So Bradford read and talked, and found his parallels. The wares he had excavated were familiar; they had been found elsewhere in the heel of Italy, especially opposite or in Matera, in Lucania, and Molfetta, in Puglia, between Barletta and Bari, in contexts dated 2600–2500 B.C. And this pottery proves to have affinities, too, with that of Thessalian Sesklo, a neolithic site not far from Dimini. This same type of pottery can be traced across the Balkans into Illyricum, and thence across the Adriatic to Bradford’s sites, giving in the process a glimpse of neolithic man as a more daring seafarer than had previously been thought. And so, by patient, detailed work like Bradford’s, the newly-discovered sites are fitted into and enrich the pattern of the neolithic world. The total mapping fills a huge gap in the picture of the findspots of Neolithic sites in Italy. Before 1945, some 170 were known; now the Tavoliere alone makes up more than that number. And Passo di Corvo becomes the largest known neolithic site in Europe. The things the archaeologists did not find are instructive, too. No weapons were found: the inference is that the Tavoliere folk were unwarlike. There is no evidence that the sites survived into the Bronze Age: it looks as though, like unwarlike peoples all too often elsewhere, they were wiped out in an invasion. It is clear from the artifacts and the site-plans that neolithic man on the Tavoliere lived like neolithic man elsewhere in Italy, that the culture was on the whole uniform. He lived in a wattle-and-daub hut with a sunken floor, a central hearth, and a smokehole--the remote and primitive predecessor of the atrium-and-impluvium house of historic Roman times, whose central apartment had a hole in the roof with a pool below to catch rain water. Fortunately for us, his wife was a slovenly housekeeper: from her rubbish we can reconstruct her way of life. In his enclosures he penned the animals he had domesticated: other Italian sites have yielded the bones of the sheep, goat, horse, ox, ass, and pig. The dog has not yet become man’s best friend in the neolithic Tavoliere. Primitive man in Italy had a rudimentary religion: the Ligurian cave of Arene Candide has yielded statuettes of big-breasted, pregnant women, which probably had something to do with a fertility cult. In another Ligurian cave, Balzi Rossi, over 200,000 stone implements have been found. Not far up the Adriatic coast from Foggia, in the Vibrata valley, lie the foundations of 336 neolithic huts. We know something, too, of neolithic man’s burial customs, and macabre enough they seem: skulls have been found smeared with red ochre; apparently the flesh was stripped from the corpse--a practice called in Italian _scarnitura_--and the stain applied to the bared bone. All this suggests a level of culture far below that which the Near East was enjoying at the same time: Passo di Corvo’s mud huts are contemporary with the Great Pyramid of Egypt, with palaces and temples