Casarotto Mill

The archaeological importance of these areas around the lake, and indeed of all the Fimon Valleys, does not lie solely in its pile dwellings. It is also connected to the presence of much older human communities. During the period known as the Neolithic, the first communities to practise farming and animal husbandry settled in various parts of northern Italy, and evidence of them has also been found in the Fimon Valleys. A great deal of material from these communities was discovered during the years of the Second World War, when more than a thousand workers were employed extracting peat from the Fimon Valleys as a source of fuel. Gastone Trevisiol, a surveyor with the Civil Engineering Department, accurately marked on a map a discovery reported to him by some peat cutters. They told him they had found a hearth and some flints, and they showed him the exact location. This information, recorded in 1943, eventually led to an archaeological excavation carried out between 1969 and 1972 by Professor Broglio and Professor Barfield. It was an Anglo-Italian excavation that brought to light the remains of three houses, or habitation areas, dating to the Middle Neolithic, around 4500 BCE—more than two thousand years older than the pile dwellings discovered by Paolo Lioy. In 2019, working with the University of Padua, together with a group of students, we carried out a series of core samples. Professor Broglio came to visit us in the field and pointed out an area of the Molino Casarotto site that had not yet been excavated. On that occasion, we also interviewed people who remembered those years, asking them to tell us about that period. It was a very short period in historical terms, limited to the years of the Second World War, but one that brought about a profound transformation in the morphology of the Fimon Valleys, lowering the ground level by more than a metre. It is also a story closely linked to a great number of archaeological discoveries.
Further excavations were carried out here in 2024, and these new investigations allowed us to identify another hearth, refine the dating of the site, and discover that its inhabitants were already familiar with cereal cultivation, thanks to the recovery of numerous cereal grains, as well as other information that could not have been extracted from archaeological sediments using the technologies available fifty years ago. Molino Casarotto is a Middle Neolithic site. It belongs to a culture known as the Square-Mouthed Pottery Culture. Examples of square-mouthed vessels from both the excavations of Broglio and Barfield and the nearby Val Liona are preserved in the Museum of Vicenza. This vessel represents a unifying element of the Neolithic world. The Early Neolithic was characterised by many small groups, each with its own ceramic styles—and therefore, we believe, with its own culture and identity. It was then replaced by a single object that spread across northern Italy and beyond: the square-mouthed vessel.