Revisiting the Early Aurignacian in Italy: New insights from Grotta della Cala
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Grotta della Cala in southern Italy is a key archaeological site spanning from the Middle Paleolithic to the Bronze Age. In the stratigraphic sequence close to the cave entrance, numerous artifacts associated with Aurignacian occupations were uncovered, including both lithic and organic materials. However, earlier interpretations were limited by challenges in dating the Upper Paleolithic layers and a lack of modern analytical methods for characterizing the finds. Recent excavations have refined the site's chronology and further explored the Aurignacian deposit. This study builds on this updated framework, offering an interdisciplinary reassessment that includes technological analyses of lithic assemblages and bone tools, along with a taxonomic examination of the marine shells. Many of these shells were intentionally perforated, suggesting symbolic behaviors linked to coastal resource exploitation. Lithic technology at the site is characterized by the systematic production of miniaturized bladelets from carinated cores, while osseous technology centers on the manufacture of split-based antler points, marking the southernmost occurrence of this tool type in Europe. The integration of new radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence dating allows us to confidently assign all analyzed sub-layers to the Early Aurignacian, a significant finding, given that no other sites in the region securely postdate the Campanian Ignimbrite (∼40,000 years ago). As such, Grotta della Cala is a crucial site for understanding the lifeways of Aurignacian foraging groups in the aftermath of this super-eruption and during Heinrich Stadial 4. Our comparative analysis of Early Aurignacian sites across Italy provides a clearer understanding of regional variability and continuity between 40,000 and 37,000 years ago, contributing to the broader debate on the biocultural dynamics of the Upper Paleolithic in Europe.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".