 Caves in Italy are a very typical feature in the landscape. As you might know, there's the Apennine chain that goes through the whole peninsula, so it's really easy to stumble upon caves. There are thousands of them, and during the prehistory they were used for many different reasons, but especially during the Bronze Age, most of them were used in a ritual way, strongly ritualized way. So we know more than 150 caves that were used in different ritual and burial ways. At first these caves were not recognized for what they were. They were mostly looked at as shelters for shepherds or as places where material culture could be better looked at because we don't know much about settlement sites, so since caves are quite preservative environments, material culture was taken from there and analyzed to build pottery type of chrono typologies. Finally in the early 90s, especially with Ruth Whitehouse contribution, they were finally recognized for being special places in a way. So now we know that there is not a clear distinction, there shouldn't be a clear distinction between domestic and ritual spaces and sites in archaeology, but we can now all agree on the fact that caves in Italy and in central Italy, especially during the Bronze Age, were used in a very especially a ritualized way. Today, well our research question is whether this ritualization can be generalized if rituals are the same in all caves or if there are diversities and what are the reasons for these diversities. So to do that we are going to look better into three case studies of caves that we have as a team worked for 10 years, well some for some 10 years or some a little less than these, but these are very recent studies and these caves are located in southern Lazio in central Italy. The first one is Grotta Moracavosso, which is in a mountain environment, a forested environment. It's a 60 meters long cave for what we know and it has a wide entrance and then it has a subarizontal, it is a subarizontal cave and it was used between the Paleolithic and historical times and especially during the Neolithic times but also during the metal ages. So the metal ages occupation is only found in the red square area, this one, which is very specific because it's where the light disappears and the darkness appears in the cave, full darkness. So this area is very interesting because we found the remains of one woman, adult woman buried in there, it was all disconnected, there was no skeletal connection but we have over 70% of the skeleton still there and together with these bones we also found hundreds of bones of perinatal domestic animals, so piglets and lambs mostly and also two pits, one of them contained an upside down bowl and near these pits there were spindle horse and flint harrow heads, so this really relates to some kind of ritual practice. The most interesting type of ritual performance that characterizes this cave is the one of the sacrifice of these perinatal animals, domestic animals, which is not only typical of this cave but we can find it a similar pattern also in few other caves that you see on the map. The interesting thing is that we don't find always the same combination of these animals, so we can find human bones and piglet bones or piglet bones and lambs without human bones or lambs with humans and so on, so it's not really identical from one cave to another. The second cave study is grotta di pastena, which is also in southern Lazio, it's important to stress that these caves are very close to one another, they're 40 kilometers away from one another more or less roughly. This is a gigantic cave, it's enormous several kilometers and there is a seasonal water stream going through the cave, so this is subject to seasonal floodings but there's one very very small cave, that's the one in the red circle that is very up high in the cave, so it's very hard to climb up there but it was always, it was never touched by these floodings and so it was a little treasure for us because the deposit, the archaeological deposit is very well preserved. In such a small cave, which is 30, 40 meters, square meters wide, we found the remains of very interesting structures, several earths, both on the upper part of this little cave and on the floor part of it, which looks a bit like a face if you look at it and once again we find these upside down bowls, three four of them in just this very little space, small space and the most interesting thing of all is the earths and especially the structures, well you see also many fine artifacts we found in here and those earths and structures which are very peculiar, we don't have another example at least for central Italy, where we found this cyclicality in stone pavings that if we remove them we found layers of burnt seeds, hundreds thousands of burnt seeds and then removing these burnt seeds we found another stone paving layer and so on and so on for three four times so we can see that there is a cyclicality in the occupation and this is probably the most interesting thing for this cave, looking at the burnt, well one thing I was forgetting, here this is also a bar of cave, but we found very few human bones, we found only four minimum number of individuals, two of them are children and one is a woman the other one is unknown, we only found very few bones, mostly fingers and teeth, which might indicate a primary deposition that was manipulated and some bones were taken away somewhere else, so this is a completely different burial practice from the one that we saw before, also in the other cave we find some kind of cyclicality because it's very unlikely that all those piglets and lamb bones were deposed in one single event, looking at the burnt seeds that we found we realized that there was 90% of broad beans of legumes and these is also common looking at the few paleobotanic data sets that we have for the other caves in central Italy, looking at those we realized that all the burial caves have a high predominance of pulses of broad beans whereas the only caves where these broad beans are not predominant are those that really don't have any other kind of ritual or burial practice in it and usually the diet of these people was characterized by cereal, cereal diets rather than pulses based diet which we can also see from the few evidence we have from the settlements, so this is really a specific ritual practice that connects pulses, fava beans with the burial rituals and looking at historical sources, mythology and classical religions actually we know that this connection exists later on in history, the connection between broad beans and the souls of the dead and it's probably, it was probably born much earlier during the bronze, at least during the bronze age. The third case study is Grotta di Colle Pardo, this is again a mountain forested environment, the cave is beautiful and it's characterized by these very rich spilefemes and this is very different from both the other cases that we have already examined, so this is the largest cemetery if we want to call it like that in central Italy for the bronze age, we have over 100 minimum number of individuals buried in it, so it's really really different from everything from everything else because usually the average minimum number of individuals that we find in these caves ranges between one and maybe five, six, ten, there's just a couple exceptions where they are 40 or 50 burials, a minimum number of individuals, here there are over 100 and it's not over yet and our bone expert detected several types of ritual burial practices in it, going