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La produzione laminare in selce del sito di Cuccuru is Arrius (Cabras-Oristano) nel Neolitico finale : caratteri tecnologici e aspetti funzionali

2019 - Istituto italiano di preistoria e protostoria

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  • At the end of the Neolithic, concurrently with the origin of Ozieri Culture (first half of the 4th millennium), starts to circulate in Sardinia a particular class of flint blades that show a certain regularity of their dimensional characteristics and a general appearance of standardization. This can possibly be considered the consequence of the activity of a restricted group of specialized craftmen. The raw material exploited for the production of these artefacts is a fine-grained and homogeneous flint outcropping in the Oligo-Miocene Basin of the Anglona region near Perfugas-Laerru, North Sardinia. Actually just one case bear the best evidence of a specialized workshop for the production of these blades: it was identified in the site of Contraguda, a few kilometers North from Perfugas. These artefacts were produced by different techniques: indirect percussion, simple pressure and lever pressure.
  • The blades detached by pressure show the persistent presence of the same morphological characters like a considerable straightness of the edges, ridges and profile, whilst the thickness is almost always regular and thin; the blades that have been produced by indirect percussion show, on the contrary, less regular profiles, edges and sections. These blades have been found both in funerary and non-funerary contexts, frequently far away from the source area, always in the stage of end-products. Independently of the final context, long-term management strategies through edge resharpening and tool recycling were applied to the sardianian flint blades: this evidence suggests the value assigned by the consumers to this category of artefacts, that possibly lies both in the exclusivity of the raw material and in the skill of technical investment they underwent.
  • The distribution of the long blades is quite variable from site to site, and their number ranges from a single element to series counting up to 70 artefacts: this is the case of the Cuccuru is Arrius Final Neolithic dwelling site near Cabras (Oristano). The entire corpus of flint blades coming from Cuccuru is Arrius site was selected for techno-functional analysis, in order to record the technical features of these remarkable tools and their functions. The main aim of this study is to determine whether these artifacts show any traces consequent upon their use or they do not show wear-traces and could be interpreted just as extra-functional valued objects. [Publisher's text]

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Rivista di scienze preistoriche : LXIX, 2019