Luca Alessandri

• PhD
• Researcher at Sapienza University of Rome

The aim of this book is to present an in-depth analysis of the socio-economic dynamics that took place from the Bronze Age until the middle of the eighth century BC, in the Latium Vetus (Italy). To understand the archaeological record, knowledge of the transformations through time of the various landscape units is necessary. Such knowledge was obta...

Saltmaking on the Latial coasts in protohistory Both in historical periods and in antiquity the area between Ostia and the Tyrrhenian Sea was strongly associated with saltmaking and although the literary sources state the importance for Rome of saltmaking near Ostia already during the advanced Iron Age, so far no archaeological evidence for salt pr...

This paper has two aims. The first is to introduce to a wider audience the recently proposed Bubble Model: a new method to reconstruct ancient settlement territories. After a preliminary discussion of similar methods that have been used in archaeology, such as Voronoi diagrams (Thiessen polygons), Multiplicatively Weighted Voronoi diagrams and XTEN...

In 2017, an excavation led by the Groningen Institute of Archaeology and in collaboration with the Tor Vergata University of Rome, took place on two small islands in the Caprolace lagoon (Sabaudia, Italy), where Middle Bronze Age layers had previously been reported. Combining the results of an environmental reconstruction of the surroundings and a...

Drop me a line if you want the full paper - The Roca Archaeological Survey, the archaeological survey centred on the landscape around the important settlement of Roca Vecchia (sometime spelled also Rocavecchia) in Southeastern Italy, has produced a wealth of new data on the landscape frequentation of one of the most important hubs in the central M...

The landscape characteristics and salt production methods along the coasts of peninsular Italy from the Bronze Age to the Roman period are examined, with a focus on the significance of marine salt for Italy's ancient food economy, given the limited availability of rock salt. Two main methods of marine salt production are highlighted. Briquetage inv...

In this work, we study salt-production settlement in central Italy with an exploratory application of centrality indexes, common in social network analysis: betweenness centrality, closeness centrality, and degree centrality. These methods are not new, but they have never been applied to this type of site and the results are innovative and illumina...

Plants have always represented a key element in landscape delineation. Indeed, plant diversity, whose distribution is influenced by geographic/climatic variability, has affected both environmental and human ecology. The present contribution represents a multi‐proxy study focused on the detection of starch, pollen and non‐pollen palynomorphs in anci...

During the Copper Age and onwards, unique archaeological sites emerged throughout Europe. These sites exhibit distinct features such as the absence of typical household pottery, the presence of kilns, and extensive layers composed solely of fragments of reddish-brown jars. Scholars generally interpret these sites as specialized locations for salt p...

Between 2015 and 2019, a team of archaeologists, palaeobotanists and geologists from the Universities of Groningen, Amsterdam and Leiden looked into the distal effects of a powerful eruption of the Somma–Vesuvius volcano in Campania on the former wetlands of the Agro Pontino and Fondi coastal plains in Central Tyrrhenian Italy. These wetlands are l...

The Middle Bronze Age at La Sassa Cave (Sonnino): the SP sector - In the La Sassa cave (Sonnino, LT), four excavation campaigns led to the discovery of a deposit ranging from the Late Pleistocene to the present day. From the Copper Age to the Middle Bronze Age (MBA 1/2), the cave was used as a burial place. In the MBA 1/2, some (possible) cultic ac...

The collection of samples and finds for archaeological surveys is traditionally based on the establishment of grids that allow the area under study to be discretized into generally square cells in order to allow a statistical assessment of the highest or lowest concentration of finds. Currently, such grids are implemented in a local coordinate syst...

This study focuses on the changes in diet and mobility of people buried in the La Sassa cave (Latium, Central Italy) during the Copper and Bronze Ages to contribute to the understanding of the complex contemporary population dynamics in Central Italy. To that purpose, carbon and nitrogen stable isotope analyses, strontium isotope analyses, and FT-I...

The Pontine Marshes (Central Italy) are known for their long drainage history starting early in Roman times and culminating in their reclamation ( bonifica integrale) by the Fascist’s regime under Mussolini, mostly in the 1930s of past century. The geology of this coastal wetland and causes for its drainage problems received limited attention till...

