The book focuses on the Castelnovian cultural complex, which developed during the recent Mesolithic between south-eastern France, Italy and western Slovenia. Namely, it aims at the reconstruction of settlement dynamics and lithic technical systems in the Emilia region (Northern Italy) within the wider context of southern Europe. To reach these objectives all the collections of the museums from this area have been examined, amounting to a total of 55 sites, some of which are here published for the first time.The results obtained confirm the appearance in Emilia during the Castelnovian of important technical innovations, along with the persistence of some aspects which were characteristic of the previous phase, while the settlement choices and mobility patterns do not seem to have changeed significantly from those identified for the ancient Mesolithic (Sauveterrian complex).The authors therefore conclude that the important changes which characterized the Castelnovian in the region cannot be ascribed to a replacement of populations, but can probably be traced back to other cultural and social phenomena which the current state of research cannot better identify.

AUTHOR
Federica Fontana is a researcher at the University of Ferrara, where she lectures on Prehistory and Methods and techniques for archaeology. Her main research topic concerns the last hunter-gatherers of Northern Italy, focusing on technical systems, settlement strategies and burial rituals. She coordinates research in some main Italian Palaeolithic and Mesolithic deposits.Sonia Ferrari has studied Letters and Archaeology at the University of Bologna and Ferrara, where she received a PhD in Science and technology for archaeology. She has carried out research at the Musum National dHistoire Naturelle of Paris and the University of Toulouse II. She has taken part in several excavation campaigns in Italy and abroad.