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COMMUNITY CONTEXT
Fonte: Rielaborazione digitale da Google Earth
The landscape around San Giorgio and Santa Maria's lakes, in eastern Veneto, has accumulated a cultural heritage and has shown the ability to represent a particular interaction between man and the natural environment.
Unlike other places in the world, recognized today as protagonists of a past, and where human resilience has worked successfully for centuries, this place has been able to adapt for 7,000 years. This peculiarity allows it to tell a story of harmony between man and a his territory, which has always provided the optimal conditions of subsistence in response to specific historical needs. It is therefore difficult to meet similar realities in such marginal geographical contexts.
Furthermore, in 2019, UNESCO declared this area a buffer zone as an evolutionary cultural landscape.
GEOGRAPHICAL FRAMEWORK
San Giorgio and Santa Maria's lakes are two basins, mostly water-bearing, within a valley between the Belluno Prealps and the hills of the Alto Trevigiano area.
The valley furrow that extends from Longhere to Follina is known as La Vallata. Its shape is a consequence of the withdrawal of the tongue of the Piave Glacier, called Ramo Lapisino, which took place during the Late Glacial, starting 19,000 years ago. This phenomenon has led to the emergence/rising of various depressions that have given rise to basins: some of them, over time, reclaimed. Lake Lapisino, fed by the glacier, stretched from Revine along the valley, approximately to the locality of Gai di Cison di Valmarino. As reported by the cartography and through a bibliographic search, it is reasonable to assume that the two lakes were a single basin until the mid-nineteenth century.
Fonte: Rielaborazione digitale da Google Earth
TERRITORIAL EVOLUTION OF THE VALLEY
Administratively, the lakes fall within the Municipalities of Revine-Lago and Tarzo. Also known as Laghi di Revine, at the present they are joined by a small artificial canal called Canale delle Barche or Stret. They are fed by karst resurgences and streams characterized by a torrential regime. The main ones for flow and detectable on the cartography, have their source in the southern side of the Alps. The basins are the chief tributaries, through La Tajada canal, of the Soligo River, which in turn flows into La Piave River.
The so-called "isthmus", which actually divides them, was a marshy area as the whole surface at the mouth of La Tajada canal. This last one, was modified at the end of the 18th century to allow for the reclamation of the surrounding land and undergoes dredging works at regular intervals.
Even in medieval times, the area was subjected to an important anthropization, however it was the nineteenth-century period, characterized by the succession of dominations, in which the most profound changes were made on the territory through reclamation, infrastructural and building works.
Fonte: Rielaborazione digitale da Google Earth
RECONSTRUCTION OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESEARCH
The first archaeological finds date back to 1923 when, during an intervention at the Canale delle Barche, a bronze sword of the Sauerbrunn type, dating back to the 15th century BC, was found.
Subsequently, another small bronze sword of the same type and two Peschiera-type daggers dating back to the 13th century BC were discovered.
Towards the end of the eighties, clay and lithic materials, faunal and paleobotanical remains were brought to light.
The research saw the succession of various excavation campaigns during the nineties. The analyzes, cores and excavations made it possible to identify wooden tables, vertical pilings, paleobotanical remains, ceramic, lithic and bone fragments. As a result of these findings it was hypothesized that the area had been affected by the presence of a reclaimed village in the late Neolithic and early Copper Age (IV-III millennium BC) with sporadic attendance during the ancient Bronze Age ( XVIII century BC) (Bianchin Citton, 1991).
In 2016, in conjunction with the construction of the pedestrian bridge over the Canale delle Barche, further archeological findings were recovered dating back to the late Neolithic. The Lakes area is also known for other findings from the seventies, which have revealed, in the Fornaci di Revine area, a late glacial deposit of fossil trunks located inside a quarry (14.765 ± 35 BP, 14.370 ± 115 BP) (Toniello, 1975).
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