STUDIO DI UN TERRITORIO DI CONFINE: LA NECROPOLI DI CASALFIUMANESE NEL QUADRO DEL POPOLAMENTO DELLE VALLATE APPENNINICHE ROMAGNOLE TRA ORIENTALIZZANTE ED ETA' TARDO ARCAICA

This study is dedicated to a corpus of finds dating back to the Iron Age, discovered in Emilia- Romagna, in the small town of Casalfumanese, south-west of Imola, which are currently conserved in the Archaeological Museum of Bologna. The first discovery was by chance: the objects were discovered by a farmer while preparing to work his field. Thereafter, illegal diggings continued without any archaeological exploration. Almost all the artefacts recovered are bronze and they have entered the museum on numerous occasions through sequestrations, sales or donations. The first chapter is dedicated to the reconstruction of the events surrounding the discoveries through the analysis of all the archival documentation that has been recovered and transcribed in full. Thus, the actual consistency of the lot was established by removing what had been mixed up. From their analysis (the catalogue takes up the second chapter) it emerged that the objects come from grave contexts belonging to two different chronological horizons: an older one, dated to the Orientalizing period, and a later one, contemporary with the "Certosa" phase attested in Bologna. While the rich archaeological evidence from the 8th and 7th centuries B.C. in Bologna and Verucchio offered a sufficiently detailed reference framework to place the oldest remains, this was not the case for the most recent ones. These, together with documentation from other nearby sites, were originally believed to bear witness to the arrival of the Celts in Italy. During the 1970s, two leading Italian scholars proposed linking the small Malatesta farm at Casalfiumanese and the other sites in Romagna rather than the Umbrians, whom ancient historiography recalls being among the inhabitants of the regions north of the Po (Chapter 3). To deepen this new interpretation, met with much approval, the fourth chapter was dedicated to an exposition of the main contexts in Romagna that are now defined as Umbrians, paying particular attention to the burial ground of Montericco di Imola. Finally, in the fifth and last chapter, after having exposed and discussed the characteristics considered unique to this very coherent set of evidence, the question of ethnicity was addressed, starting from an exposition of the methodological assumptions currently in force. Based on these assumptions, and in the absence of elements establishing a clear connection between the archaeological remains from Romagna and Umbria, we concluded that it is appropriate to abandon this ethnic attribution and limit ourselves to treating this documentation as simple archaeological evidence that has clear links with the entire Central Italic world and not only with the Umbrians, a community defined as such in the historiographical debate and at a later time.