Mani di argilla e fasce di cocci : Analisi ricostruttiva degli scavi 1977-1981 nell’abitato di Spina

The precise location of the ancient Adriatic port of Spina was determined only in the late ‘50s, when dredging and land reclamation of Comacchio Valleys ran across large amounts of archaeological material and wooden structures. That was how it came to light part of the settlement founded by the Etruscan at the end of the Po river, celebrated in antiquity for its wealth and influence (consider only the maintenance of a Treasury building in the Panhellenic sanctuary of Delphi, see Strabo 5.1.7; 9.3.8). Ever since the first accidental discovery, many excavation campaigns were carried out by the Soprintendenza of Emilia Romagna and the Archaeological Museum of Ferrara from 1965 until the 80s. However, aside from some excavation reports and preliminary frameworks of certain classes of findings, few data were published. In 2010 I began a doctoral dissertation dedicated to the systematic review of a central sector of the settlement, explored between 1977 and 1981. In the monographic study (Zamboni 2016) I present almost all the categories of finds, both imports and local production, suggesting on the basis of the archive data their possible place of discovery. The old excavations in the settlement of Spina were carried out with non stratigraphic methods – in the current sense of the term – but rather with artificial cuts (named also “mani”) inside trenches and squares. The archaeologists described in diaries the everyday finds more or less extensively, writing down (quite) similar and generic information on wooden cards onto original boxes (mainly the date and the name of the trench, sometimes the height readings etc.). A key issue of my research has been to collect and semantically arrange this large amount of heterogeneous excavations data: in a dedicated IT (MS Access) new numeric and semantic entities were created (named ‘context’ or CTX). Groups of certain ‘contexts’ (per se single actions of excavation, post-excavation, or even a storage event) can be eventually combined into a ‘structure’, another conventional concept. As result example of this method, I present here some cases of “recontextualisation” of finds and structures not clearly understood before (such as a long and deep ditch filling mistaken for some kind of odd ‘sherds wall’). Finally, I consider new perspectives on chronological periodisation, medium and long range trade relations, as well as archaeological reconstruction of the city plan.