Cults of the agricultural and pastoral societies

_{edited by Medica Assunta Orlando}

The advent of agriculture and of the new way of life based on non-migration and on the seasonal cycles of nature brought, in the human groups, also an evolution and complication of the religious sphere, with new divinities tied not only to the Mother Earth, but also to the cult of waters, of the sowing and harvesting period and the cult of the grandfathers of the chthonian world, as an original identity of the groups united according to ethnics.
The caves, once used as a living space became, in the Neolithic phase, a place of cult and rituals celebrations, documented in all the Italian territory.

In Salento, in the Zinzulusa Grotto, between the end of the Neolithic Aeneolithic, man adored a divinity of waters, bringing gifts of vases, intentionally broken, that he placed, during ritual processions along the sides of the small lake, placed just after the entrance of this cavity.

But the grotto that is best known for its connection to the complex religious and post-Palaeolithic ritual world is the Grotto of the Red Deers in Porto Badisco. The documentation of this grotto speaks in favour of a continuous residence of a human group in the pre-grotto, and these people were surely connected to the rich manifestations of art that appeared along the inner corridors. Probably it was a small group of Shamans, who protected the entrance and opened, periodically, the inner meanders to the tribal groups that arrived identifying themselves as a single ethnic group.

Here probably, to the sound of cymbal instruments, female processions and ritual dances took place; alliances were made and friendships were renewed, in the name of the God of the waters to whom they offered vases and dishes, to collect the drops of stalactites. Here rituals of initiation of the children happened, leaving hundreds of small handprints on the vault of the last room of the central corridor. This uncommon and spectacular story of an articulated and complex compact tribal world regulated by the religious sphere, seems to emerge from the hundreds and hundred of drawings made in its inner corridors. This is why the grotto is defined a real sanctuary of prehistory, in which we assist to the passage from a " residential and domestic rituality" to the centrality of places, with a sacredness, recognized and shared with tribal groups scattered on a wide territory, that stands above those gathered there, sealing with divine the actions and the attempts, that take place within.

Even the cult of the dead is complicated and began during the Neolithic: the organization of spaces, both inside or outside the living areas, dedicated to the funerary rituals and to the burial are well documented since ancient Neolithic. The site of Samari, near Gallipoli, is a real sepulchre where alongside interment areas there was a large area for the rituals of "purification", "separation" and “removal" of the dead one.

At the same time in the village of Serra la Cicora di Nardò, internal spaces to the living areas were set to receive not only the graves, but also analogous rituals of purification of the funereal "beds".

macina With the passage to Aeneolithic and successively to the Age of Bronze the cult of the dead took on several various manifestations, in which the collective graves predominate in natural cavities, dug artificially in the rocks, and supplied with access dromos and niches against the wall. The buriel objects comprised mainly daily objects, sometimes symbols of the sex of the dead one, like a grinder in stone from the Grotta of Serra la Cicora, on which the jaw of a young woman is still resting. There are many prestigious objects too, like grains of a steatite necklace, pendants in hard stone or wild boar tusks and rare objects in metal, like the dagger of Grotta Cappuccini and the fibula of the small grottos of Vanze and Acquarica.

Further studies:

_{P. Graziosi, Le pitture preistoriche della grotta di Porto Badisco, Firenze, 1980.
E. Ingravallo, Il sito neolitico di Serra Cicora (Nardò - Le): note preliminari, in Origini, XXVI, pp. 87-117, 2004.

M. A. Orlando, Samari (Gallipoli), in La Passione dell'origine. Giuliano Cremonesi e la ricerca preistorica nel Salento, a cura di E. Ingravallo, pp. 122-134, Lecce, 1997.

M. A. Orlando, Samari. Le strutture, in Forme e tempi della neolitizzazione in Italia meridionale e in Sicilia, Atti del Seminario Internaz. di Studi, a cura di S. e V. Tinè, Rossano Calabro 26-28 maggio 1994, pp. 228-231, Rossano Calabro, 1996.

M. A. Orlando, Presenze necropoliche e strutture funerarie nel Salento dal XVI al X sec. a.C. Un tentativo di classificazione della documentazione esistente, in StAnt 8,2, pp. 19-38, 1995.

S. Rossetti, Storia delle ricerche nella Grotta Zinzulusa e analisi della documentazione archeologica nel Museo Civico di Paleontologia e Paletnologia di Maglie,Tesi di Laurea, Facoltà di Lettere, Univ. Lecce, A.A. 2006-2007.}

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Cults of the agricultural and pastoral societies