 Our next speaker is Philippe Della Casa on Neolithic Supply Chains and Distribution Networks in the Adriatic Basin as Systematic Approach. Good morning everybody and thanks for being here and thanks for inviting me to the session. I want to talk about the distribution networks of Flint in the Adriatic Basin. I'll start with this is the general layout of what I want to tell you this morning. Starting from a case study already a couple of years ago on a small crescent island of Sushats and eventually turned out that material collected there had a specific importance for the aspect of flint circulation in the Adriatic Basin mostly flint from Gagano sources. So that's what Andrafsky says the sequence of toolstone procurement to stone tool discard is decided by cultural influences, situational constraints and raw material accessibility and that's exactly like the framework of the research trying to understand these various aspects. Here again in a little scheme we have a political sphere that is important that has to do with the group boundaries and territorial aspects we have environmental constraints of course we have a technology that influences the way that toolstones are used and we can add more aspects to that framework. So Chaine Operatoire and their extending to social and technological system have been an important discussion in the last years. This is just to remind the framework of the early Neolithic that is important to understand and important the change of procurement strategies and diffusion strategies at the turn from a late Mesolithic to early Neolithic. ICC in Gressel Cardio complex that within a very brief span of time maybe 150 years that's from the Binder et al. diagram and Bayesian modelling spreads all across the central and western Mediterranean and creates a network of connection within which some very specific raw materials will circulate. I want to focus on flint today but of course we also have obsidian unfortunately we're missing rock dioxide and different other raw materials that would be interesting to look at. So here's the case study. Suchat's survey and excavation in the late 90s. Suchat's is a small island which is west of the larger south formation islands. It's mostly uninhabited but it beers a couple of very thrilling archaeological situations two of which I would briefly address today. I would survey and test excavated by international team. One is at the south of the island. It's an early Neolithic site as you can see. It has a typical Gressel ceramics and very peculiar flint-tune assemblage and it's been dated by radioparbon to the beginning of the 6th millennium CalBC. That's the oldest evidence of human presence we identified during the survey on the island. The second site is 027 which is quite a large and mostly deflated site on overlooking the coast of the island to the west. It has some structural elements that I will not comment on further. The important thing is that it had a lot of surface fans because of deflecting erosion but also some fairly well stratified middle Neolithic context and that's the key issue of that site. But I want to focus your attention on that large chunk of flint. There was a surface fan on the site. It's a decorated nodule of flint, one and a half kilo heavy, so big blank of raw material. The stratified context, as you can see, if you're somehow familiar with South Italian and Dalmatian middle Neolithic consists of chrome-painted pottery. So we are in an evolved middle Neolithic phase and we have some other peculiar elements such as this black facial flint piece. Next we have a 30, I think it's long enough, a little piece of an obsidian core and other elements that are quite typical of the pier. We're talking about, again, we have a radiocardin date which is about a thousand years younger than the one from the early Neolithic site so it's around the 4,800 cal BC which goes pretty well with the polychrome, trichrome serum phase that is also known across the Adriatic in Apulia. So that's the most important context of the site. There is material from other phases but we are quite confident that most of the recorded archaeological material must be somehow related to these stratified contexts that are all of the middle Neolithic. Okay, back in 2000, first microfacial analysis proved a carganum provenance of the litics from SEO 2.7 and other sites on the Sushads Island. This was work done by Gianna Falto who has a long record of microfacial analysis in Switzerland and she identified several carganum litotypes, mostly from the Piscicci area and was able to relate our Sushads finds and also some material provided from our colleagues Palakruzia and Venuspila excavations to that flint source. At that time, it was not widely recognized that carganum flint supplied most of the Adriatic coast from the early Neolithic so that research maybe remained unnoticed for a couple of years and now with newer and intensified research both on the Italian side and the carganum flint mines and also on the Croatian side on the materials from archaeological sites. This becomes evident that the carganum flint mines are the main supplier of flint from the early Neolithic in that area which is southern Italy and the southern Adriatic basin. A lot of publications have appeared in the last years on the carganum flint mines in particular on the different solar mine where you need the most famous that starts around 6000 so it has some of the oldest radio carbon dates for flint mines in Europe all together. You can see that on the diagram here of the available for seed dates. I would like to stretch just two things on this diagram. One is that there is a post 5000 PC radio carbon date from Defensola so though the activity on the mine seems to lower towards the end of the 6th millennium there is evidence for flint mining weevil to our middle Neolithic site and two shots at one point and then of course there is a lot of in Neolithic for cooperation with everyone to call it like fourth millennium activity in