Appearance and function of harpoons in northeastern Italy

The chapter discusses the appearance of osseous harpoons in northern Italy. At present, in Italy, the earliest harpoons come from the eastern Alpine region and in particular from the Adige Valley, the southern Dolomites and the Julian Alps. Typologically, specimens from these areas are defined as bilateral harpoons with straight barbs and basal bilateral gorge and bevelled bases. On the basis of the radiocarbon dates available for the archaeological layers containing the harpoons, it seems that lateral-barbs technology was introduced in the eastern Alpine region during the Sauveterrian, in the 9th millennium cal BC. Only in the Adige Valley have a total of 15 entire and fragmentary harpoons been found in the Late Sauveterrian and Castelnovian levels of the sites of Romagnano Loc III, Riparo Pradestel, Riparo Gaban and Doss de la Forca. One entire specimen comes from the burial of Mondeval de Sora in the southern Dolomites whereas another two fragments were recovered at the sites of Riparo Biarzo and Cladrecis in the Julian Alps. Such harpoons underwent a technological and functional analysis, the results of which are discussed in relation to experimental data as well as evidence from contemporaneous stone projectile technologies. In the chapter, we explore whether the introduction of standardized hunting toolkits, such as that represented by lateral barbed osseous projectiles, might have been related to changes in environmental conditions and how cultural transmission processes might have spread the use of this curated technology across a wider region. The evidence we collected seems to indicate that such an innovation spread locally at the end of the Early Mesolithic. Other chronologically earlier specimens have been found in the adjacent Balkan Peninsula and Southern France.