from primary burials to postmortem manipulation, so some bones were taken and put somewhere else, some specific bones, long bones, here we can see the distribution of the different parts of the skeleton and this distribution doesn't look to be natural. We also found several fine artifacts including amber beads and finance beads and this is really an exception for central Italy and the inner part of central Italy of central up nines because usually all the other cases are known from more coastal areas, here we found an enormous number of these fine artifacts like 50 amber beads and as many finance beads and also metal work which is very rare to find in caves. Another very interesting thing related to this cave is the apparent spatial differentiation of use, so we have the entrance, illuminated entrance where there are the only cases of structures of herds and also of animal bones found indicating some kind of preparatory rituals whereas the darkest part, the innermost part of the cave is only characterized by human bones and fine artifacts that were probably personal ornaments of the dead, so there might be this kind of differentiation in the spatial use of the caves. One thing that seemed common to all those caves was the pottery, the material culture and the chronology, so if you have a look at those two tables with pottery drawings they really are identical and they are from Gratta Moracavosso and from Gratta di Colle Pardo, up to a few couple of years ago really since we started doing the radiocarbon dating we all agreed more or less on the fact that these caves were occupied mostly during the middle Bronze Age phase because of the pottery chronology and because there weren't that many radiocarbon datings but these actually these dates that we are carrying out in several different sites now tell us a different story so for example for Moracavosso cave we carried out seven, eight dates very recently and we only had results dating to Copper Age and we dated both human bones and animal bones. As for Colle Pardo, the big, big cemetery, we dated 15 different individuals and they were all dated to a late phase of middle Bronze Age so I'm not here to say that pottery type of chronology doesn't work even if it's been debated and it's still debated but the interesting thing is that these two data offer us complementary information and we can see that these caves had more complex and longer and differentiated types of ritual practices in them. We thought that they were identical that they were contemporary but they aren't and maybe the fact that pottery is very very similar to from one cave to another might mean that in that specific time of the occupation of the cave pottery was given a stronger emphasis and pots were introduced for a specific reason in that specific time whereas maybe earlier and later emphasis was given on other types of rituals so it's very interesting it's a question big question point to for us to work in the future so what have we learned so far going back to our initial research question are these all these caves do they point towards converging type of ritual or diverging type of ritual we see that at least some of the dead were often buried in these caves and we don't have many other example of aerial practices of side caves for this period we only have rock cactumes but these there are 20 or 30 no cases so far and cyclicality and repetition is one common feature for all these caves and also for the three caves that we have analyzed closer because we but in different ways so we have for example the repeated deposition of perinatal animals in the first cave in the second one we have the cyclical paving and the deposition of burnt crops and so on and in collevardo we have these repeated deposition of dead of the of the dead so it's converging and and diverging in a way another common feature might be seen in this dark light focus emphasis so we see that darkness is where the more most intense rituals were performed then we see that there are some common structural and ritual practices like the upside down parts and the broad beans recurring and also the animal bones that we've seen the perinatal bones all of these point to point towards an attention to the cycle of life of death and death of both humans and of nature and they these are best represented in caves because they really represent the innermost part of the earth the motherly part of the earth that can really hold this kind of seasonal rituals but on the other hand these are really it's not possible to generalize because we've seen that many caves are occupated during this period but not all of them so and all of them are very each cave has its special characteristics it's not all the same type of caves so there are there is the one that is very big but there's a very small cave inside and then there's the one that could even be a shepherd rock shelter because it's soup it's subarizontal and it's hospitable and then there's the callipardo cave which is so complex in spillo dams the space is used in different ways and ritual practices in all of these caves can be both linked and not linked to burial practices so this is not even a common point also within the burial practices we see that there is not just one way to bury the death and to perform burial practices so primary secondary and both of them different caves and even when we try to find a common point a common ground in the rituals involving plants and animals they are very different from one cave to the other so some of them relate to but all of them we can see they're related to ectonic called ectonic some kind of ectonic religion that in classical periods can be related to Dimitra rituals and religions so in conclusion I think that variability is the only common denominator of these rituals so there's no way to generalize them of course we they all start from a common ground that is this very strong meaning symbol is related to caves that represent this link with the nature and so it's the best place to represent the cycle of human life and death cycle and nature life and death cycle but other than that caves are so different in the way they are used even if all four ritual and even burial purposes so in conclusion the research questions for the future are are these caves used differently because each community was frequenting or few communities were frequenting one specific cave and they were personalizing the rituals or it is is it the other way around so each cave had an agency had a personality in a way and so it influenced the way communities performed in that specific cave probably as usually most of time is it's a combination of those two points of view but how can we understand more about these so there are several ways first of all we have to perform more radiocarbon dates to see the duration and the intensity of frequentation of each site DNA and isotope analysis can help us understand whether these communities were were similar were the same same size or how much they were differentiated and certainly we need to carry on more surveys surface surveys because we need to know more about settlement sites and so about settlement models and patterns in this area which is mostly known for the caves but as we have understood very well caves are very biased sites they can't tell us about the everyday life of people and so in order to know better about the religion and the symbolic world of these people we know we need to know better about their everyday life so it's a very interesting challenge for the future thank you for your attention