The MOLA Project

Several hundred sites dating from the 5th to the 2nd millennia BC have been identified in the eastern Italian Alps making them one of the best archaeologically-mapped regions among the European mountains. However, despite the large amount of residential and productive prehistoric sites, only few funerary contexts have been unearthed, and even fewer human remains have been studied using state of the art bioarchaeology (e.g. isotope analyses, DNA, etc.). Prehistoric burials found in the eastern Italian Alps represent a unique and exceptional source of information that can provide crucial knowledge on past human mobility and life histories in mountain environment. During this 4,000-year time span an increase of social complexity and an intensification of exchange networks are documented in this region, a buffer zone between the Mediterranean and the central Europe, crossed by major north-south routes (Adige-Eisack valleys), that implied an intensive movement of people, objects and ideas.

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The EU-funded MOLA project aims to integrate Alpine Landscape Archaeology with state-of-the-art bioarchaeology and spatial modelling to understand how social strategies influenced human mobility and life histories from the Neolithic to the end of the Bronze Age in mountain environment with a particular focus on the eastern Italian Alps. To achieve this research goal an innovative methodology based on the combined analysis of strontium (87Sr/86Sr), oxygen (d18O) and sulfur (d34S) isotope ratios in prehistoric inhumed and cremated (87Sr/86Sr only) human remains from the area and period under study is used. Additionally, a high-resolution bioavailable strontium isoscape will be developed by sampling modern vegetation in the eastern Italian Alps and local sulfur baselines will be measured on faunal remains contemporary with the burial sites under study. These data will be coupled with data from Landscape Archaeology of the uplands on human-environment interactions (stratigraphic excavations, surveys, geomorphology, etc.) to shed light on social strategies and possible gender differences behind individual and collective mobility and life histories in the eastern Italian Alps during the Neolithic, the Chalcolithic, and the Bronze Age.