 I will now take you to southern Italy. And I will be talking not about a mega site, in the terms of what we heard before. It's a mega site in a more rural setting, I think. And this paper will be a bit speculative, because it's a new type of settlement that we found in Bronze Age, Italy. And I found no parallels for it. So I want to present some scenarios for interpretation. And I also want to discuss how our interpretation of settlement is very much influenced by the way we do research of small sites and settlement dynamics. So to give you the regional setting, we investigated this area in Calabria, southern Italy, the tip of the boot. The Contrada d'Amale is a part of our research area. It's an underlating sloping land unit on the fringes of the coast of Sibari. The whole area is about 200 hectares, so it fits very well in the mega sites that we saw before. We did there. My university did non-site-focused field walking surveys between 2002 and 2004 in a total area of 52 hectares within this area. And then this was followed by a more intensive research in which I did my doctorate. And we did resurveys of a couple of these sites. We did geophysical surveys. We did targeted corings and some test trenches on selected sites within this area. Which comprises a total of nine hectares. And so we expanded the area a little bit. Unfortunately, we couldn't do any excavations. So what I'm going to show you today is all based on mostly non-invasive research. And that's why our interpretations are also quite unsure yet. Now, to show you the archaeological evidence of what we found in the Contrada d'Amale, we found three types of sites. So we're talking about protohistory, the metal ages. We found 44 small scatters with handmade pottery and a specific type of storage vessel. And you can see it here on the large picture. It's in Italian. It's called dolio accordone o affascia. And it only occurs in the late Bronze Age. And we have five sites where these occur as well, but with a wider assemblage with more artifact types. And so we call these rich sites. And then there's 15 pottery scatters that are just this handmade type of pottery, which is very poorly dateable, poorly preserved. And so we're not very sure about the dating. Not so they also occur here in this area. Now, the late Bronze Age in Italy is a period of between 1350 and 950 BC. And it's usually subdivided into two phases, the recent Bronze Age and the final Bronze Age, to make it more complicated. But this is of interest of our area because we see a large increase in scatters from the recent Bronze Age to the final Bronze Age. We go from three to 46 scatters. And you have to remember that these scatters are very small. They're sometimes only 10 meters in diameter, sometimes a bit bigger. But so there are small artifact concentrations in this landscape, but they're quite densely distributed. The average distance is about 90 meters. Our geophysics show that we find a lot of similar features on these sites. So we have rectangular structures, as you see here in the top and in the bottom. These are features that measure about eight by four meters, sometimes 10 by a little bit more. And they occur all throughout the Contale d'Amale. So in this whole area of 200 hectares, but in a dispersed way. We find other stuff like ditches, this one, sort of ditches and pits. And so these occur throughout this area. These sites are all, yeah, they're small. They're sort of similar. And we don't see a lot of variety between them in terms of function and dating also. Why is this so strange that we find this? Well, first of all, we find these very small scatters. Previously, previous research in our area has not really focused on these small sites. So research was always very much focused on central places, the major sites. So the famous Italian archaeologist Renato Peroni did a lot of research in this area. And he was specifically looking for the central sites of this Bronze Age society. And his idea was to start building models of state formation achieved on the rise of elites. And this was very much focused on how these elites control their territories. And to do so, he modeled territories based on land unit size and on morphology of the locations where they were found. And so his model is very much based on only a certain type of settlement that he was specifically looking for. And in this model, there's no place for rural settlement and for people who live probably in farmsteads. Now the problem with his models of elite building and incipient social complexity is that there's no mortuary record in this area. So we don't really have a confronting evidence for his ideas. So the Contrater d'Amale doesn't really fit in these models. But we have to interpret it in a certain way. So we came up with the idea that we're dealing with a dispersed rural settlement. It's not a central site, but we think that this area was settled by single family farmsteads. We also assumed that these people live and exploit their own lands in a mixed agricultural subsystem with crop cultivation and animal husbandry. We also think that they were permanently occupied but as I said, we haven't done any excavations. So it's only speculation and hypotheses. But we assume that they were linked. There was a social cohesion because these sites are close to each other. They're within a hailing range of 150 meters. So we assume that these people were neighbors and that they had a community in which they exchanged goods, marriage partners, animals. But that this was a balanced, non-hierical community, a rural community. And we also assume that the Contrater d'Amale is an entity because it's a bounded landscape unit and it's unique in our area. But beyond the Contrater d'Amale, we don't find this type of site with these storage vessels. So I think here we found the base of the settlement pyramid. So the people at the bottom of the pyramid in Christaller's model. And this is a contribution to what we already know about this area in southern Italy. And here you see a picture of Broglio di Trebisaccio, which Alessandro Vanzetti is working on. And Toro Mordilio is another large site in this area. Now, we've done very intensive research of this area. And our question is, is this area unique? Are there other places like this? And we don't know, but we have no reason to believe that it is unique just because the research right now has not been focused on these very small artifact scatters. So I will now present to you three scenarios of how we can interpret this Contrater d'Amale agglomeration settlement cluster. So it's very speculative, but I want to raise some issues that we have to think about and maybe for our future research should address. So the first scenario is, yes, the Contrater d'Amale is unique. There's no other areas in this area with a similar design. It's huge, it's much bigger than other sites in this area. It's 200 hectares, much larger than any of the larger sites. It's much more densely settled. It doesn't have defensive features, but it's naturally bounded what to make of this. The second scenario is, it's part of a wider process. We just haven't found other places like this yet because we haven't been looking for them. And so we're looking at a short-lived rural settlement in the territory of an existing center, but we don't know yet which center that would be. We have to research this further. And the third scenario is, Contrater d'Amale is not unique. It's part of a wider process. We just haven't found similar places because we haven't been looking for them. But it's not part of an existing territory of one of these larger sites. It's something new, a new development in the settlement dynamics of the Sibariti area. It's having to do with explosive population growth in this final phase of the Bronze Age in which people find new ways of settlement and being linked to a local market and trade networks. Now, referring to what you showed this morning with the cycles of settlement, I think what we should be looking at is Contrater d'Amale appears very sudden. It also disappears very sudden. The sites stop at the beginning of the Iron Age. So I think maybe we have to do with a boom and bust cycle, population growth, and then a certain collapse, something happens at the start of the Iron Age, which we don't really understand yet. But yeah, we have to start looking at that. And we also have to start looking at the blank areas in our research area. Here you see the coastal plain where sediments are so deep that we can't investigate. So we don't know, people may have moved there at the start of the Iron Age. They may have moved further inland, but we just haven't been looking there. And so, yeah, this is where I would like to end. So there's still a lot of work to do, but yeah, maybe we can talk about this later.