Manuela Montagnari Kokelj 1, Franco Cucchi 2 & Pino Guidi 3
1 Department of Humanities, University of Trieste, Italy – montagna@units.it
2 Department of Geo-Sciences, University of Trieste, Italy (retired) – franco.cucchi@tim.it
3 Società Alpina delle Giulie, Trieste – pinko.mugo@gmail.com
Archaeological caves and rock shelters of the Trieste Karst (NE Italy): the C.R.I.G.A. Project
ABSTRACT
The C.R.I.G.A. Project (the acronym stands for Informatic Cadastre of Archaeological Caves) is an interdisciplinary project created with a basically scientific aim – i.e. understanding the influence of the geo-environmental factors on the human use of caves in prehistory –, while its potentiality for both land use planning and cultural dissemination emerged later on.
The study area is the Trieste Karst, which occupies the SW part of the Classical Karst and covers the easternmost part of Northern Italy and the SW part of Slovenia. The high number of caves present in the limestone belt – currently c. 3000 registered ones – conditioned not only the prehistoric use of the territory, but also the investigations since c. the 1870s, as both speleologists and professional archaeologists focused their researches on them. These produced a large quantity of data, mostly unpublished till the early 1990s when the C.R.I.G.A. Project started, first with systematic revisions and editions of Neolithic-to-Iron-Age materials of the most important cavities, while all the Roman and Medieval artefacts were the object of two dedicated studies. In the late 1990s it had become clear that the collaboration of speleologists and geologists was essential for a broader approach. Consequently, the systematic control of the Speleological Regional Cadastre – based on the records of the Commissione Grotte “E. Boegan”, Società Alpina delle Giulie, active since 1893 – and of scientific literature, plus systematic field surveys to check the geo-environmental characteristics of these caves and their surroundings, were added to the ongoing critical revision of archaeological collections.
A dedicated geo-referenced database was created to store all data on the ab. 180 caves identified as of archaeological interest (see www.units.it/criga); in addition, GIS analyses were carried out and gave interesting results in predictive terms, which, combined with more traditional studies, allow to formulate new hypotheses on past land use strategies.
Relazione presentata alla conferenza “Archeologia e Speleologia, Subterranean Speleology” svoltasi a Roma il 2 Luglio 2019.
http://www.scintilena.com/conferenza-a-roma-su-archeologia-e-speleologia-subterranean-archaeology/07/03/