Due storie, una valle: La transizione antichità-medioevo sul Tagliamento attraverso l'archeologia

This volume contains the edition of two excavations conducted by the teaching of Medieval Archeology at the Ca 'Foscari University of Venice as part of the Alta Valle del Tagliamento project, begun in 2004 and concluded in 2011. The text will explain the reasons and purpose and context of relationships (including personal ones) that were at the origin. In 2008, therefore, only four years after the beginning of the research in this area, the first of the volumes we had in mind to write about our research (the book relating to the excavations in the Sacuidic castle) was published. This second volume, on the other hand, comes out several years after the first, also due to the fact that, in 2011, the project was interrupted, above all due to the difficulty in finding funds for research. In any case, the excavations that had engaged us the most, after the original interest in Sacuidic, could be considered substantially concluded (to the extent that each excavation can really be said to be concluded) or in any case had already produced enough material to allow us to offer a good interpretative synthesis. This book finds its first internal coherence on the fact that the contexts that are published date between late Antiquity and the early early Middle Ages: archaeological evidence, that is, which tell of a past of this territory until today almost completely ignored. Two testimonies, however (and we have written it several times), have a very different documentary weight because, although chronologically close, one illustrates the conjuncture (Cuol di Ciastel) the other a long-lasting history (Andrazza). Therefore, they contain different meanings that can be used in the reconstruction of the settlements of the population of this valley (but, one could also add, of the Alpine valleys as a whole, to the extent that this territory, even with all its peculiarities, still represents a space geographic and socio-anthropological generalizable): a late Roman castle, expression of a central power, functional to specific political-military dynamics of the late empire and a necropolis of a local community that faces history towards the end of the sixth century and that , most likely, it represents "in a nutshell" the generating cell of the future communities of this portion of the valley.