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Articoli Salento
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The toponym
Salento has uncertain origins. According to the research of Mario Cosmai, the
word “salento” seems to derive from “sale” (salt), meaning “land surrounded by
salt-sea”. Romans, in fact, called Sallentini the inhabitants of arid marshes that meet around the Gulf of Taranto.
According
to the Greek geographer Strabone, the toponym seems to derive from the name of
the Cretan colonists who settled in this land, called Salentini as native of
the city of Salenzia.
In the end,
we have the hypothesis of Marco Terenzio Varrone, according to which, the
origin of the word “salento”, takes its name from an alliance drawn up “in
salo”, that is “in the sea”, among three ethnic groups that lived there:
Cretans, Illyrians, Locrians.
As regards
the history of Salento, the studies and the researches made in the latest
years, revealed that Salento was already inhabited in Middle Palaeolithic.
Flintstone tools have been recovered in the caves formed thank to the great
presence of calcium. Probably they were hominids who belonged to the species of
Homo Neanderthalensis. In fact, that of Homo Sapiens Sapiens would have
propagated in Upper Palaeolithic. An important
archaeological finding has been that of some statues of bones found in the
Grotta delle Veneri (Cave of Venues) near to Parabita, that demonstrate the
existence of fertility worships already 20000 years ago. Another important
attestation of the prehistory of Salento is Delia, a female hominid found in
Ostuni. She’s so important because she had in her womb the remains of a foetus
in terminal stage: she has become the oldest mother in history of whom we keep
the remains. These remains represent the first “relatives” in Palaeolithic e in
the whole human history.
The human
presence in Palaeolithic and Neolithic is documented also by interesting cave
paintings, tools, human and animal remains, found in the caves of the
peninsula. The graffiti in the Grotta Romanelli, near Castro, and in the Grotta
dei Cervi, near Porto Badisco, are also very important. An imposing
fortification structure dating back to the bronze age (XV-XI century B.C.) has
been found in Roca Vecchia. In the same area, there is another important
archaeological site: the Grotta della Poesia (The cave of Poetry),
found in 1983. It is a circular area of 600 m2 and has a lot of
votive inscriptions, sometimes overlapped, of different ages and civilizations,
that are dated back to the VIII-II centuries B.C..
Other important ancestral attestations are represented by some
megalithic constructions in the area, as dolmen (tombs formed by two
stones put vertically in the earth and another slab of stone put over
the others), menhir (a big and long stone put vertically in the earth),
specchie (megalithic monuments created by overlapping stones of
irregular shapes) that in the following centuries would have been used
for the cult of Christianity
Translate by: Anna
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