IV Incontro Annuale di Preistoria e Protostoria. Applicazioni tecnologiche allo studio di contesti paleolitici e mesolitici italiani. IV Annual Meeting of Prehistory and Protohistory. The Application of emerging technologies to Italian Palaeolithic and Mesolithic case-studies. Abstract-Book

The 4th IAPP conference organized jointly by the Istituto Italiano di Preistoria e Protostoria and the University of Ferrara lives up to expectations. The rich program of the conference confirms the great interest of the scientific community towards the most ancient prehistory and demonstrates its engagement in keeping the standard of archaeological research in Italy at the highest level. The 27 oral presentations and 14 posters included in the conference program (7th and 8th February 2018) concern the Alps, the Apennines as well as the Tyrrhenian and Adriatic areas touching all the phases of human peopling recorded by our archives and dated between the Lower Palaeolithic and the end of the Mesolithic. Strongly anchored to a multidisciplinary approach the projects presented at the meeting deal with aspects connected to prehistoric ecology, settlement strategies, geoarchaeology and geognostic, lithic technology and economy, art and the symbolic behavior of neanderthal and sapiens human groups. These topics will be addressed starting from the results, frequently unpublished, of fieldworks, stratigraphic investigations, studies and analyses carried out in the context of short and mid-term researches. Around twelve presentations illustrate the potential of advanced technologies applied to a varied archaeological record and spanning across time. Moreover this focus on the Palaeolithic and the Mesolithic is strengthened by a growing attention to cultural mediation.