Why using caves and rock shelters of the Trieste Karst (north-eastern Italy) in the Late Prehistory? Some hypotheses supported by data and analyses of the C.R.I.G.A. webGIS

Since the 19th century archaeological materials have been discovered - by professionals, speleologists and amateurs - in c. 180 caves and rock shelters out of the over 3,100 natural cavities in the Italian part of the Classical Karst (north-eastern Italy). The collected data remained largely unpublished till the beginning, in the early 1990s, of systematic revisions and publications of the findings from the main sites. In the late 1990s a new interdisciplinary project developed from these studies – C.R.I.G.A. (the acronym stands for Informatic Cadastre of Archaeological Caves) –, aimed to reconstruct the changing relationship between human groups and the Karst landscape through time, and to detect the possible constraints of the environment. Using the data contained in the C.R.I.G.A. webGIS plus the results of recent sedimentological, soil micro-morphological and archaeometric analyses of deposits, raw materials and artefacts, it will be possible to get a better understanding of the cultural evolution of the Karst, and to formulate new hypotheses about its role in a wider territorial context.