This was the fifth excavation campaign in the grotto in the sanctuary of the Madonna at Praia a Mare, in collaboration with the Archaeological Superintendency of Calabria and the administration of Praia a Mare. Work was undertaken in the Pigorini trench with the aim of investigating the final levels of Neolithic occupation and reaching the Mesolithic levels.
A) Pigorini trench – Based on the documentation from preceding campaigns the layers UUSS 363, 366, 367, 368, 369, and 370 were identified at levels between 49.83 and 50.40 m a.s.l. During the cleaning of US 366, fragments of plain ware pottery, a fragment of obsidian blade and a back element were recovered. US 366 did not seem to extend across the entire excavation area. The removal of the remains of the collapse US 370 revealed a heavily altered paleo-surface (US 373), characterized by a thick reddish-grey clay deposit, in which several postholes, pottery, a bone punch and a bead were found.

The layer beneath US 373 was characterised by the presence of numerous postholes, some containing limestone wedges, although it was not possible to identify any plan that could relate to a particular structure (US 378). Some of the holes contained obsidian fragments and the remains of domestic animal bones. A more complex combustion structure was only partially investigated as it ran under the section. It was oval in plan with a baked clay surface that presented concretion (US 409) and an underlying level of carefully arranged stones of various sizes (US 423). The stones rested on a compact layer of reddish clay (US 474). The removal of the stones exposed the cut in which they were housed.

The layers investigated in the south-west part of the 2006 trench all related to the Neolithic occupation, as attested by the material finds (plain ware pottery, obsidian, and domestic fauna) and the number of structures found (postholes and hearths), which reflect an organised and complex occupation of the space. Layer US 370, interpreted in 2004 as a natural collapse, may have been the remains of a wall delimiting the area of Neolithic occupation. There was little evidence that could be dated to the Mesolithic period with any certainty in a zone in which the structures had almost certainly cut into the earlier underlying layers.

B) Cardini trench – In order to check the stratigraphy of the Mesolithic levels identified by Cardini a 1 × 0.70 m trench was opened on the fifth step of the south section of the trench excavated in the 1960s. A part of the Mesolithic deposit was uncovered that contained an abundance of sea and land shells, wild animal bones, tortoise shells and lithics, whose upper layers had been partially “disturbed” by the subsequent Neolithic occupation.

As regards the lithic industry, the stone tools were rare and generally not diagnostic. However, the irregular and squat shape of the supports, absence of back tools and débitage, and the presence of a toothed scraper makes it plausible to suggest their attribution to the Epipaleolithic period, a facies of the Mesolithic period already attested in Italy at other sites on the central-southern Tyrrhenian coast and in Sicily.