#daunia

CANOSA DI PUGLIA: What a wonderful couple of days I spent last week in Canosa [despite the rather warm weather]. I visited the excavations and the new venue of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Canosa [not yet open to the public], engaged in discussions with local archaeologists and art historians from the Fondazione Archeologica Canosina [ https://www.canusium.it ], and gathered excellent material for my forthcoming article in ANTIQVVS Magazine. The article will focus on one of the distinctive aspects of the pre-Roman heritage of Canosa.

I would like to express my sincere gratitude for the warm hospitality and the superb organisation of the visit, which included access to unique and often overlooked historical sites as well as ongoing excavations. My thanks go both to the Fondazione Archeologica Canosina as an institution, and to its individual founders, representatives and specialists:

Dott. Sergio Fontana, President [ IG: @ fac_canusium ]

Matteo Fraccacreta [ IG: @ fac_canusium ]

Francesco Specchio [ IG: @ canosasiamonoi ]

Giusy Del Vento [ IG: @ giusydelvento ]

Giovanni De Ventuno, Univ. of Bari

Archaeological Museum of Canosa https://museipuglia.cultura.gov.it/musei/museo-nazionale-archeologico-di-canosa IG: @ museo_archeologico_canosa

Fondazione Archeologica Canosina:

Web : https://www.canusium.it

FB : https://www.facebook.com/canusium.it

IG : @ fac_canusium

YT : @ fondazionearcheologicacano7127

Oooo glad you asked!

Since we don't have any surviving texts from Daunia until Hellenistic times most of what we know about them comes from their stelae and unique pottery. Here's some resources that provide a pretty good base in my opinion:

Camilla Norman's "People of Ancient Daunia: Voicing the Statue-Stelae" is a book dedicated entirely to examining these unique monuments. Though it's not fully available online, the first stretch of the book (5 chapters) can be accessed through Google Books, and it gives a pretty good rundown of the origins of the Daunians and their art, as well as typologies, artistic parallels, a history of scholarship... It's jam-packed with information. It's also one the most recent resources linked here (2024), so if you want to be up to date fast this is the way to go.

Norman also has a website where you can access an archive of every known stela and filter by type, represented figures/scenes... Also a really awesome resource for visual reference.

Here's a couple papers by Norman worth checking out:

The tribal tattooing of Daunian Women

Illyrian Vestiges in Daunian Costume: tattoos, string aprons and a helmet

Maria Luisa Nava is one of the pioneers of Daunian research so her papers are also worth checking out. Here's some I'd reccommend (these are in Italian):

Le stele della Daunia nel quadro del megalitismo mediterraneo

Le gesta degli uomini, dei cavalieri e degli eroi nellla vita e nel mito sulle stele daunie

Lastly, I have to mention Maria Laura Leone, who has published on the Daunians as well, with a special interest in their attested use of opium, such as "Daunian opium and the concepts revealed by images", as well as these two papers on the iconography on the stelae by other researchers (I tried to use as much recent research as possible but these two are a bit older. Also only in Italian.): Iconografie greche nel mondo indigeno della Daunia, Il repertorio figurato delle stele della Daunia

Do keep in mind that this is a relatively young discipline of study so there's still a whole lot of uncertainties about the Daunians (especially compared to the other Iapygian peoples they neighboured, who did leave inscriptions and came in contact with the Greeks much earlier), so there's not much we definitively know about their beliefs for example, and things like the classification of stelae will differ drastically between Norman and Nava. That being said, the Daunians have left behind a large amount of absolutely fascinating material culture to study and they are very underappreciated, so I hope these resources spark some interest!

Thanks for asking and if you need anything more specific do let me know!

Closest thing I have been able to find are these Greek vases depicting what the MET describes as Oscans, which were present in a large area of the South of Italy including northern Puglia, aka Daunia, so I assume the Daunians (particularly the men, the women in these vases are not identified as Oscans and might just be Messapians/ Apulian Greeks) may have worn something similar.

The second image is particularly interesting to me because the headdresses they're wearing are reminiscent of the ones featured on some Daunian stelae, so I wonder if that's what they're meant to depict and thus if this was assimilated by the Daunians from Oscan culture (though if I'm remembering correctly the stelae with this headress have all been identified as female (don't quote me on that lol), while the vases show this headress on male figures only). These vases are however from the 4th century BC, while the stelae date from the 8th to the 6th, so I'm not sure they can be trusted as accurate representations of Oscan clothing in the 8th and 6th centuries, much less for Daunian clothing, since the connection between the Oscans in these vases and the Daunians is merely speculation

Then of course we have the tattooed arms of Daunian women (really interesting subject btw), both from the stelae and this tomb fresco in Arpi, which also gives a tiny and fragmentary glimpse at the clothing:

As well as this really frequent hairstyle from the stelae, which has been interpreted by some as a long braid with a dried poppy plant tied to it, given the abundance of poppy imagery in Daunian art.