As today, in antiquity the importance of coastal and deltaic environments lay in the sea's integrating role in the subsistence, resources, and trade opportunities of its people. For the first large towns of the late Bronze/early Iron Age in Central Italy, salt was an indispensable commodity being the only means available to preserve food, both for...

La Sassa cave (Sonnino, central Italy) is a recently investigated MIS 3 site of southern Latium, a region char-acterised by a large number of caves and open-air Late Pleistocene sites. This paper describes the large faunal assemblage discovered at La Sassa cave, providing taphonomic and stratigraphic analyses which allow us to interpret the outer r...

In Europe and beyond, the cultural and archaeological heritage may have considerable extensions of hundreds of square metres if not kilometres. It is then necessary to study highly efficient techniques able , at the same time, to maintain centimetric accuracy. In these contexts, the SLAM technique can be an efficient solution. We tested the latter...

An intersection of two roman glareatae roads and an underground stretch of a Roman aqueduct ( rivus subterraneus ) were found in the locality of Colle Oliva, during an emergency archaeological investigation (between 11/2018 and 3/2019). The aqueduct has been detected in several test trenches and some profiles have been obtained. These data shade so...

The greatest part of the documents concerning the last reclamation scheme of the Pontine Plain is now stored in a section of the state archive and in the archive of the Consorzio di Bonifica dell’Agro Pontino, both located in Latina (Italy). Detailed plans of the realised buildings, infrastructures as well as thousands of pictures of the environmen...

In this paper we outline a novel interdisciplinary field methodology that we will use in our research project `Salt and Power, Early States, Rome and Resource Control, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and based at the Groningen Institute of Archaeology. The aim of the project is to gain insight in ancient salt pr...

A synthesis of the current knowledge of the so-called Italian giacimenti a olle d’impasto rossiccio (reddish jar potsherd deposits) is presented. These sites are common along the Tyrrhenian side of Central Italy and are usually interpreted as salt-production sites, because of parallels with similar European specialised sites. In the latter, salt wa...

The mobility patterns in the Italian peninsula during prehistory are still relatively unknown. The excavation of the Copper Age and Bronze Age deposits in La Sassa cave (Sonnino, Italy) allowed to broaden the knowledge about some local and regional dynamics. We employed a multi-disciplinary approach, including stable (carbon and nitrogen, C and N,...

The area south-east of Rome is characterised by the presence of several roman aqueducts which brought water to the eternal city from the Apennine and Alban Hills springs. In the last 40 years, several pieces of evidence about these aqueducts were acquired during the realisation of archaeological test trenches before building activities. In 2019, a...

While processes involved in the protohistoric briquetage at Puntone (Tuscany, Italy) have been reconstructed in detail, the age of this industry remained uncertain since materials suited for traditional dating (14 C dating on charcoal and typological dating of ceramics) were very scarce. We attempted to assess its age by radiocarbon dating organic...

Caves are one of the most conservative environments on Earth, where archaeological, anthropological, climatic and tectonic data can be well-preserved. Here, we present the results of a multidisciplinary method that allowed us to recognize, for the first time in this area, the interaction between Late Pleistocene to Anthropocene neotectonic and arch...

Across Europe, the genetics of the Chalcolithic/Bronze Age transition is increasingly characterized in terms of an influx of Steppe-related ancestry. The effect of this major shift on the genetic structure of populations in the Italian Peninsula remains underexplored. Here, genome-wide shotgun data for 22 individuals from commingled cave and single...

A protohistoric (c.10th–5th c. BC) briquetage site at Puntone (Tuscany, Italy) was studied to unravel the salt production processes and materials involved. Geophysical surveys were used to identify kilns, pits, and dumps. One of these pits and a dump were excavated, followed by detailed chemical and physical analyses of the materials encountered. T...

Caves have been used by humans and animals for several thousand years until present but, at these time scales, their structures can rapidly change due to erosion and concretion processes. For this reason, the availability of precise 3D models improves the data quality and quantity allowing the reconstruction of their ancient appearance, structure a...

In the geomatics field, modelling and georeferencing complex speleological structures are some of the most challenging issues. The use of conventional survey methods (for example, those employing total stations or terrestrial laser scanner) becomes more difficult, especially because of the space constraints and the often critical light conditions....

