A Hunters’ Camp Lay Directly Under the First Farmers’ Layers in an Italian Cave
Archaeologists in northeastern Italy have found a Mesolithic hunters’ camp sitting directly beneath the oldest farming layers in a cave. The site, Tina Jama, sits near the summit of Mount Lanaro (also called Volnik) on the Trieste Karst, close to the Slovenian border.
What the team found
An Italian-Slovenian team led by Federico Bernardini of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice has excavated the cave over four field seasons. Elena Leghissa of the Institute of Archaeology at ZRC SAZU heads the project. The team opened a wide area instead of a small test trench, so it could read the whole layout. The pattern points to an organized camp built around a hearth in the most sheltered part of the cave, with stones and large blocks forming a structure near the entrance.
The finds include tiny trapezoid stone tools and the waste from making them, bone points, shell ornaments from the sea and from fresh water, and pierced red deer teeth that people likely wore as pendants. One tooth carries traces of red ocher. The team also found a child’s tooth, a large red deer antler axe with an unfinished hole, and an 11-centimeter antler object with two drilled holes. The team suggests the object may have straightened arrow shafts, but it has not confirmed that use.
Why the layers matter
At many Karst sites, the sequence of layers is broken or mixed. Here the layers sit in order, with a late Mesolithic deposit directly below the earliest Neolithic levels. That order lets researchers study the shift from hunting and gathering to farming. Bernardini dates the arrival of the first Neolithic groups in the Karst to about 7,500 years ago. That date belongs to the farmers, not to the hunters’ layer below them.
What is still unknown
The release gives no radiocarbon dates for the Mesolithic level, so its exact age is not yet established. The team has not said whether hunters and the first farmers overlapped in the cave, or whether newcomers replaced the earlier people or local groups adopted farming themselves. The antler axe also has almost no parallels in Italy, although similar axes appear in Mesolithic northern Europe.
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