An archaeologist once told me that all
you needed for success in the field, besides years
of study, was luck, patience and money. That
fortunate coincidence came to pass in the early
1980s in the Cilento hill town of Roccagloriosa,
just a few minutes above the gulf of Policastro at
the southernmost part of the province of Salerno.
A lucky find of an ancient tomb (image, right) led
to the excavation by a team from the University of
Alberta of a significant piece of evidence of the
presence of the Lucanian culture. The Lucanians
were one of the inland Italic peoples who were
contemporaries of, but much less known than, their
neighbors on the coast throughout Italy around 500
BC. In southern Italy, that means primarily the
colonies of Magna Grecia;
Paestum and Velia, for example, are
just a few minutes away by modern transportation.
At their peak, the Lucanians held a considerable
part of south-central Italy (map, below) with
coastal holdings in the west near what would later
become Poseidonia (Paestum) under the Greeks and
in the east at Metapontum and Heraclea. There were
at least a dozen major Lucanian centers of
population along the coast as well as inland; they
were bound together in what historians call the
Lucanian Federation. Beginning in c. 600 BC the
Lucanians along both the eastern and western
coasts were substantially displaced by the arrival
of Greek settlers, but the Lucanians retained a
robust presence inland. (See this entry for more
detail on the Greeks and Lucanians.)
Ancient Lucania c. 600 BC There is
also evidence of much earlier human presence. The
oldest finds in the immediate area are flint tools
from the 5th-to-4th millenia BC. Such finds are
consistent with others throughout the area; the
caves in the nearby coastal areas of Camerota
(about where Velia is marked on the straight SW
coast on the map), indeed, display evidence of
even earlier human
presence. In the case of the Lucanians,
however, we are talking about a people well into
the period of recorded history with a
self-proclaimed ethnic identity as a group beyond
the small tribal identity that even very early
humans must have had. The Greeks, Etruscans, Romans and Samnites are examples of
some of those peoples whose long-term destinies
started to take shape in Italy in the years
between 1000 and 500 BC. Indeed, all of those
groups left ample archaeological evidence of their
presence. The Lucanian presence is less evident,
which is why the site at Roccagloriosa is so
interesting. The Lucanians are probably an
off-shoot of the Samnites, who were from central
Italy and were great enemies of the Romans. In the
Cilento area, the Lucanians succeeded another
early people called the Oenotrians,
about whom even less is known. Some sources say
that the Oenotrians arrived from Greece as early
as the 11th century BC(!), inhabiting portions of
southern Italy, but were absorbed into other
Italic tribes by the 6th century BC.
Beginning in the second half of the 5th
century BC a populated center developed at not-yet
Roccagloriosa that was then expanded in the 4th
century BC into a true urban center with a
1200-meter-long wall that is partially visible
today; it had a 15-hectare (37 acres) "acropolis"
(high city) and a larger lower area. The town was
called Ostritania by the Lucanians), and the site
is interesting both because of its geographical
location as well as the nature of the structures.
The town was higher up than modern Roccagloriosa
and perfectly situated to watch approaches from
the coast as well as from the inland hills. The
ruins show a regular urban pattern of blocks with
a long main street intersected by narrower ones.
Some of the ruins had basalt courtyards. As well,
the presence of votive shrines and altars indicate
the practice of religious rituals and sacrifices.
There
is also a fragment of a bronze plaque with
inscriptions on both sides in Oscan (image, left),
the language of the Samnites. Since Oscan was
closely related to Latin, the text, written in the Greek alphabet, is relatively easy to decipher; it is a
series of rules and regulations and shows the
civic and administrative complexity of the
Lucanians. The town was a nexus for traffic of
goods moving from the gulf of Policastro up to the
Vallo di Diano, that is, into the interior hill
country of Cilento, movement made possible by a
natural road created by a fracture in the ridge of
the Capiteni mountains, on the slopes of which the
town developed.
The market-place was located
outside the town wall on a table-land. It provided
a place for merchants from the nearby colonies of
Magna Grecia to arrive and do business. The large
vases of Greek manufacture found at the site and
now on display in the two fine small museums in
Roccagloriosa are witness to a flourishing center
of trade.There is a necropolis connected to the
site. Many tombs have been found, dating from 4th
c. BC to the first part of the 3rd c. BC. One of
them has been reconstructed on the site itself
(photo, top) and may be viewed. Other structures
at the site have been reconstructed in miniature
and are on display in the museums. At this point
we note how many of the finds were from tombs.
