Lavagnone (Desenzano del Garda) : new excavations and palaeoecology of a Bronze Age pile dwelling in northern Italy

Abstract

Lavagnone is a lacustrine basin, today turned into a peat bog, which was continuously settled for about 1,000 years dur- ing the Early, Middle and Late Bronze Ages. Since 1991 research has been carried out under the supervision of R. C. de Marinis (Universita degli Studi di Milano) in four different areas of the basin in order to reconstruct the features of the settlement and the changes that occurred over the course of time. Palynological and palaeobotanical analyses, taking place since 2002 in cooperation with CNR-IDPA (Milano), are focused on determining the palaeoenvironmental manifestation, both then and now, of the anthro- pogenic exploitation of the basin.