A seguito della sintesi pubblicata sulle indagini archeologiche nel territorio di Sezze, condotte dall'Università di Groningen sotto l'egida del Progetto della Regione Pontina (PRP), questo documento discute la metodologia e i primi risultati di due progetti di ricerca sul campo più recenti nel quadro del PRP, entrambi finanziati dall'Organizzazion...

Sometimes, the georeferencing of a cave in the global reference system can be challenging. Some difficulties may arise when narrow passages do not allow the use of classical topographic equipment or a terrestrial laser scanner. In these specific cases, the surveyor can employ a visual-based approach to produce both the followed path and the 3D mode...

The survey of ancient cave can generally be performed by traditional topographic methods that allow also its georeferencing in a global reference frame; some difficulties may arise when there are narrow tunnels that do not consent the use of a total station or a terrestrial laser scanner. In such cases a visual-based approach can be used to produce...

We give an overview of the ongoing investigations of the karstic cave La Sassa (municipality of Sonnino, Lazio, Italy), where archaeological remains were first discovered by in 2014. The cave was mapped in 2014 and 2015, during which Bronze Age pottery and bone fragments were found. A human tibia fragment was radiocarbon dated to the Copper Age. A...

During the Early Bronze Age, a giant eruption of Mount Vesuvius (Italy) buried a flourishing landscape of villages and fields in the plains to the north and east of the volcano under more than a meter of ash. Inhabitants of the closest sites such as Nola (‘the Bronze Age Pompeii’) could barely escape with their lives. Italian archaeological researc...

Explorations conducted by speleological groups are a precious source of information on the use of natural caves in different periods, especially during the Metal Ages. Pottery shards dating from the Middle Bronze Age were recently found in southem Latium in the Caverna di San Pietro a Campea, the Grotta del Pistocchino and the Grotta La Sassa. Inve...

Early states, territories and settlements in protohistoric Central Italy is volume is the second of the series Corollaria Crustumina aimed at the publication of conference proceedings, doctoral theses and specialist studies concerning the Latin settlement of Crustumerium (Rome) and Italian protohistory. It contains multidisciplinary papers of an in...

In February 2014, the entrance of the La Sassa cave was identified by a team of speleologists. Just after the entrance, there was a very large room in which modern and contemporary artifacts can be seen, just on the surface. Steps and terraces were present. Information collected on the site confirmed the use of the cave as a shelter during the Seco...

A major eruption of the Monte Somma Vesuvius (1995+-10 BC) devastated the landscape and the flourishing Early Bronze Age society then occupying the southern part of the region of Campania (Italy). Following an initial small eruption, which is thought to have allowed the population to flee the area, heading inland rather than towards the sea, the so...

La grotta di San Pietro a Campea, nel comune di Roccasecca (FR), è stata esplorata dal Gruppo Grotte Castelli Romani. Di possibile origine ipogenica, conserva al suo interno tracce di frequentazione della media età del Bronzo.

Tijdschrift voor Mediterrane Archeologie

This volume presents the fruits of research that began in the 1980s concerning a class of pottery that has assumed increasing importance in Italian late prehistory, namely pottery of Mycenaean type or style, usually decorated, dating from the 17th to 11th century BC, and found throughout peninsular Italy, Sicily and Sardinia. Its significance lies...

The aim of this book is to obtain a better understanding of the settlement dynamics in the part of central South Lazio that comprises the Latial Volcano, the Pontine plain and the western slopes of the Monti Lepini and Ausoni. The periods discussed are the Ancient Bronze Age (BA), the early phases of the Middle Bronze Age (BM1/2), the late phase of...

Materiali protostorici dal promontorio del Circeo I frammenti ceramici sono stati individuati nel corso di più ricognizioni condotte a partire dall'anno 2001; l'ultimo sopralluogo è stato effettuato a novembre 2005 (fig. 1A) 1. L'area di dispersione dei frammenti ceramici (Coordinate UTM ED50 riferite al punto più alto dell'area di dispersione: Est...

During the years 2001-2002, the " Soprintendenza Archeologica di Roma " conducted rescue excavations of the " Tenuta Quadraro " in the southeast of Rome, finding out remarkable and extensive archaeological evidences referable to a period between the Bronze and the Roman Ages. Among them, some artificial adjustments came out including many portions...