Camonica Valley: A Depiction of Village Life in the Alps from Neolithic Times to the Birth of Christ, as Revealed by Thousands of Newly Found Rock Carvings

Translated from the French by Linda Asher. Originally published in French as "La civilisation du Val Camonica". This remarkable book throws a bright light on 2,000 obscure years of prehistory in northern Europe and on the myths and cults of its mysterious forest people, who have fascinated civilized men from Julius Caesar to Robert Graves. Just five years ago a young Israeli scholar, Emmanuel Anati, made a sensational archaeological find - 15,000 carvings chiseled into an Alpine mountainside that has been called "the richest and most varied ethnological document yet uncovered from a prehistoric community in Europe." Camonica Valley is now recognized as the most rewarding of the many sites where Bronze and Iron Age pictures are to be found, not only because its artists depicted the life around them with such profusion and gusto, but because they were influenced by travelers on the Great Amber Route from the shores of the Baltic and from Mycenaean Greece. Thus, we have a kind of master check on the chronologies and influences of other cultures. Moreover, daily life was identical in many ways in Camonica and in the forests north of the Alps, and all the intimate details of that life are depicted in the carvings. Here are far more than isolated finds, piles of debris or shards, tombs or simple building foundations. Every carving is a document illuminating the economic system or the architecture or the religious practices, agricultural methods, or the sex live of the people who engraved it. The carving testify to the cultural continuity of the community from Neolithic times until it was conquered by Rome in 16 B.C. Thus, the carvings have a significance far beyond local history. They sum up in a single site all the steps taken by man from a savage cultural level dependent mainly on hunting and gathering, through evolving stages of barbarism, to urban civilization and literacy. The graven rocks portray two thousand years of an all but unknown world. and this book is the archaeologist's own interpretation of his priceless discovery.