L'età del Ferro a Capua

In this extensive study, the author aims at a comprehensive analysis of funerary archaeological evidence in Early Iron Age Capua, the ancient city in the modern province of Caserta, Campania, southern Italy, situated some 25 km north of Naples. The main difficulty results from the entity of the burials, which includes different burial grounds belonging to three different cemeteries, in turn investigated by different methods and times; the information about them is often incomplete and that conditions the critical interpretation. Another problem is that the sample is composed of a majority of 2nd local phase burials and this condition might alter the outline with a faked under representation of the tombs of the 9th century BC: in fact, only in 2005-2006 most of "Nuovo Mattatoio" necropolis, the main first Capuan phase graveyard, was excavated and works (excavation and restoration) are ongoing. However, the examined 1st phase graves well symbolize the development of community in the pre-protourban period. Among the main goals of this research is a comprehensive re-examination of relative and absolute chronology for the early Capuan phases. Another goal is to shed some light on our knowledge of the amount of archaeological contexts identified over the last fifty years by subjecting the material to statistical analysis, which necessitated an alternative reading of the problem of diachronic and synchronic development in the society investigated.

Gianluca Melandri