Parco Archeologico di Santa Maria d'Agnano

In the karst of the southern Murgia, a cave above Ostuni's olive plain held one of Europe's notable Palaeolithic burials. The archaeological park of Santa Maria d'Agnano preserves the site where the Donna di Ostuni was found in 1991.

Why it matters

The municipal description of the park is spare but precise: a prehistoric cave used as a place of burial and worship since the Palaeolithic, famous for the discovery of the Donna di Ostuni. That discovery redefined Ostuni. In October 1991 excavators found a young woman who had died in the final stage of pregnancy, buried around twenty-eight thousand years ago in the Gravettian culture, laid curled on her left side with a headdress of hundreds of pierced shells and red ochre, the fetus protected beneath her hands. The original burial is displayed in Ostuni's civic museum. The cave is the archaeological setting of this discovery. The site also carries later layers — the cave's use as a cult place continued long after the Palaeolithic, and the same cave yielded further burials of different periods.

What to notice

The park lies in Contrada Agnano on the edge of the Murgia plateau, above a plain of centuries-old olive trees stretching toward the Adriatic. Finds from the cave include a second burial dated to about thirty thousand years ago and later human remains from roughly thirteen thousand years ago, as well as evidence of the cave's long use as a cult site.

Context and history

The cave of Santa Maria d'Agnano — recorded in the specialist literature as a cave sanctuary in Contrada Risieddi, near the road from Ostuni towards Fasano — entered modern science through excavations that began in 1991 under the direction of the archaeologist Donato Coppola. On 24 October that year the team uncovered the burial known as Ostuni 1: the young woman since nicknamed Delia, whose grave goods, posture and preservation made it a reference point for European prehistory. Excavation continued to reveal the site's longer biography — other individuals buried in the same cave at different times, and evidence that the cave remained a destination of worship long after the hunter-gatherer world that created its fame. The city incorporated the cave into an archaeological and natural park to protect and present the site.