presence, to strengthening the Prehistory in Italy project. Their presentations are not simply "lessons," but stages of a collective research that grows with each meeting, thanks to the participation of those who listen, ask questions, share, and support.
The calendar for this end of 2026 and next 2027 It will therefore be an invitation to explore together central themes of prehistory and archaeomythology: ritual music, images of the body, caves, the sacred feminine, forms of power, the memory of origins, the deepest places of the earth and of human history.
7 October 2026
Barbara Crescimanno
Women Playing Drums. Transforming an Iconography – Part II
The cycle resumes 30 September 2026 with Barbara Crescimanno and with the second part of the meeting Women Playing Drums: Transforming an Iconography.
This event marks the second leg of a journey that intertwines archaeology, ethnomusicology, and anthropology, continuing a journey already underway with great participation and interest.
Through images, testimonies, and comparisons between different eras and cultures, Barbara Crescimanno will guide us through how the act of beating a drum has accompanied ritual practices, collective celebrations, and forms of transmission of female memory.
The drum, in this journey, appears not only as a musical instrument, but as a sounding body, a ritual object, a threshold between the human and the sacred, between rhythm and community, between memory and presence.
Barbara Crescimanno She teaches at the Arci Tavola Tonda School of Traditional Music and Dance, collaborates with the Chair of Ethnomusicology at the University of Palermo, coordinates the TrizziRiDonna ethno-choreographic research group, and has been conducting an original research project for years dedicated to the relationship between music and the sacred feminine.
11th November 2026
Chiara Baldini
Palaces without kings
The November 11, 2026 it will be Chiara Baldini's turn with Palaces without kings Minoan Crete: Neolithic Legacies, Matrilinearity, and Forms of Power
What if Bronze Age Minoan Crete was the last great heir of Mediterranean Neolithic societies, just as Marija Gimbutas suggested?
Starting from this question, the meeting will take us into an extraordinary civilization, often described through its palaces, frescoes, luminous images, and artistic refinement, but still capable of raising profound questions about the forms of authority and social organization.
Through recent archaeological re-readings, which are increasingly present in the academic debate today, we will explore a Crete characterised by palaces without kings, non-hierarchical authority models, and matrilineal social and architectural structures.
A meeting to reflect on how modern categories of power, domination, and royalty can shape our understanding of ancient societies, and on how necessary it is to return to material traces with a freer, more attentive, and less predictable gaze.
Chiara Baldini is a researcher, author, and freelance curator originally from Florence. Her work investigates the evolution of ecstatic cults in the West, with a particular focus on Minoan Crete, Ancient Greece, and Rome, intertwining historical research, altered states of consciousness, and contemporary cultures.
February 2027
Luciana Percovich
Guardians of the Threshold
In the month of February 2027 We will meet Luciana Percovich, author, translator and independent researcher, with an appointment dedicated to her latest work Guardians of the Threshold, published by Venexia in the series The owls of Venexia.
In her book, Luciana Percovich rediscovers ancient and forgotten female figures—ancestresses, mythical mothers, Crones, and guardians of knowledge—restoring their role as guides in the passages between worlds, between memory, myth, and transformation.
From prehistoric caves to symbols of the sacred feminine, the book is an invitation to rediscover a wisdom capable of reconnecting us to the living body of the Earth and the deep roots of the human experience.
Thresholds are not just places of passage, they are spaces of transformation, points where the visible and the invisible meet, where the everyday world opens up to a deeper dimension.
From the depths of time, the guardians of the threshold continue to question our ways of thinking about knowledge, the sacred, birth, death, healing, and transformation.
A meeting dedicated to figures often marginalized or erased from dominant narratives, yet still capable of speaking powerfully to our present.
Luciana Percovich She is a writer, translator, essayist, and independent researcher, active in the women's movement since the 1970s and associated with the Libera Università delle Donne in Milan. Her work intertwines women's history, female spirituality, health, anthropology, and mythology, with a particular focus on the origins of the sacred and female genealogies removed by patriarchal culture.
March 31, 2027
Maria Laura Leone
In the Dark Depths of Badisco: The Deer Cave.