different mining areas of the carganum so after the early Neolithic, early to middle Neolithic exploitation phase there is from the fourth millennium a very important new mining activity and distribution activity of flint from carganum. Now why is this interesting in Zurich? We happen to host a 1950 collection from a guy called Rutschmann he obviously spent a lot of time on carganum earlier in the 20th century and collected intensively flint from mining and working sites some might also have a settlement aspect but these are mostly atelier close to the mines where the transformation of the primary modules in the mine happened. These are surface finds we have almost no record except for that tiny map on the look on the Al Castello still exists that restaurant where he reported his findings and a student in Zurich spent a lot of time identifying the sites first of all and creating a GIS base in order to localize what's in all these boxes that is hosted in our collection. So one important question and that's the core topic of today is what are the formats of distribution of the flint? Flint supply in the Neolithic sites of course very wide topics I really want to focus on this specific aspect we know from our Italian colleagues that the carganum mines were the main supply for example in the Neolithic of the entire taballiere and the many many Neolithic sites in this area but how did the flint actually circulate and reach these settlements? Little was known about that I can quote Tarantini from 2012 with reference to the site of Maseria Candelaro in Italian La Scarsia Quantità di lame verticali e di support di initialisazione affronte della presenza di tutte le altre fasi del debittage suggerisce Sharp's idea di un arrivo della Selce del Gargano in formative premium play. So he says from indirect evidence that he has a lot of flint debitations on the site so he supposes that some form of blanks or pre-nuclea must have reached the settlement and okay that's exactly what we find on Sushat's it's a decorticated nodule so it has been tested for quality it has been evidence that we have a high quality flint nodule and that's a format in which it's transported and it's actually in this case transported across the area we would expect that it also went to many other sites and was then worked into actual tools so that's what the early and middle Neolithic then the things change massively towards later periods in the E Neolithic it seems to be another format of distribution again Tarantini puts out a hypothesis di lavoro a working hypothesis says that it's probably so that the bifacial preforms are the main format of distribution of the raw material and that these preforms are then later in Atelier or in settlement Atelier worked into tools such as bifacial points and in particular pinte di freccia arrowheads, bifacial arrowheads and this again is what we find on Sushat's we have these typical Ojibwe these typical preforms of the gargamel flint lids and other bifacial elements that can be preforms or pre-tools so we have evidence of both these distribution systems on the same spot this very small island which indicates first that yes Tarantini and his colleagues were quite right in their hypotheses about the ways of distribution of gargamel flint and yes it's also possible to trace it all across the atriatic and we can see from the material in the Rutschmann collection that it is an extensive production of preforms of the Fofenme 9 and there's hundreds of these preforms and they're all very similar as you can see on this photo taken from Ruzina Tony's work so it's an industry it's not just a pretreatious way of purchasing with flint raw material it's a proper industry that then ends up in the sites such as Dorspacato here in this example and on the sites are worked into flint arrowheads now we talk to lithic technicians they first did not really want to believe that they said it's cumbersome to produce a preform and then work it into an arrowhead it's much easier to work it directly to an arrowhead from a flake but that's a technological aspect and in the technology we must consider those social aspects and obviously there was a socio-economic factor here very important from the producer side to the consumer side and that's done through the bias of these preforms just as in metallurgy we have ingots you could imagine that objects would be melted into form right where the copper is produced but now it's not the case it's first it's transformed into ingots and these circulate and we have a very similar system here now evidence for the Gargano flint so we can start linking this producer and consumer sites and we can of course start thinking about how these materials cross the Adriatic if we look at Goulas' drifted data it's quite obvious that from the early Neolithic any penetration of the Adriatic basin would go along the eastern coast mostly but then due to the specific situation here of the central Adriatic with the small islands of Sousa, Palogruza and the islands and the Gargano is very well linked to the central and southern Dalmatia and offers an island bridge which is well known to the works of our colleagues for many years in Palogruza for example and just facts a confirmation now with the Gargano flint circulation we might even issue some hypothesis where these preforms ended it's always been striking that in Palogruza we have all these arrowheads whether they come from the Gargano flint where have they been manufactured nobody knows maybe on the island itself none of these preforms have been found so far in Palogruza but ok Stascha is not here today but I'd like to discuss that with him one day whether this is a possibility that we have here a typical consumer site which was receptive of these preforms of Palogruza thank you very much here's a little list of acknowledgement of people involved in the research some are here, thank you and just two articles that should be published soon and they will resume what I've just presented today thank you very much