Pollen and macroremains from the site “Vasca di Noceto”: an artificial basin for votive practices during the Bronze Age in Northern Italy

This research is part of the national-funded interdisciplinary SUCCESSO-TERRA Project (Human societies, climate-environment changes and resource exploitation/sustainability in the Po Plain in the mid-Holocene: the Terramare culture; PRIN-20158KBLNB) and discusses biological information of the archaeological site “Vasca di Noceto”, an artificial wooden basin dating to the Bronze Age and discovered in 2004 in the central Po Plain, near Parma. Geoarchaeological, geochronological and dendrochronological data suggest that the basin was used for ritual practices for about one hundred years (ca. 1420–1320 BC) from the inhabitants of the nearby Terramara village, which was completely removed in the nineteenth century because of quarry activities. The waterlogged anoxic clay-bearing infilling of the basin preserved the wooden architectonic structure and many biological findings submerged until their recovery. The abundance of botanical records (pollen, seeds and fruit remains) in an extraordinary state of preservation permits to investigate the use of plants in ritual contexts and to reconstruct the local plant cover influenced by the interaction with human activities near the site. Cereals and fruits were possibly used as votive offerings during ritual activities together with flowers and inflorescences, probably deposited into the water according to the observation of the preservation state of pollen from several entomophilous species.