On August 6, 1909, archaeologists Francesco Samarelli and Angelo Mosso were going to Bisceglie, in the narrow strip of Apulia among the gentle slopes of the Murge and plunges into the warm embrace of the Adriatic Sea. They had received news from a group of local farmers: some large stone slabs had emerged from the soil near the country locality “la Chianca”. The two archaeologists immediately supposed that these artifacts were related to prehistory. In fact, they knew that the area had hosted early settlements. Furthermore, other archaeological testimonies from that period were beginning to be found there. For instance, about twenty years later, the important Cave of San Ciriaco was to be discovered, confirming the presence of Neolithic rock dwellings.
The Dolmen of Chianca
When Samarelli and Mosso arrived at the site of the discovery, farmers had already shoveled the land revealing an ancient construction made of local limestone. The lithic structure has three large vertical slabs or orthostats, in Apulia called chianche, and a fourth horizontal covering slab (240 cm x 380 cm). A narrow dromos-shaped corridor oriented eastward, about seven and a half meters long, departed from the cell, which was one and a half meters high.
It was immediately clear that the particular stone structure so ancient and mysterious was a megalithic dolmen. It was a prehistoric expression of a collective burial.
Finds from the dromos and subsequent excavations
The discovery was undoubtedly sensational. The Dolmen of Chianca appeared to be unique in its kind. In fact the structure was exceptionally intact and still retained its original function as a burial chamber. Subsequent excavations lasted for years and were led by archaeologist Michele Gervasio. Inside the cell, fragments of pottery, small stone knives, animal bones and, most importantly, eight human skeletons of different ages were found1. Along the dromos there were some pieces of blackened pottery, probably from ritual fires, a jug and a pendant. These findings are now preserved at the Archaeological Museum of Bari and dated between 1200 BC and 100 BC.
Ancestral rites of passage
The Dolmen of Chianca was certainly a place of enormous mystical-ritual significance. Some clues discovered near the communal burial chamber suggest that elaborate rites of passage took place at the complex. The dromos ideally corresponded to the path that the soul of the deceased had to take to reach the afterlife. In fact, the corridor faces east in the direction of the rising sun and ends in the burial cell. The chamber is a symbolic representation of the afterlife dimension. Some fires lit along the dromos ideally facilitated the transit of the deceased. Instead, crockery and animal bones served to forage during the transition, similar to many contemporary cultures. The dromos thus served as an antechamber for the funerary banquet2.
Also of considerable importance are the holes visible at the level of one of the vertical slabs. They were expected to allow the soul of the deceased to reach the burial chamber so that it could rejoin his body. This is an element that recurs frequently among civilizations with collective burials. Such holes could have a function similar to those found on the exedras of the tombs of giants in Sardinia, or of pre-existing pre-Nuragic cultures.
The Dolmen of Chianca as a metaphysical boundary
Despite the numerous studies conducted, the ritual function of dolmen burials has yet to be investigated in detail. Nevertheless, such megalithic monuments fascinate contemporary man not only for their intrinsic historical and cultural value. They manifest primordial belief in another dimension of existence too. Thus, the Dolmen of Chianca constitutes a metaphysical boundary between the world of the living and the dead one, between known and unknown past, between matter and the ethereal conception of fire, which makes everything indistinguishable.
Samuele Corrente Naso