Prehistory is not only a story of hunting, wars, tools and power, it is also a story of relationships, bodies, images, rituals, knowledge, places, symbols and different forms of organization of human communitiesA story in which women and men have built, transformed, and transmitted cultures that we can still try to understand today.
With Prehistory Meetings 2026/2027, we propose six online appointments to explore some of these themes from different perspectives, with particular attention to what has long remained on the margins of more traditional archaeological narratives.
Six meetings, six journeys, six opportunities to ask new questions about the past.
The program
October 7, 2026 – BARBARA CRESCIMANNO
Women playing drums
Transformation of an iconography – Part II
The cycle starts again from a meeting which, before the summer break, had a great success and a particularly participatory followingBarbara Crescimanno had accompanied us to discover the images of women playing drums, opening a rich and surprising iconographic story. At the end of the meeting, there were many questions and requests to continue this story and learn what still remained to be explored.
And it is precisely from those questions that this second appointment was born.
On October 7th Barbara will return with the second part of Women playing drums, to continue the journey through an iconography that allows us to bring to light female presences, musical practices, and ritual dimensions that have too often remained on the margins of historical narrative.
November 11, 2026 – CHIARA BALDINI
Palaces without kings
Minoan Crete: Neolithic Legacies, Matrilinearity, and Forms of Power
When we think of the great Minoan palaces of Crete, it's easy to imagine a society organized around a ruler and a central power. But is this really the only possible key to understanding such a complex society?
Knossos, Phaistos, Malia, and Zakros tell of a world where architecture, ritual, production, and exchange intertwine in ways that do not necessarily correspond to our political models.
With Chiara Baldini, we will enter Minoan Crete to explore Neolithic legacies, possible forms of matrilineality, and the different ways in which power was organized, asking a simple but far from obvious question: is it necessary to imagine a king at the center of every palace?
February 2027 – LUCIANA PERCOVICH
Guardians of the Threshold
From the long history of the beginning of time and the threshold places between the worlds where the first human cultures took shape, the visions of the Guardians re-emerge, marginalized but never defeated by the short time of patriarchy.
A meeting with Luciana Percovich starting from his latest book, published by Venexia PublisherFrom the long history of the beginnings, from caves and burial grounds—thresholds between worlds where the first human cultures took shape—the Guardians of the Threshold reemerge, female archetypes who have always inhabited the places where life and death collide. Figures capable of generating the skills, social structures, and narratives necessary to keep the vulnerable human species together and alive.
A process that lasted for millennia and millennia until, with the rise of an increasingly human desire for control in place of the cosmic harmony of which women were a mirror, the direction began to veer towards detachment, domination and an increasingly artificial, less and less human order.
The book (which continues the journey begun with Dark Shining Mothers and She Who Gives Life. She Who Gives Form) retraces some crucial passages of this evolution that reaches the present day through the stories of those who, marginalized but never defeated, carry within themselves the thread of creation.
March 31, 2027 – MARIA LAURA LEONE
In the Dark Depths of Badisco: The Deer Cave and its complex paintings
The Grotta dei Cervi in Porto Badisco and its extraordinary heritage of paintings and signs lead us into one of the most enigmatic places in prehistory, among images, ritual paths and possible "other" dimensions.
A special meeting with Maria Laura Leone, archaeologist, paleontologist, and Professor of Art History, with research in prehistoric art and cognitive archaeology, who has had the opportunity to enter the cave several times and studied its paintings and the possible effects of pareidolia.
The Cave is an extraordinary place in Salento, where the images left on the walls thousands of years ago pose an unanswered question: what were those people telling us?
Laura will guide us through this place, drawing on her knowledge and firsthand experience, to try to interpret those images without assuming that the past must always be told through the same eyes.
A journey into prehistory, but also into our way of looking at it.
April 2027 – ELVIRA VISCIOLA
The Keepers of Time
Paleolithic figurines: matter, symbol, and memory of the origins
Paleolithic female figurines are among the most fascinating and, at the same time, most debated testimonies of European prehistory. Small figures, often very different from one another, for over a century have been observed, named, and interpreted through categories that have often favored a masculine interpretation of society and symbolism.
But what do these figures really tell us? Who created them, for whom, and with what meaning? And how much of their possible stories can we still discern beneath the interpretations we've constructed around them over time?
With Elvira Visciola, we will enter the world of Paleolithic figurines, starting from their material, forms, and contexts, to question the relationship between body, image, and the memory of origins. A journey that invites us to look at these small figures not as simple objects to be classified, but as testimonies of a human world whose many languages we have yet to learn to interpret.
May 2027 – ARIANNA CARTA
The Sacred Feminine in Sardinia
Sardinia preserves an extraordinary legacy of places, images, and testimonies linked to the sacred dimension of prehistory. A heritage in which the feminine reappears through figurines, rituals, tombs, sanctuaries, and landscapes that still today invite inquiry.
With Arianna Carta, we will enter this most hidden and evocative of Sardinia, following the traces of a sacredness that has its roots in a distant past.
Arianna carries on this research also through her Who is afraid of the goddess, one of the titles of the podcast series curated and produced by Preistoria in Italia The invisible roots of history; his is an engaging narrative to discover the places and testimonies of ancient Sardinia.
It will be a journey through archaeology, landscape, and imagination, revisiting the feminine in Sardinian prehistoric cultures and questioning the meanings these presences still hold for us. A meeting to be guided by the traces of Sardinia's most sacred past and listen to what the past, through its places and images, still has to tell us.
Six meetings, one journey
Appointments are meant to be spaces for comparison and research, in which prehistory can be observed without taking for granted that the experience of a single glance constitutes the universal measure of human history.
Our aim is not to replace one story with another, nor to construct new certainties where archaeological evidence leaves room for interpretation. Rather, it is open your gaze, recovering questions, images, and interpretive possibilities that can help us compose a broader and less androcentric history of past societies.
How to participate
All meetings are free, online on Zoom, and begin at 6:30 PM.
Members of Preistoria in Italia are automatically registered for all meetings and will receive information on how to participate directly.
Anyone who is not yet a member can sign up by writing to preistoriainitalia@gmail.comRegistrations will be accepted on a first-come, first-served basis, with priority given to members, until all available spaces are filled.
Recordings of the meetings will be published later and available exclusively to members.
You can sign up for a single meeting or for all six.
🌿 It starts on October 7, 2026, with Barbara Crescimanno. WE ARE WAITING FOR YOU!
