Rio di Pusteria
Located at the entrance of the Val Pusteria, 777 a.s.l., in the northernmost part of Italy in the North-Eastern part of Alto Adige. The village is located along an important transit way; site of a flourishing market since the XIII century. Evidence of the historical origins of the settlement is in the finding of a front flint scraper from 6500 years ago, to pottery remains from the I-V century to the old civic walls dating back to the time of Mainardo II (XIII cent.). In 1269 Rio di Pusteria was given up by the Rodengo family to the Counts Alberto and Mainardo of Tyrol, who turned it into a merchant and craftsman village.
The religious buildings include the parish church of St. Elena and the unconsecrated Chapel of St. Floriano (XV cent.).
St. Floriano Chapel
The chapel was built in 1482 to satisfy the wish of Sigismondo, count of Tyrol. Built ex novo, its foundations rest on a pre-existing building, probably of roman age.
In 1998 the parish priest Father Hugo Senoner, during clearing works in the lower floor of the Chapel, discovered that under the staves acting as floor was a large amount of human bones: a long forgotten charnel house. The charnel house was the result of centuries of bone unearthing from the cemetery adjacent to the chapel, the last of which is believed to have occurred towards the end of the XVII cent. A.D. It is believed that the oldest bones may date as far back as the Palaeochristian period (V-VII A.D.). Upon recommendation of the Archaeological Remains Office of the Autonomous Province of Bolzano, the works for the recovery of the osteological materials were entrusted to the Company for Archaeological Research run by Giovanni Rizzi & Co. Among the bones various fragments were also found: coins and pottery fragments of the roman period, parts of headstone crosses and candelabra, small terracotta money boxes, rolls of bands probably used for medication, a spelling book from the Renaissance, an excommunication letter from the 1500s and intrusive animal bones, in addition to a children playing ball.
360° image of the St. Floriano Chapel
Click into the picture to navigate
St. Floriano Chapel charnel house: an archive for anthropology
The charnel house contains approximately 30 m3 of osteological material, corresponding to 2980 individuals (MNI assessed through the left femur). Under the wooden floor of the Chapel a mass of bones crammed on top of one another and completely disarticulated were randomly deposited without any distinction between anatomical elements; it is probable that during transfer from the cemetery, the smaller parts of the skeletons were largely left behind in situ.
Space and time references are hardly determinable; the timespan includes the millennium until the 1600s, with deeper traces of late-roman burials in part included in the soil on which the charnel house was based. It is difficult to determine whose bones were deposited in the charnel house, indeed during the Late Antiquity or the Early Middle Ages it is possible that part of the bones may have arrived from the leper-chronic hospice (Siechenhaus) located at the entrance of the village.
The palaeodemographic study has revealed a high infant mortality (1734 adults against 1264 children skeletons): males are over represented, while life expectancy was of 40 years.
The craniological analysis highlights a substantial homogeneity in intermediate characters with possible family relationships between the individuals.
The morphometric analysis of the pubic bones highlighted that the "functional stress" markers are more frequent among males and that they are already obvious in both sexes around the the age of twenty. This suggests that individuals were used as workforce much earlier than today. The tough mountain environment has influenced individual adaptation, this is obvious from the presence of markers on the femurs, those pertaining to hiking uphill and to the squatting position. Circulatory and articulation pathology were frequently observed.
|