Reconstructing landscapes through lithics. Raw material acquisition strategies and prehistoric mobility in central Italy: new data from Grotta Battifratta (RI)

Throughout Prehistory, humans have adapted to the natural environment shaping their coping strategies with the ecosystem. Tracing ancient movement is a key point to detect human interactions with the environment and adaptive mechanisms. Reconstructing past human routes means, indeed, to comprehend the ancient landscape as it was known and perceived and, consequently, its exploitation. Here, we will discuss the role of lithic data in investigating territorial behavior. Lithics are potentially informative of various aspects of ancient groups as they played an essential role during Prehistory. Siliceous rocks were diffusely exploited to produce stone artifacts and humans developed different supplying strategies to acquire raw materials. Therefore, human groups were deeply aware of the ecosystem they lived in. As a result, characterization and provenance analyses offer an interpretative tool to archaeologists to investigate connectivity and human-environment relationships, revealing to what extent humans exploited the surrounding ecosystem. These theoretical criteria have been applied through a geoarchaeological approach to the investigation of the Sabina region (northern Latium, central Italy), whose raw material sources are still unknown. Non-destructive petrographic analyses have been run on the lithic assemblage of Grotta Battifratta (RI), a cave site showing a long-term occupation from the upper Pleistocene on. The Neolithic sample suggests the exploitation of different siliceous rocks, whose variability has been analyzed using different methods with the aim of identifying raw material sources. The identification of lithic outcrops and deposits will help defining site-catchment areas, linking the site to a larger territory in order to trace spatial mobility and reconstruct the ancient landscape exploited during the Neolithic peopling of the region.