Faciano (Grotte di Castro, VT) : un sito aperto dell'antica età del Bronzo a nord del lago di Bolsena

The site of Faciano lies on a wide plateau north of Lake Bolsena, within the administrative territory of Grotte di Castro (VT). The site was first identified in 2018 during a field survey project aimed at reconstructing settlement dynamics in the northern Bolsena basin from prehistory to Late Antiquity, with the broader goal of producing an updated archaeological map of the area.

At Faciano a large dark-soil anomaly was associated with a substantial scatter of prehistoric impasto pottery and a small number of lithic artifacts. Analysis of the limited diagnostic material suggested an attribution to the Early Bronze Age, with possible traces of an earlier Eneolithic occupation. In summer 2023, a team from the University of Naples Federico II conducted a stratigraphic excavation at the area of the surface scatter, to assess the extent of buried deposits and refine the chronology. Excavation revealed a stratigraphic sequence heavily disturbed by modern mechanized agricolture, which had almost completely removed the ancient layers.

Only the base of a channel was preserved, filled with a deposit containing prehistoric ceramic fragments intermixed with more abundant charcoal remains. Among the limited ceramic forms, some can be unequivocally assigned to the Early Bronze Age. This attribution is further supported by one of the two radiocarbon determinations obtained from charcoal samples. Despite the modest quantity of finds, the investigation demonstrates the presence of an Early Bronze Age open settlement, a type of occupation still little documented in southern Etruria. From a cultural perspective, the ceramic assemblage shows no formal or decorative affinities with the Belverde-Mezzano facies, which characterizes the final phase of the Early Bronze Age in the region. This absence may indicate that Faciano belongs to an earlier phase of the Early Bronze Age, a hypothesis consistent with one of the two radiometric dates. [Publisher's Text]

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