The First italian Farmers: the role of stone ornaments in tradition, innovation and cultural change

When the first farmers landed on the eastern coast of the Italian peninsula (VI mill. BC Cal), they brought with them a system of knowledge and technologies that quickly spread along both coasts. The kind of interaction they had with the local hunter-gatherer communities, especially in the central-south of the Italian peninsula, remains a widely debated issue. Elements in the symbolic culture of these first settlers, such as the use of columbella rustica or the exclusive of hard animal matter ornaments in some sites, suggest that they adopted some local traditional features. However, especially in the central-south of the peninsula, the attestations of Castelnovian sites are too scarce, and cannot exclude that certain elements were already part of the traditional heritage of the newcomers. Concurrently, in some of the oldest Neolithic groups is well observable the importance of shaped lithic ornaments and the development of types that will become more and more standardized in the successive neolithic phases.