Oltre ciò che appare, oltre le facies archeologiche. Cosa possono fare aDNA e isotopi per la protostoria italiana?

Despite the last decades’ reassessments of the concept of culture as a dynamic phenomenon and an entity in constant transformation, the essentialist logic still permeates prehistoric archaeology. On the one hand, archaeological cultures and facies are drawn using the distribution of objects; on the other hand, they respond to the need to describe the actions of the ‘subjects’, namely human groups. The sharing of material culture can be one aspect of (social and/or ethnic) group identity, but on a subordinate level compared to language, territoriality, socio-political organization, juridical-normative system, tradition, cosmology, religion, and mythology. These are indeed essential traits of culture and ethnicity, although less immediately visible in the archaeological record. For these reasons, the conceptual leap from archaeological culture to ethnos risks becoming an inertial tendency, intrinsically ‘structural’ to the traditional methodologies of research. Recent developments in biogeochemistry (strontium and oxygen isotope analysis) and archaeogenetics (aDNA), allow us to investigate the mobility of single individuals or groups of individuals, the permeability of society to newcomers, migrations, the degree of genetic variability of a population, or among different populations. Thanks to what has been defined as “the third science revolution in archaeology” (Kristiansen), we are becoming therefore able to integrate what we know about the mobility of things with the mobility of people, as well as to test historical and archaeological theories. Starting from ethnohistorical and biodemographic data, which provide an exemplar framework of the relationship between culture, socio-economic structures and population dynamics, as well as from the synthesis of the recent advances in archaeogenetics and biogeochgemistry, we emphasise the potential of a new interdisciplinary approach towards the study of the Italian Bronze Age, in a perspective of overcoming the intrinsic aporia of the concepts of facies and “archaeological culture”.