Abstract:

In this paper we present the results of an ongoing archaeoanthropology project which was started in the year 2007 at Benabbio, a village located near Lucca, in northern Tuscany, Italy. Aim of the project is to exhume individuals buried in the medieval cemetery near the church of the Castle of Benabbio (also in course of excavation), and of people who died in the village during the cholera epidemic of the year 1855. The archaeological site is an area with dense concentrations of features, artefacts, and organic material. A total of 3,000 artefacts from the site, ranging between 19th and 12th centuries have been recorded on a computer database and will be studied by a team of specialists to provide information about the cultural and physical aspects of this ancient human group. The discovery of many well preserved medieval houses led to the decision to examine the settlement in its entirety, exploring the spatial and chronological development of the site.
Archaeological exploration of this vast area will involve not only the cemetery of the castle but also the houses and the manor, investigating the origins of the settlement and the early stages of encastlement, by which the local lord could dominate the surrounding countryside and control his neighbours. It will be possible to reconstruct the different phases of organization of the settlement and the life-style and diseases of the inhabitants of the castle.
Furthermore, this project is an important test-bed for the development of field techniques such as balloon aerial photography, high-resolution georadar survey, geographic information system (GIS), as well as special laboratory techniques for palaeopathology such as computerized axial tomography (CAT), electron microscopy (EM), stable isotopes (13C and 15N) palaeonutrition and ancient DNA (aDNA), that can be used to diagnose ancient diseases.

This paper has a dual purpose: on the one hand, it makes the first results of the excavations available to the widest possible audience; on the other hand, it describes the application of a CLIL methodology which uses a foreign language to study a specific discipline. In this case, English is used as supporting language to carry out a number of tasks on the archaeological site, within an environment of interaction where the peers and the content and language teachers are working in collaboration. The language is embedded within the activities, in particular two separate groups of students will be working on the two different sites (the cemetery and the residential complex), communicating in English with students graduating in the same discipline in Great Britain and the United States. The two groups will be asked to keep a running diary of the daily activities, and to document this information, using the blogging features of Office Word 2007, a familiar device offering a wide range of writing tools that can help create an ongoing online record of their experiences.
The project, organized and funded by the Division of Palaeopathogy of Pisa University, has been approved by the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Pisa.

Keywords:

Archaeoanthropology, medieval cemeteries, field archaeology, content and language integrated learning (CLIL).