Il sito di Uomo della Roccia (Muzzolon di Cornedo Vicentino). Comunità e ambiente prealpino dal quinto millennio a.C.

Uomo della Roccia (The Stone Man) is a huge calcareous monolith arising in the hilly landscape of the Italian Prealps between Lake Garda and River Brenta. The area has always been a natural passage between the alpine world and the Po plain, and the big stone surely was a land-mark useful for people living in the zone. Therefore, when the team of the Agno-Leogra Project made the first surface survey around the monolith, it was not surprised to find archaeological artefacts. The following surveys and excavations discovered several interesting archaeological areas. In the slopes under the monolith an agrarian landscape made of terraces covered a previous occupation in which the remains of a structure and a big amount of ceramic and lithic artefacts were pinpointed. Uphill from the monolith impressive stone ramparts were detected, while in close proximity clearings suited to hunting and comfortable caves had attracted human exploitation. A series of specialistic studies is collected in this book, dealing with the troubled geology of the area and the analysis of the findings -ceramics and lithic tools, a unique metal artefact, human and animal bone fragments, palaeobotanical remains- as well as the spatial analysis of the relationships of the site with the contemporaneous settlements of the area. The results of the study as a whole show that the bulk of occupation was in an advanced stage of Neolithic age, when the site was devoted to animal -especially sheep and goat- husbandry, agriculture, hunting and fishing, but interestingly -as far as the metal artefact is concerned- it was inserted in a network of contacts reaching up to the Balcans. The earliest terraces downstream the monolith can probably be dated to this age.