by Francesca Principi The large knotted rings are one of the most characteristic symbols of the Piceno culture even though they remain, to this day, finds whose true meaning remains mostly obscure. To understand the cultural context in which these objects were created, it is of fundamental importance to make a premise on identity…

Autochthonous civilizations lit up along the coasts of the Danube, with strong signals of equal and community culture. A tribute to Marija Gimbutas, visionary archaeologist. by Harald Haarmann and Mariagrazia Pelaia Discovering Ancient Europe. In the preface to her fundamental work entitled The Civilization of the Goddess (1991; transl. It .: La civilization…

by Giulia Goggi The condition of Etruscan women seems to have been freer than that of contemporary women. It has been hypothesized that they knew how to write and read and the inscriptions on some mirrors could be related to this, explaining the scenes represented. In the Etruscan inscriptions the…

by Elvira Visciola Marija Gimbutas spoke of ancient Europe for the Neolithic, including a vast territory in which populations moved bringing with them their own customs and traditions which they transferred to the populations they met. In reality, although the traces are more fleeting and distant even by several thousand…

by Barbara Crescimanno At the Salinas Archaeological Museum in Palermo are preserved two "lozenge" idols in dark clay, about 10 cm high, dating back to the Middle Eneolithic (mid-XNUMXrd millennium BC) and found in a tomb found in front of the Park gate of the Regia Favorita, in Piazza Leoni, in the plain that…

by Alessandra De Nardis An article by the French journalist Manon Meyer appeared on National Geographic on January 3, 2023 entitled: "Why did prehistoric men and women paint in caves?"; the text is an interview with Jean-Loïc Le Quellec, prehistoric archaeologist, anthropologist and director emeritus of research at the CNRS who of…

by Arianna Carta That Marija Gimbutas was a genius and that she revolutionized Neolithic archeology is a fact that is clearly evident from her university career, publications and direction of international excavations at a time when women archaeologists had to stay locked up in their rooms. Little known…

by Alessandra de Nardis André Leroi-Gourhan (1911-1986), considered one of the world's greatest specialists in prehistory, hypothesized that animals were part of a symbolic system of the living world maintained with small variations throughout the duration of Paleolithic art. This symbolic system implied a distribution of animal species in two…

by Maria Laura Leone Writing about Grotta dei Cervi in ​​Porto Badisco in Salento is stimulating and arduous. The artistic complexity and the anthropological phenomenon that characterize it involve science, philosophy and neurology at the same time. It is a singular place and dealing with it, as with my excursus linked to it,…

by Alessandra de Nardis Prehistory is certainly an inexhaustible place of questions that are unlikely to ever find answers. When we try to reconstruct our origins, intuition remains perhaps the only useful faculty since it draws on the deepest and most recondite ancestral memories. Despite the scarcity of artifacts created by our…

by Kristina Berggren In 1934, it fell to a farmer working on his land just outside the town of Capestrano to find a large statue. The front was badly worn, but the back was in perfect condition. It was broken below the knees but the base with the legs…

by Barbara Lucrezia Paganelli Taken from Marija Gimbutas – Twenty years of study on the Goddess – Proceedings of the Conference of the same name – Rome 9-10 May 2014 – Laima Editorial Project – Turin During the XNUMXrd millennium PEC spread across Europe, moving from the east, a group of new cultures (of ceramics…