Technological traditions of Bronze Age Impasto Pottery at Torre Castelluccia (Apulia, Southern Italy): a comparative study of domestic and funerary context

The coastal site of Torre Castelluccia in Apulia (Pulsano, TA) is a rare example in Italian protohistory where both settlement areas and adjacent burial sites—including grotticella-type tombs and a cremation cemetery—have been identified (Gorgoglione 2002). A recent re-examination of over 1000 pottery sherds has produced a reliable chronological sequence spanning from the South Italian Middle Bronze Age (1700–1300 BC) to the Greek colonisation around 700 BC. Building on this dataset, further research has explored the technological characteristics of impasto ware from both settlement and funerary contexts. The aim is to investigate the technological choices made by the community of practice responsible for pottery production at Torre Castelluccia, focusing on raw material procurement and paste preparation methods. By analyzing analogous functional shapes from different contexts of use—domestic and funerary—we can conduct a comparative study that significantly enriches this research, especially given the rarity of such diachronic and contextual analyses. The methodology combines macroscopic and archaeometric approaches. Macroscopic observation of various vessel types from both contexts and different phases enabled the preliminary classification of 180 potsherds (Pizzuti et al. 2025). Out of these, a representative sample of 50 sherds was selected for thin-section petrographic analysis. This poster presents the petrographic results, highlighting the relationships between petrofabrics, chronological phases, vessel function, and context of use. The results offer new insights into the technological traditions and social organisation of pottery production at Torre Castelluccia during the Middle and Late Bronze Age. Moreover, the project significantly expands the regional dataset, as only a limited number of samples had previously been analysed for this area (Cannavò et al. 2018).