Il March 31, 2027 we will ideally descend into the heart of the Grotta dei Cervi of Porto Badisco with Maria Laura Leone and the meeting In the Dark Depths of Badisco: The Deer Cave and his complex paintings.
Maria Laura Leone, palethnologist, researcher of prehistoric art and professor of History of Art, has dedicated important studies to the ideological and religious aspects of prehistory in Puglia and is the author of The Phosphenic Deer Cave.
With her, we will approach one of the most extraordinary complexes of prehistoric art in Europe: a dark, visionary, deeply symbolic place, where thousands of signs seem to preserve an ancient ritual memory.
The Deer Cave is not just an archaeological site of exceptional importance. It is a sanctuary of the sign, a place where the depths of the earth seem to become language, ritual, image, and transformative experience.
The meeting will be an opportunity to consider Badisco not only as a heritage to be explored and protected, but as one of the great milestones of European prehistory.
Maria Laura Leone She is an archaeologist, paleontologist, and art historian, a scholar of prehistoric art, and a professor of Art History. Her research focuses particularly on the symbolic and ritual expressions of prehistory, with particular attention to the Grotta dei Cervi in Porto Badisco, the Daunian stelae, megalithism, and stelae statues.
April 2027
Elvira Visciola
Le Guardians of Time. Paleolithic figurines: matter, symbol, and memory of the origins.
In the month of April 2027 Elvira Visciola will be with us for the meeting Guardians of Time. Paleolithic figurines: matter, symbol, and the memory of their origins.
With her, we will enter the world of Paleolithic figurines: tiny yet powerful images, created thousands of years before written history.
Not just “objects,” not just artifacts to be classified, but presences capable of questioning even today our way of thinking about the body, the feminine, ritual, and the origins of human representation.
Paleolithic figurines force us to return to a fundamental question: what did the most ancient human communities see, preserve, and transmit through these forms? What relationship existed between matter, body, gesture, and memory?
This meeting will also be a way to recognize the value of the patient and passionate work of those within Preistoria in Italia who are contributing to building new maps of knowledge.
Elvira Visciola She is one of the voices that have helped shape the Prehistory project in Italy from its very foundations. An architect, independent researcher, and passionate scholar of prehistory, she has for years collected, organized, and interpreted archaeological data with a multidisciplinary perspective, attentive to both the rigor of the documentation and the symbolic depth of the finds.
May 2027
Arianna Carta
The Sacred Feminine in Sardinia
In the month of May 2027 Arianna Carta will accompany us to Sardinia with a meeting dedicated to Sacred Feminine in Sardinia.
The issue of female power is complex, controversial, and often debated. But what do we really mean by power? Power as domination? As authority? As generative, ritual, symbolic, and social capacity? As a recognized presence within the community?
What are the signs, symbols, and practices that trace a line that is often difficult to follow, because it is dispersed across time, space, and interpretations?
Through archaeology, landscape, myth, and memory, Arianna Carta will invite us to reflect on the traces of the sacred feminine in Sardinia, a land where places, images, and traditions sometimes seem to hold ancient threads.
The meeting will also be an opportunity to question the categories through which we interpret the past. Speaking of the sacred feminine doesn't mean superimposing contemporary desires onto the ancient world, but rather attempting to carefully observe the contexts, bodies, symbols, practices, and places that prehistory and protohistory have handed down to us.
Arianna Carta, a cultural anthropologist with an interdisciplinary doctorate between anthropology and archaeology dedicated to the origins of female social power in Sardinia, hosts the association's podcast Who's afraid of the Goddess? His book The Sacred Feminine in Sardinia: Symbols, Rites, and Forms of Power comes out in January 2027 for Venexia Publisher.
A calendar to follow, a community to grow
Each encounter is a piece of a larger project: building a space where prehistory can be recounted with rigor, passion, and a free gaze. A space where questions about origins aren't locked away in books, museums, or archives, but instead nourish the present.
Attending the meetings means joining a vibrant community of scholars, researchers, members, and enthusiasts who believe in the cultural power of prehistory and the need to make it accessible, discussed, and shared.
Prehistory in Italy was also born for this reason: to build bridges between research and society, between ancient places and contemporary questions, between profound memory and the future.
We look forward to seeing you at our next meetings.
Because roots don't just belong to the past: they continue to grow beneath our feet.
