Dos dell'Arca (Capo di Ponte, BS). La ripresa dello studio, cinquant'anni dopo.

Dos dell’Arca in Valle Camonica (BS), located in the northern Italy, is an important site on a rocky hill, with evidences of a Medium Bronze Age settlement, Late Bronze Age fortifications and a mixed frequentation dated to the Second Iron Age, in a context highly characterized by the presence of some engraved rocky surfaces. The site is relevant for the protohistory of the Alps and the eponymous location for the cultural facies of the second Iron Age called “the Breno/Dos dell’Arca Group”; nevertheless, great part of the findings remain unpublished to the present day and little is known of the structural evidences of the site. Dos dell’Arca was firstly signaled by Gualtiero Laeng in 1957, along with other sites nearby, while a first approach to the site was made by Renato Peroni, in 1958, but the results of his work on the field were never published and his work in this area remained episodical. The site was then excavated in 1962 by Emmanuel Anati who published, six years later, a brief report and, twenty years later, briefly considered by Raffaele de Marinis in his research on the protohistory of the central alpine Italian valleys. In 2011 I began a doctoral dissertation dedicated to the systematic study of several unpublished sites of the Valle Camonica and the nearby, in order to improve our knowledge of the protohistory of this area (Rondini 2015a): the analysis of Dos dell’Arca was the main case of study. The area surrounding Dos dell’Arca can be called, from now on, the area of the Four Hills, because of the presence of four archaeological sites in an area morphologically homogeneous: from South to North, in extreme proximity, there are the hill of “Dos dell’Arca”, the hill of “Piè”, the great hill named “Picciò” and a fourth hill without name. The old excavations on the hill of Dos dell’Arca were carried out with a non stratigraphic strategy, proceeding with artificial cuts inside squares. The original documentation is limited and incomplete. The main problem for the resumption of the research of this excavation has been of finding a way to re-order the large amount of findings (mainly pottery), that appeared without an evident logic. The observation of the data written on small paper notes attached to the original boxes and bags, full of pottery shards, has led to the elaboration of a database (using the Microsoft Access software) where each single group of objects, now called for brevity “cluster”, is arranged along with all the data that came with it. Through this database I was able to re-create, via confrontations between the different data of each cluster, a set of depth-intervals for almost each square of the site, in which also some of the findings without depth data could be re-located, as to produce an artificial re-contextualization of the findings in relation to the archaeological context.