 As we were listening to Rowan I was thinking about personality tests and I'm on the left of the spectrum and we're going to be talking about a specific problem. It's not a terribly long paper and it's going to be more a sort of here's a problem what are we going to do about it sort of paper. Now one of the reasons that we can do this is because one of the places in the West Mediterranean, perhaps the place of West Mediterranean with the most radiocarbon dates is there in a candidate with almost 100 dates now and a lot of those I would guess the vast majority are thanks to a whole series of projects that Roberto did and I can say this because he's not talking that Roberto did that but he was able to find all the charcoal that Benable Brea had put aside. He didn't know what to do with it. This is the really interesting thing but that Roberto's commented on in the past but he kept it and so that was analyzed and then there's been a lot more work recently as we'll see on a short life sample so seeds and bones being dated and so trying to get more accurate fix on on the issue of the earliest military of west central and north western Italy. Okay a bit of self publicity that's what you have to do talking into confidence is about marketing your ideas isn't it. So I just wanted to remind you just to take away conclusions about Liguria from the work I did looking at trying to do Bayesian models of the North Italian early Neolithic. So there are seven dated early Neolithic sites in western Liguria and it seems that I worked out that the Neolithic was established by around five, six, thirty at the very latest and probably well before that date perhaps even as early as the first century of the sixth millennium Calvici and here you can see a table with Bayesian model dates and a single sample dates from the various sites. Now more recently some research that Roberto did, Rindidia van der, used a different way of approaching Liguria carbon dates the chrono model program and this is taken from an article that they published in Documenta Prih Historica in 2017 and what we can see here is are samples that come from the new excavations that Roberto directed in the Iranian candidate and AMS determinations on short-life samples. So Youngsheep at serial seeds and husks and hulls of cereals extracted from pottery and they came up with a date of 5786 for the beginning of the impressive phase and 5467 for the beginning of the cardio phase and you can see all the all the numbers down there. I'm not going to explain how it works or anything like that I don't think this is the right place for that sort of thing and in that paper you'll also see this illustration thinking about the west Mediterranean in a slightly from a slightly different perspective and using the mode up as posteriori of phases as you can see we've got the Iranian candidate 5786 Pondimun 5715 Rocol Oats at 5767 and Pere Siniado 5826 and the the mode of the posteriori dates for the various sites earliest sites are here on this illustration. Now I think well I hope that this is a little bit clearer I've done it in a different way and I've used rather than than the chrono model method I've used a more traditional Bayesian method and what I wanted to want to draw attention to on this diagram is a problem a well-known problem which is that the dates in west central and Italy and in north and in eastern Liguria are much much date later than the dates in western Liguria and there seems to be something going on there this seems to be in a chump across the across the sea. These are the dates that I published in my book so they're not they don't include the 12 new dates that Roberto published with Digivando. So there's a very big question that we need to ask ourselves this isn't real I know but it's a great it's a great illustration of what what they might have been doing what was it that took the Neolithic settlers to western Liguria and here you can see the Iranian candidate cave just there. So we know that they were navigating so there are some reports of obsidian in Liguria pre Neolithic they're not very reliable but we've certainly got Mesolithic activity on Sardinia between the 9th and the late 7th and we've got new Mesolithic activity in Corsica as well during the Mesolithic so no problem about navigation we've got highly mobile groups based on the continent making irregular visits to particular sites. So if they're knocking around in Corsica and Sardinia in the Mesolithic we can suggest that the west Mediterranean seaboard were probably well known to mariners before the spread of the Neolithic and that the rapid spread of the Neolithic through the Tyrinian and Ligurian seas area was not the exploration of unknown territories. I think we also need to reflect on the importance of landmarks it's perhaps no accident that the earlier site in one of the earlier sites is a very well known landmark this is a French spy's drawing of the coast of Genoa and here's a photograph of the dune the arena candida that was underneath the cave until it was quarried for making glass but if you look at the dates those are the dates for the Neolithic in the west and these are the dates for the latest Mesolithic in the east so what's going on now Roberto's put together some comparative data and this is coming out in a paper from the Pauli the Pauli IIPP conference showing that just as in Italy oops we have an island of Neolithic in the Mesolithic the same picture occurs in Portugal and and in Greece and in Greece as well so what what what was the resource location what brought the Neolithic people to western Liguria they brought with them sheep cereals pottery obsidian we know that there's ophiolites from the vulture group right down in southern Italy we have pottery with ophiolitic temper from the Brachum asif in in these Neolithic sites we've got chert coming across Jasper from Lagarara and Flint Flint from France are the dates for west central Italy so much later and it's a big problem because if you look at the circulation of the currents they go round it's well known in anti-clockwise circles so if you were going to sail from Sicily or the bottom of Italy to the north you would go up the coast you wouldn't go what there's a non-visibility here so you'd be very unlikely to go straight to Sardinia but you wouldn't go that way or that way you would go this way so if the currents are doing that why don't we have early Neolithic there so it seems to me that it seems to us that we must look for early Neolithic dates uh along the coast of west central Italy and there are some indications so his date you might not have in your database it's from a deep core at Cestrull of Ante in eastern Nyguria Barley pollen in peak levels dated uh 6225990 and that may document Neolithic pioneers at a convenient landing place in an intermediate area pollen does suggest some level of permanence to occupation and that settlement is not attested and of course there's some older dates in Lazio at Lamarmota but there there's the danger of the old wood effect. In Banda's paper there are three dates modelled from Lesecion using the geo but unfortunately the paper does not report the data and I'd like to make an appeal here that it is not acceptable not to report the data so approaches for future research are we need more dates from known early Neolithic sites we need more dates on short lived samples and we need to date sites along the western coast of Italy. Now Roberto and I when we were discussing this paper wanted to do more excavation we thought we can't say that and Rowan said it so thank you Rowan but we do need more excavation as well thank you very much everybody