The discovery of the large Copper Age necropolis in San Giorgio Bigarello (Mantua, Northern Italy) has proved to be a surprise both in terms of the quantity of excavated tombs, a total of 22, and the archaeological data that promise to be very valuable for researchers.
Watch the video about the Copper Age necropolis in San Giorgio Bigarello (English subtitles):
The first isolated tombs, excavated in November 2023, in January-February 2024 were indeed only part of a larger cemetery, of which the exact proportions have certainly been lost over the millennia. Many tombs contained a collection of weapons made of flint: daggers of great technical skill, perfect arrowheads, and other blades. Additionally, archaeologists from SAP, under the scientific direction of the archaeological officer of the Soprintendenza Archeologia Belle Arti e Paesaggio di Mantova, Simone Sestito, with the keen interest of the municipal administration of the town near Mantova, also found personal ornaments such as necklace beads, made from materials that raise some preliminary questions about chronology, likely dating back to the 4th millennium BCE.
San Giorgio Bigarello, an archaeologically rich territory full of surprises
The territory of San Giorgio Bigarello, a scattered municipality that has experienced strong urban development since the second half of the 20th century, is certainly not new to archaeological finds of considerable value, just think of the famous “Lovers of Valdaro” (here the article), a fraction, which are now the most iconic section of the National Archaeological Museum of Mantova, at Palazzo Ducale. A burial of the late Neolithic that no one hesitates to call an “embrace”, very interesting for archaeological inquiries but also for an emotional involvement that leaves no one indifferent, regardless of the meaning of the position of the bodies of the two young individuals, a boy and a girl, whether they were truly “lovers” or not.
Beyond weapons: studying the ancient inhabitants of the Po Valley
In this case, the Copper Age necropolis of San Giorgio Bigarello, discovered during the works of a public garden, in what was supposed to be a sandy hillock, elevated compared to the watercourses and surrounding marshy areas, provides useful elements for understanding the Mantovano area before the foundation of the city, almost certainly the work of the Etruscans. The 22 burials were found just a few tens of centimeters (about 40) below the surface, sometimes disturbed by subsequent activities such as agriculture, construction, and old urbanization. But more often, the human remains were in excellent preservation conditions, which is of great importance for the studies that can be undertaken by anthropologists: age, paleopathology (searching for diseases or traumas that leave traces on the bone remains), research on diet, and, if lucky and favorable conditions arise, even on the origin of individuals, not to mention what ancient DNA can reveal.
Funerary rites and deposits to be studied in the necropolis at the gates of Mantua
The study of depositional practices also promises very interesting insights. Some tombs are not arranged as in the not-so-distant and important necropolis of Remedello (Brescia), with which that of San Giorgio can largely be compared. Not all lower limbs are flexed, with the upper ones around the abdomen, as one would expect for contemporaneous necropolises, but perhaps with “reduction” activities, i.e., with the intentional movement of skeletal material. These are entirely preliminary observations that nonetheless deserve careful consideration by specialists, as with the aforementioned necklace beads, which could push the chronology upward.
Hand in hand with the study will come, in due course (we hope), the valorization of the material, presumably at the museum of the capital. While it is under study, as Mayor Beniamino Morselli tells us, how to commemorate the archaeological site in the same garden that – over 5000 years later – allowed the discovery of the tombs, and the still-unrevealed stories of the inhabitants, some of whom were warriors, of that ancient landscape of water and sands that would later become Mantova.