Between the living and the dead. Combining different legacy datasets in the Bronze Age site of Torre Castelluccia (Apulia, Italy)

Torre Castelluccia (18 km southeast of Taranto, Apulia) is one of the few Bronze Age sites in Italy that has yielded remains of both habitations and spatially contiguous burials of different types and chronology. Given its uniqueness, it is an ideal case study to tackle the issue of integrating data from funerary and domestic spheres when reconstructing past societies. However, since archaeological research at this site was mostly conducted in the 1950s and 1960s and information is stored in non-digital formats, data management has proven to be quite challenging. Thus, the first goal of our study was the conversion from a physical to a digital archive; this procedure helped to prevent further data loss and created a space where different datasets could communicate. The new database enabled managing and comparing information on the settlement and funerary areas (e.g. to identify similar pottery functional types used in both contexts) and directly supported their interpretation. One of the outcomes was a more accurate characterization of the activity phases for each considered context, which contributed to further speculations on social and cultural dynamics. In fact, while the fortified settlement is continuously occupied from the South Italian Middle Bronze Age until Greek colonization, the cremation cemetery is in use in the Late Bronze Age and is partly coeval with at least one rock-cut "grotticella"-type tomb (whose skeletons have unfortunately not been fully preserved). This chronological overlap is referable to a complexity of coexisting rites, possibly adopted by different social groups, whose reflection in the settled area can be searched for. In this paper, we will present the results of our research. Based on first-hand experience, we will also discuss the potential of linking funerary and domestic data using a single repository which can be queried and updated at any time.