This is typical in much archaeology and is
extremely important in cases where there are no
large-scale monuments such as temples, residences
or administrative buildings left intact (plus the
fact, also, that most smaller bronze and iron-age
cultures did not engage in "cyclopean"
construction, a term used to describe the mammoth
rock walls of some of the early Italic peoples of
central Italy, walls that are still totally
visible today and, indeed, may still serve as
foundations for modern buildings).
The
items found in the tombs and elsewhere at
the site have been moved to one of the two museums
in Roccagloriosa; they include ceramic votive
statuettes, household cooking utensils, bits of
armor and spectacular gold jewelry (specifically,
a gold necklace of alternating pendants of female
and lion heads; that it is gold indicates it was
not manufactured locally but was made elsewhere,
probably in Taranto). Some of the bronzes and
vases found in the tombs are clearly of
non-Lucanian production and show how important the
site had become as a point of cultural exchange.
Three of the vases on display (photo, right) are
attributed stylistically to one of the great
masters of the ornate Apulian style of red
figure vase painting, a single artist who
has come down to us simply as "the Underworld
Painter" and who was active in Puglia
between Metaponto and Taranto in the second half
of the 4th c. BC.
These cultural and commercial links
illustrate the socio-cultural transformation that
occurred over much of Magna Grecia when the
Samnite Oscan-speaking peoples from the central
Italian hinterland moved into the area. 500 BC is
when we can thus speak of the consolidation of a
Lucanian ethnic identity spread over a large area
that included modern-day Cilento as well as
northern Calabria and over a large part of the
Basilicata (the modern name for the region that
was traditionally called Lucania).
Some say that the town was destroyed by the
Romans as punishment for having sided with
Hannibal (i.e. 200 BC). Another theory is that it
was hit by an earthquake. The other possibility is
that the foundation of the Roman colony at nearby
Paestum (as the Romans started to solidify their
hold on the southern part of the peninsula
following the Punic wars) led to the relocation of
the inhabitants of Ostritania, which was then
reduced to a farming area, another Roman
bread-basket. At that point, the Lucanians were
assimilated into Rome.
Once
the original Lucanian site dissolved, so to speak, various
replacement settlements grew up in the immediate
area. The modern town of Roccagloriosa actually
started as such a settlement to replace one
destroyed by Roman general Flavius Stilicho around
the year 400 AD. Popular tradition traces the
source of the name to Roccae (Latin for fortress)
indicating the strategic position of the town and
Gloriosa to indicate the veneration of
Mary. A small church was dedicated to the Glorious
Mother of God in 412. Other villages such as
Acquavena, Celle di Bulgheria and Rochetta as well
as the castle at Roccagloriosa were then built in
the wake of the devastating Gothic wars (in which
the Greeks under Justininan displaced the Goths)
and the subsequent Bulgar invasions in the 6th
century AD. The Longobards arrived in 590 AD
(effectively doing away with Justinian's
reconquest of Italy) chased away the Bulgars and
expanded the castle. The next few centuries are
just straight-ahead peaceful feudalism! The castle
of Roccagloriosa was on Frederick
the II's (early 1200s) list of Castra
exempia in Campania, those fortresses that
were directly under imperial jurisdiction. The
castle was finally demolished in the 1950s,
leaving in place a wall or two as historical
markers. The original Church of the Gloriosa,
built in 412, the oldest church in town, was
destroyed by the French
forces of Joseph Bonaparte, king of Naples,
in 1806 and again by an earthquake in 1846. It is
adjacent to the ruins of the old castle and has
been rebuilt as an historical monument. The
current town of Roccagloriosa (image, above right)
with its winding cobblestone streets, fountains,
churches and small squares is still cited as one
of the most important medieval settlements of
Lower Cilento. It is in the valley between the
Mingardo and Bussento rivers (to the north and
south, respectively) in the shadow of Mt.
Bulgheria. Roccagloriosa is within the UNESCO
World Heritage site of the Cilento and Vallo di
Diano National Park.
Me, I'm waiting for another
conjunction of luck, patience and money. There
have to be many more signs of ancient cultures
buried in these hills.
sources:
—Gualtieri, Maurizio (1987).
"Fortifications and settlement organization: An example
from pre‐Roman Italy" in World Archaeology,
Volume 19, Issue 1, 1987, pages 30- 46. —Gualtieri, Maurizio (2010). "Roccagloriosa,
la tabula osca ed il caduceo: frammenti di un discorso
sulla ‘città’ italica" in Salternum, semestrale
di informazione storica, culturale e archeologica a
cura del gruppo archeologico salernitano, year XIV
- number 24-25 January/December 2010. —Roccagloriosa, Un luogo dalla
storia millenaria , published by the Salerno
Provinvial Tourist Board. Original text by
Geraldino Cavalliere.