![]() Similar examples from the period in Europe are known, but are quite rare, says Zerboni. The excavators also uncovered seven small clay votive figurines depicting horses, pigs, cows, and, in one instance, an anthropomorphic figure. Zerboni notes that the pottery found in the pool is of a type that would have been highly valued and used only for special occasions. The finds include around 150 complete vases and 25 miniature vessels, which pottery experts dated to this region’s Middle Bronze Age (ca. Their excavations did, however, uncover an extensive array of material in the pool. There was no sign of a mechanism for channeling water in or out, and the fine-grained sediments had accumulated slowly at the pool’s bottom without the sort of regular disturbance that would have occurred if it had served as a reservoir. The team found no indication that the pool had served any practical purpose. ![]() In any case, the upper tank, whose design included additional supports, held strong for millennia. It’s unclear whether the earlier design simply couldn’t withstand the pressure of the earthen walls or whether one of the area’s frequent earthquakes contributed to its demise. “But we dug a few more trenches just to check what was below the tank, and we found evidence of another wood structure.” This turned out to be an earlier attempt at building a somewhat larger tank, which had collapsed before it was completed. “When we arrived at the bottom, we said, ‘OK, our job is done, we have finished the excavation,’” says Zerboni. As the researchers would learn, the pool’s builders had good reason to take extra care to ensure the soundness of their design. And, for good measure, a pair of long beams were arranged diagonally to buttress the four corner poles. The poles, in turn, were pressed against the walls by two networks of horizontal beams that crossed the pool perpendicular to each other. More than 240 interlocking boards lined the pool’s earthen walls and were held in place by the poles. Twenty-six wooden poles were arranged vertically to form a tank measuring roughly 40 feet long, 23 feet wide, and at least 16 feet deep. When they reached the bottom of the pool after several years of careful work, the archaeologists marveled at the feat of ancient engineering before them. We don’t expect to find such majestic structures from prehistory.” “Building such a structure implies very careful planning, coordinating the work of many people, and a very clear architectural plan. “The Noceto pool is unique in Italy-it’s unique in the world,” says Zerboni. What they have learned about this pool in the years since has provided surprising new insights into the social organization and ritual practices of a culture that thrived in this fertile region for centuries during the second millennium B.C. ![]() The structure they were excavating was not a building at all, the researchers realized-it was an artificial pool. “But soon after we started the excavation, we noticed that the sediments inside the structure weren’t related to domestic activity.” Rather than material such as ash and charcoal, typically found where people lived or worked, the structure was filled with natural sediments of the sort that would be found in a lake. “At the beginning, we thought it was probably some sort of residential building,” says team member Andrea Zerboni, a geoarchaeologist at the University of Milan. A team of archaeologists led by Mauro Cremaschi and Maria Bernabò Brea was called in to investigate. On a hilltop at the edge of the town of Noceto on northern Italy’s Po Plain, a 2004 construction project had gotten just a few feet into the ground when a wooden structure began to emerge. ![]()
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