Area Megalitica

The Megalithic Area is a true treasure chest of archaeological evidence documenting the town over 6000 years of history. From the Late Neolithic to the Middle Ages, passing through the Copper, Bronze, and Iron Ages then on to the Roman Empire, late antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, this site offers visitors an extraordinary journey through time in a magnificent setting linking the past and future. In fact, the definition “megalithic area” sums up the manifold identities of this site which proves the existence of a sacred area used for various types of ceremonies linked to worship and burial in Aosta.
It all started at the end of the 5th millennium BCE, with the traces of an ancient activity which humans had only just learnt to do: ploughing. While in the countryside there is no more mundane action, here it became a ritual through the scoring of the land which was chosen and made sacred. A simple gesture, but of incredible importance in both a religious and social sense. An open-air sanctuary used for worship of the living, characterised by wooden stakes and anthropomorphic stone steles, which only at the end of the 3rd millennium BCE would take on funerary functions, becoming a necropolis for prominent members of society, with megalithic tombs of various megalithic types. At the dawn of the Bronze Age, around 2300 BCE and for reasons which are as yet unknown, the site was gradually abandoned and used, for over a thousand years, only for agricultural purposes. During the early Iron Age (first half of the 1st millennium BCE), the site once again began to be used for burial and worship; various different funerary practices were carried out at the site, from burial to cremation. During Roman times the site was important for both settlement and agriculture as well as funeral rites: remains of a large rural building were found alongside traces of a necropolis along a secondary suburban road. During Late Antiquity the area continued to be used for both farming and funerary functions, which then gradually made way for a natural and rural transformation, maintaining its use as a cemetery alongside the presence of a residential area.
The subsequent emergence of a highly symbolic and sacred building, the church of Saint-Martin-de-Corléans, can be considered the endpoint of the process of transformation of the site, which culminated in the 12th century with the creation of a new religious meeting centre, the result of a much changed socio-cultural environment.