Lake Bracciano - La Marmotta Neolithic Settlement

La Marmotta Neolithic Settlement

At La Marmotta, a few hundred meters outside the village of Anguillara Sabazia, remains of an Early Neolithic lakeshore village, datable 5700 BCE have been found, in works overseen by Maria Antonietta Fugazzola Delpino, director of the Pigorini National Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography in Rome, and president of the Italian Institute of Prehistory and Protohistory. Thick oak pilings driven more than two meters into the subsoil have survived, thanks to anoxic lakebottom sediments; dendrochronology dates the settlement very accurately, for local tree-ring sequences have already been thoroughly established. The oldest post Fugazzola Delpino has discovered at La Marmotta dates from around 5,690 BCE, but she thinks ongoing work may yet reveal the village to have been born a century or so earlier. She is more certain of when it died: within a decade of so of 5230 BCE. "Since the sixth millennium BCE, as the climate has grown wetter, the water level in Lake Bracciano has risen more than 25 feet, and so the ruins of the Neolithic lakeshore village are now buried in bottom mud 400 yards off shore" (Delpino 2002).

The strongest evidence that the Marmottans came from far away, probably originally making their way upriver to its source in Lake Bracciano, is simply that their culture was advanced. In the region around Lake Bracciano, according to Fugazzola Delpino, there is no sign of any hunter-gatherers before the settlement was built at La Marmotta. The builders of the village had at their disposal, from the start, the entire "Neolithic package": domesticated animals and plants, ceramic pots, polished stone tools, just as though they had unloaded all those things from their boats.

They kept sheep and goats; they brought pigs and cows with them too, and two breeds of dog, and they planted a wide variety of crops—wheat and barley —and collected others in the woods. " 'They had everything', says Fugazzola, 'They ate grains, vegetables, and also lots of fruit – apples, plums, raspberries, strawberries' Especially in winter they supplemented their diet with acorns, which they stored in large ceramic jars. They cultivated flax to make linen. They planted opium poppies" One of their boats has been recovered. A team of Czech archeologists built a copy of the boat and sailed it 500 miles along the Mediterranean coast to test its seaworthiness.