Cronologia versus Archeologia. L'«ambiguo» scorrere del tempo alle soglie della «colonizzazione»: i casi di Cuma e Pithekoussai

the cases of Cuma and Pithekoussai here discussed fall into two specific areas of research on which the writer has been working for some time, with results perhaps controversial, but which are based on at least two objective aspects: the need for a more careful archival research of old excavations and the extraordinary importance of the stratigraphy of Pithekoussai’s necropolis. In the first case, the study of new archival documents, relating to the ‘preellenic’ burials, has allowed us to highlight the serious anomalies which have destabilized the reliability of some contexts on which the chronological reconstruction of the early Iron Age in Italy was originally founded. In the case of Pithekoussai, the reconstruction of the stratigraphic sequence of the necropolis, merged with the typological and associative analysis of more than 2,600 grave goods found in about 600 contexts (dating from the late Geometric I to the Middle Corinthian), has yielded to a more accurate interpretation of the evolution of the cemetery and to a more precise contextualization of graves and finds, unanimously considered “guide fossils” for the ancient Mediterranean chronology.