Le ambre di Campestrin e l’origine della decorazione tipo Tirinto. In “Frattesina cinquant’anni dopo. Il Delta del Po tra Europa e Mediterraneo nei secoli attorno al 1000 a.C.”

This work is a synthesis (and expansion) of two reports presented at the conference “Frattesina fifty years later. The Po Delta between Europe and the Mediterranean in the centuries around 1000 BC”, held in Rovigo in 2018. The orginal works were dedicated respectively:to the ambers of the processing site of Campestrin di Grignano Polesine (Rovigo - Italy) and to the chrono-typological evolution of the amber beads traditionally referred to as ‘Tiryns type’. The settlement of Campestrin was discovered in 2007 and four excavation campaigns were carried out between 2008 and 2011. The site is located in the low plain between the final sections of the Adige and Po rivers, close to the right bank of an ancient branch of the Po river known as ‘Po di Adria’ and near its Delta. It seems to have had a relatively short life (Recent Bronze Age 2 and Final Bronze Age 1 - 12th century BC), therefore coeval to the first phase Frattesina di Fratta Polesine, the well-known production and trading center, located about 8 km further to the west along the same river course. The news of the oldest known amber processing site south of the Baltic region has been welcomed by many scholars as proof of the active role of the North Adriatic region in the production and circulation of artifacts made with amber of North European origin (or ‘Baltic’). This hypothesis was already proposed by some scholars after the discovery, in 1967, of Frattesina, despite the lacking of specific indicators of amber processing. These are widely documented in Campestrin, which among its products also includes ‘Tiryns-type’ beads. As it is known, the ‘Tiryns type’ is mainly dated between the 13th/12th and 11th centuries BC (but in Italy also up to the 9th century BC) and found in a very wide area: from the central Mediterranean to the Aegean, with extremes ranging from Sardinia to the Eastern Mediterranean and to Ukraine. It is essentially one of the components of the so-called koiné of the late European and Mediterranean Bronze Age (weapons and ornamental elements), which coexisted and went beyond the crisis of the 12th century BC. The purpose of the paper is to present the finished artifacts currently identified in Campestrin, as well as the finds in the processing phase recognized as pertinent to the operational chain of objects characterized by the presence of the central rib (‘Tiryns type’). Still under study are the other possible operating chains. As regards the specimens of the so-called ‘Tiryns type’ (finished and unfinished), a new typological classification is also proposed, based on various formal parameters that made it possible to distinguish several types. In this new proposal, the presence of the central rib is seen as a decorative modality defined as ‘Tiryns-type decoration’. Added to this are the analysis of processing traces, in particular of the types with Tiryns-type decoration, and the investigation of the provenance of the raw material, characterized as succinite, the so-called ‘Baltic amber’. Ample space is given to artefacts with Tiryns-type decoration: previous studies, distribution, chronology and new hypotheses on origin and possible processing centers, based on a model created with the Network Analysis. Although it is still early to propose a precise reconstruction of the development of the Tiryns-type decoration (the chronology of many specimens is imprecise), the phases provisionally proposed in this work (phase 1 = RBA1 (?)/2-FBA1 and phase 2 ≥ FBA2) allow for some new more precise observations. In the first phase, when Campestrin is dated, the decorative innovation ‘Tiryns type’, applied on different types of biconical, truncated and cylindrical amber beads, seems to be limited to the Adriatic and Ionian basins with a particular concentration in the North central-eastern Italy and more rarefied presences along the coasts, up to the extreme south of Greece. The first presence of decoration on the northern Tyrrhenian side of the Italian peninsula should also be attributed to this phase. In these areas the beads with ‘Tiryns-type decoration’, especially those of a cylindrical shape, show a certain morphological affinity – an indication of their origin from the production center of Campestrin, or from other possible processing centers in the North-Italian area. Furthermore, it is possible to argue that, in the first phase, amber beads decorated with median ribs produced in central-eastern northern Italy reached: the Mediterranean Levant, probably Bohemia and perhaps Ukraine. It still has to be ascertained, however, whether the presumed Sardinian processing centers were already active at this stage. Subsequently, from FBA2, the Tiryns-type decoration seems to have spread further in the areas previously affected by the phenomenon, with apparently more substantial contributions in areas where only single or few elements appeared in the first phase, as in the case of the central Tyrrhenian side and now also southern (Lipari, Piazza Monfalcone). Even in the case of the exceptional complex of Hordeevka (Ukraine) - kurgan 38 it is possible to presume an origin of the beads with Tiryns (and Allumiere) decorations from workshops in north-eastern Italy, also considering that the ambers of Hordeevka are not the only elements that refer to northern Italian production traditions (glass beads) or costume (fibulae with raised violin bow) in the North Pontic territory, between Moldova and Ukraine. After the end of Campestrin, in the second phase it is possible to hypothesize the birth (or development) of new centres specialized in the processing of amber that adapt the Tiryns-type decorative motif to new supports or elaborate the motif in new ways. One of these centres is Frattesina, also in the Polesine area, as well as at least one centre (currently unspecified) in the Kvarner-Dalmatia- Lika area. To those, the presumed workshops operating in Sardinia can be added, perhaps in an later moment of the FBA. It is in FBA2 that the frequent association of beads with Tiryns-type decoration with elements in which another decorative style appears, with parallel incisions or grooves: the Allumiere-type decoration. From FBA3, with the only possible exceptions of the Sardinian flattened beads and the presumable keimelia of Osteria dell’Osa, the ‘Allumiere type’ decoration will completely replace the ‘Tiryns type’ in the central Mediterranean, outside of which both types are no longer present.