Le industrie litiche dell’Antro Mitriaco di Angera (Varese)

This paper deal about the results of the study carried on the chipped stone assemblages from the so-called Antro Mitriaco, also known as Tana del Lupo, a small cave opening approximately 230 meters above the southwestern wall of the Rocca Borromeo of Angera (Varese), East of Lake Maggiore. The study consists in a revision of three distinct groups of chipped stone artefacts, partly already published, which are stored at the Civico Museo Archeologico di Angera: the finds from Fusco excavations of 1973, those collected by M. Maioli between 1969 and 1971, and those unearthed during the 2009 excavation performed by the Department of Archaeology of the University of Bologna in collaboration with the Civico Museo Archeologico di Angera. The stone artefacts are made on lithotypes, especially flints and radiolarites, largely coming from the Jurassic and Cretaceous formations located above all in the mountainous region north of Lake Varese. The techno-typological analysis carried on the three groups of artefacts allows us to ascribe a large part of items to a homogeneous lithic assemblage which can be referred to the Late Epigravettian. The stone assemblage from Antro Mitriaco is characterized by a low number of burins, end-scrapers and other common tools together with several microliths mainly consisting in backed points. A small group of finds, among which a trapeze and some cores and bladelets, which are compatible with pressure technique, may be related to either an Early Neolithic or a Late Mesolithic (Castelnovian) occupation of the cave.