The article deals with the practice of phenomenological archaeological fieldwork, which is concerned with sensory experience of landscapes and locales. Phenomenological approaches in archaeology have cast light on aspects of past human experience not addressed by traditional archaeological methods. So far, however, they have neither developed explicit methodologies nor a discussion of methodological practice and have laid themselves open to accusations of being 'subjective' and 'unscientific'. This article describes and explores three experiments in phenomenological archaeology developed in the context of the Tavoliere-Gargano Prehistory Project and carried out on Neolithic settlement sites of the type known as villaggi trincerati. Our aims are both to develop explicit methods for this type of fieldwork and to combine phenomenology with other more traditional approaches, such as those concerned with technological, economic and environmental aspects of landscapes and sites. Our work also differs from other phenomenological archaeology in its concern with familiar, everyday experience and domestic contexts, rather than exceptional, special experience in ritual contexts. We consider how our particular approach might be used to further understandings of past lives.
The currently accepted divisions of the south Italian Neolithic are based on typological studies of ceramic styles, interpreted with the aid of stratigraphical information derived from a few key excavations. On the basis of this material a number of authorities have divided the Neolithic into a series of chronological phases. It is my belief that the evidence for constructing this neat relative chronological framework does not in fact exist and that the scheme generally favoured today is oversimplified and in parts inaccurate. In this paper I shall first summarize three important typological studies of south Italian Neolithic pottery: R. B. K. Stevenson's pioneer study of museum material, mainly from the Materano, published in 1947 (Stevenson, 1947); L. Bernabò Brea's scheme, based primarily on the stratigraphical sequence obtained from his excavations on the island of Lipari, published in various forms and admirably summarized in a paper presented to the Primo Convegno di Studi sulla Magna Grecia in 1961 (Bernabò Brea, 1962) and, finally, R. Peroni's recent study of the Apulian material (Peroni, 1967). The second part of my paper will consist of a critical examination of these three studies and the final section will be devoted to a description of the known Neolithic wares, with an assessment of their relationships and relative chronological positions.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.