Margherita Mussi

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Margherita Mussi (born August 31, 1948 in Treviso ) is an Italian prehistorian who taught at the Roman University of La Sapienza from 1974 to 2009 . Her research focuses on the paleolithic settlement of Italy and that of Europe in the middle and late Pleistocene on the one hand, on the other on the art and burial culture of the Paleolithic and human evolution in East Africa. She wrote basic works on the prehistory of Italy .

Life

Mussi taught at the "Sapienza" at the Dipartimento di Scienze dell'Antichità and was a professore associato for archeology . She is also director of the Missione archeologica italiana in Melka Kunture and Balchit ( Ethiopia )

Mussi completed her studies in 1972 (Ecologia preistorica) at the "Sapienza" and completed her diploma in 1975/76 at the Scuola Nazionale d'Archeologia di Roma . In 1973 she took part in excavations in Somalia , then in Juba in southern Sudan . She also dealt with excavation sites in the Middle Eastern Natufia as well as Afghanistan . In Italy she dug at sites in Tyrrhenian Italy, in Abruzzo, in Fucino , in order to finally extend her research horizon to the Paleolithic as a whole of Italy.

She has been carrying out archaeological excavations in Italy and East Africa since 1977, including from 1982 to 1989 in the Grotta Barbara ( Middle Paleolithic to Early Upper Paleolithic ), since 1992 in the Grotta di Pozzo and in the Altopiano delle Cinque Miglia (Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic ), in the south Sardinia since 1999 and since 2009 in the Ethiopian Melka Kunture, more precisely in Garba III.

From 1993 to 1995 she represented Italy in the coordination network The Palaeolithic occupation of Europe of the European Science Foundation . From 1994 to 2001 she was the science coordinator for the collaboration between the “Sapienza”, or the Dipartimento di Scienze dell'Antichità , and the Canadian University of Alberta in Edmonton , or the Department of Anthropology . Since 2009 she has been working as an expert on prehistoric excavation sites at the UNESCO World Heritage Center , more precisely on the Human Evolution, Adaptations, Dispersals and Social Development (HEADS) program.

Works (selection)

  • Il Paleolitico e il Mesolitico in Italia , 1993 (Popoli e civiltà dell'Italia antica, xxx) (replaced the twenty years older work by Antonio Radmilli: Uomo e ambiente dal Paleolitico all'Età del bronzo , 1980)
  • with Wil Roebroeks , Jiří Svoboda, Kelly Fennema (eds.): Hunters of the Golden Age: the Mid Upper Palaeolithic of Eurasia (30,000-20,000 bp) , Leiden University Press, 2000.
  • Earliest Italy. An overview of the Italian Paleolithic and Mesolithic , Kluwer Academic / Plenum Publishers, 2001.
  • Le Paleoscienze. Le origini delle attività cognitive , treccani.it, 2001
  • East and South of the Alps: the MUP funerary and artistic record of Italy and Moravia compared , in: Jiří A. Svoboda, Lenka Sedláčková (Eds.): The Gravettian Along the Danube. Proceedings of the Mikulov Conference, November 20-21, 2002, The Dolní Vĕstonice Studies , Vol. 11, 2004, pp. 252-269.
  • with Pierre Bolduc, Jacques Cinq-Mars: Le 15 figurine paleolitiche scoperte da Louis Alexandre Jullien ai Balzi Rossi , in: Origini XXVI (2004) 7–64.
  • with Maria Rita Palombo, Patrizia Gioia, Giuseppe Cavarretta (eds.): Studying Proboscideans: Knowledge, Problems and Perspectives. Selected papers from “'The World of Elephants” Congress, Rome , in: Quaternary International 126-128 (2005) 1-287.
  • La Venere di Savignano: scoperta, polemiche, descrizione e prospettive , in: Origini XXVII (2005) 219–246.
  • Women of the Middle Latitudes. The Earliest Peopling of Europe from a Female Perspective , in: Wim Roebroeks (Ed.): Guts and Brains: An integrative approach to the Hominin Record , Leiden University Press Academic 2007, 165-184.
  • with Paul Bahn, Roberto Maggi: Parietal art discovered at Arene Candide Cave (Liguria, Italy) , in: Antiquity 82 (2008) 265–270.
  • with Alessandro De Marco: A Gönnersdorf-style engraving in the parietal art of Grotta Romanelli (Apulia, southern Italy) , in: Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für Urgeschichte 17 (2008) 97-104. ( online , PDF)
  • with Paola Villa: Single carcass of Mammuthus primigenius with lithic artifacts in the Upper Pleistocene of northern Italy , in: Journal of Archaeological Science 35 (2008) 2606-2613.
  • The Venus of Macomer, a little-known prehistoric figurine from Sardinia , in: Paul G. Bahn (Hrsg.): An Inquiring Mind. Essays in Honor of Alexander Marshack , in: American School of Prehistoric Research, Harvard University 2009, pp. 193-210.
  • with Maria Rita Palombo, Samuele Agostini, Maurizio Barbieri, Emmanuele Di Canzio, Federico Di Rita, Ivana Fiore, Paola Iacumin, Donatella Magri, Fabio Speranza: The early Middle Pleistocene site of Pagliare di Sassa (L'Aquila, central Italy) , in : Quaternary International 223-224 (2010) 170-178.
  • Paleo-landscapes and vulnerability in the framework of the World Heritage Convention , in: Nuria Sanz, Penelope Keenan (Ed.): Human Evolution: Adaptations, Dispersals and Social Developments (HEADS) - World Heritage Thematic Program . World Heritage Papers Series 29 (2010) 190-201. ([whc.unesco.org/documents/publi_wh_papers_29_en.pdf online], PDF)
  • with Marco Peresani: The Palaeolithic Settlement of Italy during the Younger Dryas , in: Quaternary International 242 (2011) 360-370.
  • with Flavio Altamura, Roberto Macchiarelli, Rita T. Melis, Enza Spinapolice: Garba III (Melka Kunture, Ethiopia): a MSA site with archaic Homo sapiens remains revisited , in: Quaternary International 343.1 (2014) 28–39.
  • Earliest Italy , Springer, 2014.
  • Encoding and Decoding the Message: The Case of the Mid Upper Mesolithic Female Imagery , in: Fiona Coward, Robert Hosfield, Matt Pope, Francis Wenban-Smith (Eds.): Settlement, Society and Cognition in Human Evolution , Cambridge University Press, 2015 , Pp. 275-287.
  • with Rosalia Gallotti, Margherita Mussi (Ed.): The Emergence of the Acheulean in East Africa and Beyond. Contributions in Honor of Jean Chavaillon , Springer International Publishing, 2018.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Mussi, Margherita
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian prehistorian
DATE OF BIRTH August 31, 1948
PLACE OF BIRTH Treviso