The Neolithic civilization

Following the last great Pleistocene freezing, between the end of the 7^th and the beginning of the 3^rd millennium, the Neolithic developed in Europe in a climatic period that has reached our days, the Holocene, characterized by a progressive rise of the temperatures that favoured its diffusion.

Starting from the regions of the so-called Fertile Half Moon in the Near and Middle East, thanks to the introduction of a productive economy based on agriculture and breeding, the Neolithic was a period of radical and irreversible changes in all the aspects of the life in mankind, characterized by new models of life, based on the direct intervention on the modification of natural environments and on the non-migratory aspect of stable dwellings, that supplanted nomadism and the natural equilibrium with the atmosphere that had distinguished the Palaeolithic Man.

Small groups, possessing this extraordinary "culture", advanced towards the West, leaving behind disforestation and fires in order to make place for cultivated fields and prairies for the cattle, reached the Salento, through the bridge offered by the Ionian Islands and "rocks" that had not submerged yet, on primitive boats loaded with seeds, kept in ingenious ceramic containers, and the first tamed animals: ox, pigs, goats and sheep.

On the coast the first villages of small huts were established supported by poles and with great external hearths, and quickly they spread towards the inland and towards other regions of Southern Italy, now surrounded by walls and ditches, usually situated in proximity of courses of water, necessary to the survival of the new economy and not far from natural clay deposits, for the fabrication of its vases. Beside the instruments in flint, other tools appear that are directly connected with the new economy like grinders  and cutting  blades  together  with  obsidian  blades,  a

volcanic glass that resulted from the first forms of long distance commerce with the places of origin in the Aeolian and Greek Isles. Next to axes, hatchets, pickaxes in polished stone, objects in bone become more frequent like spatulas and pricks, connected also to the ceramic production that comprises various daily objects, like small ovens, furnaces, fumaroles, grains and charms from necklaces, besides, obviously, the predominant class of this innovative production: vases.

Concerning the evolution of the ceramic forms and the various styles of decorations, the Neolithic has been subdivided in three periods: Ancient Neolithic, from the end of the 7^th millennium to the end of the 6^th millennium BC, characterized by a few forms of vases with a very elementary structure, decorated with irregular impressions: horizon of the impressed ceramics, with engraved or graffiti ceramics in the last centuries of the 6^th millennium, and the first manifestations of painted ceramics; the mid Neolithic, 5^th 4^th millennium, in which, beside refined products of impressed and engraved ceramics, even painted ceramics spread, horizon of the ceramics with red bands and later the tri-chromic ceramic in the style of Serra d’Alto; and the final Neolithic, end 4^th beginning 3^rd millennium BC, dominated by unadorned ceramics of the range of the ceramics Diana-Bellavista.

During these periods, life developed around inhabited nuclei, evolving and complicating the religious world and the social organizations of the not migratory groups. The acephalous or egalitarian nuclei, that is with a social composition based on equality, often characterized by relationships, and deprived of a stable head, evolves in segmental tribal ethnics, more organized and complex that, already in the course of the medium Neolithic were distributed on wide territories of Southern Italy. Within them the social role of some personages predominates, without however assuming any dominating hereditary or chaste meaning, compared to the rest of the community, while the role of the shamans becomes more and more obvious that, in rarest cases, could be identified as a first form of a "sacerdotal chaste". However, it is between the end of the Neolithic and the beginning of the Age of Metals that the delineating of the first forms of a chiefdom society ought to be found and that will continue to be asserted mainly from the second half of 3^rd millennium BC.

Further studies:

_{D. Cocchi Genick, Manuale di Preistoria. II. Neolitico, Firenze, 1993.}