Fonte delle Mattinate

The plestino or "del Casone" plateau, occupied since the end of the Pliocene by a large lake that extended to the adjacent floors (Annifo, Collecroce, Arvello and Popola), has always been a place of convergence and branching off of numerous the Apennine ridge crosswise meet those that connect the Adriatic area to the Tyrrhenian area across the Umbrian plain. It is a vast depression of karst-tectonic origin already frequented in the Paleolithic, about 32,000 years ago, by the first hunter-gatherer sapiens for at least 6 millennia with short, but repeated phases of occupation. The site, excavated in 1999 near Fonte delle Mattinate, has returned flint artefacts, such as blades and lamellae, burins and scrapers, which testify how the settlement, located on the banks of a body of water, was seasonally a place of procurement and processing of lithic tools and, at the same time, a hunting area for large mammals.