Archeological Site "Lavagnone"
The Lavagnone basin, which extends between the municipalities of Desenzano and Lonato, is one of the many small lake basins that characterize the landscape of the Garda morainic hills amphitheater.
Today a small marshy area is what remains of the ancient lake and it still occupies the central part of the basin, while after the reclamation (in the early 1900s) the lake bed was transformed into cultivated fields.
The first collections of archaeological materials on the site date back to the early twentieth century but it will be necessary to wait until 1958-61 for scientific investigations in the area. Since 1989, the University of Milan has conducted annual excavation campaigns.
The Lavagnone is one of the most important archaeological sites in northern Italy. The shores of this lake were inhabited starting from 6500 BC. from Mesolithic Castelnoviani groups and later during the Neolithic; the best documented chronological phases, however, are those of the Bronze Age, when the basin was inhabited without interruption from the initial phases of the Early Bronze Age (end of the third millennium) to the Recent Bronze Age (approximately 13th century BC).
The Lavagnone is one of the 111 pile-dwelling settlements belonging to the multinational site "Prehistoric pile-dwelling sites of the Alps" in 2011 recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.
In 1978 a plow was discovered in a peaty layer, wedged between the piles of the pile-dwelling settlement dating back to an early phase of the Polada culture (about 2000 BC). It is the oldest plow in the world, made entirely of oak wood (the yoke is instead in beech). It has been preserved in excellent condition thanks to the characteristics of the archaeological deposit: peat in fact is anaerobic and therefore does not allow the wood to decompose. Numerous other wooden artefacts from Lavagnone are exhibited at the Archaeological Museum of Desenzano del Garda.
