This was the 10th season of excavation and research on the Poggio di Spaccasasso in the Maremma Regional Park. The aim was to investigate the open-air quarry used for working the veins of cinnabar present in the limestone of Poggio di Spaccasasso. The cinnabar quarry lies below the Eneolithic funerary structure excavated during previous seasons. The deposit relating to the mining of the cinnabar veins was sealed at one point by sterile soil that had slipped down from a fissure in the limestone above from which red-orange soil continues to descend today.

The excavated evidence seemed to confirm the use of the fire setting technique for demolishing the quarry face. As well as the scars on the rock face seen in the previous campaign, evidence was uncovered that documented the repeated lighting of fires close to the quarry face. Greenstone mallets were found next to a large limestone block with flat horizontal surfaces that suggest this was an area used for breaking up the limestone rocks containing the cinnabar after they had been broken away from the quarry face. The fires had been built both on top of detritus of medium sized clasts slopping steeply towards the quarry face, and directly on the bedrock. The conformation of this rock was the same as the vertical walls of the quarry face and of the “Buca” itself. This may be a “quarry floor” whose conformation again seems linked to the use of fire.

While the excavations took place at the Buca di Spaccasasso, work began on the contextualisation of the micro and meso topography of the conoid fan immediately below the Buca. A dry-stone wall interrupted the stratigraphic continuity between the quarry face and the detritus spread lower downhill. The wall was built to contain the material excavated between 2000 and 2004 by the “Gruppo Speleologico Naturalistico Maremmano”. The embankment formed by this terrain completely obliterated the quarry’s original morphology.

The area subject of the contextualisation was inserted into a grid of 10 × 10 m and 5 × 5 m squares, aligned with the excavation grid. As well as collecting artefacts, the morphological elements in a part of the area were recorded. The survey of such elements aimed to identify possible factors that may have influenced the distribution of the quarrying tools.

The collection highlighted a number of significant concentrations including one in the area surrounding a manmade structure for containing the detritus.
A topographical survey of the dispersed material from the quarrying activity and the area’s morphology was carried out in the area uphill from the Buca di Spaccassaso plateau. Here, grond-penetrating radar and seismographic surveys carried out in areas with particularly dense concentrations of tools and particular morphological formations (2011 campaign) had revealed the presence of underground cavities both in the form of vertical “wells” and sub-spherical spaces. This season’s investigations identified two “wells”, one of which perfectly vertical, sub-cylindrical and about 6 m deep (Pozzo 1), and the other with a blocked, sub-horizontal opening (Pozzo 2).