Lindsay Marie Morris

Current archeological evidence suggests that humans first occupied Sicily around 17,000 years ago, which is far more recent than settlement to more remote places like Siberia or Australia. The question of why and how these early occupiers impacted Italy's largest island is at the heart of the Early Occupation of Sicily Project.

 

Led by Sicilian-born Washington University in St. Louis Assistant Archaeology Professor Ilaria Patania, alongside University of Connecticut Department of Anthropology Chair Professor Christian Tryon and a dedicated team of graduate students and alumni, the project seeks to answer questions about when humans first arrived in Sicily and their ecological impact.

 

Focusing on the region encompassing Syracuse and Ragusa, the Early Occupation of Sicily Project investigates why human settlement in Sicily lagged while examining whether early settlers influenced habitat changes and the extinction of species like tiny elephants and giant swans once found on the island.

The project combines geological mapping and underwater surveys to reconstruct ancient sea levels and migration routes. It has also gotten the local communities involved through citizen science initiatives focused on site preservation and research.

 

By exploring Sicily's archaeological past, researchers aim to connect historical migration patterns with today's climate-driven displacement issues. Perhaps it will also shed some light on solutions for our own future.

I recently spoke with Dr. Patania, who shared more about the project and her hopes for its outcome.

 

 

What inspired this project?

I've always done paleolithic archeology. I'm a geo-archeologist and an environmental archeologist by training. So, I'm really interested in how we can, as archeologists, contextualize. I'm less interested in what we produce and more in the environment we live in as humans, how we interact with it, and how we adapt to it. I have a very personal experience of traveling a lot and having to adapt to different places. I'm from a very warm place. I went to school in Boston, where it was very cold. And climate today is such a critical issue for everybody. My experience is that it impacts us no matter what. And it has impacted us.

 

One thing that I've also always been interested in is the very first wave of migrations of humans to a new place. It's not easy to arrive in a new landscape. How do they deal with it? What do they do? You need to know where water is, where food is, and what helped us because the reality is that we really moved a lot in a matter of a couple of hundreds of thousands of years. We colonized the entire planet, and we reached places that were almost unthinkable.

 

I think empathy is one of the things that allowed us to do this. The fact that other groups of Sapiens, Neanderthals, or Denisovans that were already on that landscape recognized their similarities with the newcomers. And they were able to help and guide us. And if we didn't have that, we wouldn't have been as successful at the very beginning.

 

Why are you studying southeastern Sicily in particular?

The reason why we're studying this area is more geological. This is an area on the African plate, not on the European plate, which means that tectonically speaking, it is quite stable, so there's no uprising of the coast. So, if you go to the north, all the coasts you see today are 80 to 160 meters higher than during the last glaciation, which means that where the first people arriving here walked is quite different from where it is today.

 

If you go to the southeastern portion, we have an uplift that goes between four and 12 meters, which is quite negligible. So we see something that was also seen by the first inhabitants, and it was pretty much in the same position. Of course, there was erosion and human impact, but more or less, we can reconstruct it.

 

Tell us about the time period you are researching and how Sicily looked.

This was a time period when the globe underwent glaciation. There's only a finite amount of water on Earth, and a lot of it is trapped in the ice caps, which means that the sea retreats during glaciations and comes back up. So, what is happening today with the rising sea levels? They're rising because the ice is melting, right? The opposite was true for the last glaciation, which was the time when the first humans arrived in Sicily. This means we are working on a landscape 100 meters to 120 meters farther offshore. These people had way more land to deal with to accommodate them.

 

Another piece of the puzzle is that because of that sea retreat, the island of Sicily was connected to the mainland of Italy, creating an actual land bridge, but also to the island of Malta, where there was another quite large bridge. Sicily was in the middle of this highway, which possibly brought people to Malta through Sicily. So that is one of the big questions: Did people come through Sicily and go to Malta? We are pretty sure that people came from Italy to Sicily.

 

At this point, the earliest homo sapiens in Northern Africa were from 300,000 years ago. Homo sapiens started coming out of Africa, traveling up the Levant. Eventually, they spread to places like Siberia 45,000 years ago.

 

Yet, there was nothing in the Mediterranean. At least they were getting their feet wet in that same sea and walking around that basin, yet they were not able to colonize the islands even if they could see them. And it might not be a matter of seafaring because between 65,000 and 45,000 years ago, we know that they could seafare the ocean because they arrived in Australia.

 

But they didn't seem able to colonize this basin. Most scholars agree that the reason why is the low trophic level and the strong and unpredictable currents of the Mediterranean.

So, the current hypothesis is that we cannot settle these landscapes unless we have the knowledge of goats and sheep, for example, if we bring them or grain with us and we start growing things. This seems to be true for most of the islands except Sicily—possibly because Sicily is so large—that if you have a small enough population, you might be able to survive.

 

Questions still open are: Did Sicily have such a small population that it took so long to really populate this island and colonize it? How long did it take us to move from one side to the other and eventually into Malta if we ever did that?

 

What impact did early humans have on Sicily's environment and vice-versa?

People think of humans in the past as being in tune with nature. In reality, that's not true. Humans are destructive at different degrees. Of course, our civilization today is one of the most destructive for the planet because of sheer numbers and the kind of technology we have that requires certain things. But we've always been like that. For example, when we arrived in pristine environments, we often hunted, killed off many animals, and eventually created a cascade effect and mass extinctions. So our questions are, did we do that in Sicily, and how did we do it?

 

Part of the work involves diving to find hidden evidence.

What methods have you used to trace human dispersal?

Our protocol has several steps. We start with archival work. This landscape hasn't really been studied a lot, scientifically speaking. This is a landscape where Greek and Roman archeology is way more popular and makes more money, touristically speaking. But that doesn't mean that local people are not interested in it.

 

There have been a few local vocational archeologists who have spent their entire lives after work and on their weekends walking this landscape. And a few of them actually did a great job of recording everything that they found. So we're going through all of the local publications, small historical bulletins in towns, et cetera, and trying to catalog as many of these finds from vocational archeologists as possible. Then we try to find them again, and we assess them in a very archeological way if we know that people have already excavated some sites. And we try to find the collections in the museums, and we analyze those.

 

We have found and analyzed two collections fully. During our foot surveys, we try to look at all of the caves that we find. So, while we relocate the other caves, we are also exploring new caves and trying to see if there's anything promising.

 

Underwater, we take a very similar approach. We start from the archival. We also do surveys. We walk the coast, swim or snorkel in certain areas, and dive in others.

 

We use a lot of citizen scientists. We have trained people to recognize stone tools and fossils. And so we ask every year we go back if they found anything. We have a reporting system in place for the underwater. This has worked particularly well.

 

What do you hope people take away from your research?

Archaeology is all about pretty objects like the Vase Museum. I don't think that's what archeology is. I think it's really about who we are as humans. 

 

I think empathy is a big part of our survival, especially when it comes to successful migrations, occupying new territories, and exploring new things. We, as a community, have accomplished a lot. We've always found a way to survive and go on. But at the same time, we've also very often destroyed the landscape around us, so we could learn from that.

A colleague the other day said something that really struck me: "We can't science ourselves out of this climate crisis, but we can definitely anthropology our way out."

 

Scientifically speaking, this climate crisis is indeed happening and is caused by humans. The issue, to me, is around how people react to this fact, and that is something we can look at through anthropology and archaeology.

 

We often forget the value of knowing our past and learning about it. I think the Paleolithic is a good place to start because it's stripped of the pretty flashy objects that often take attention away from the core issues. 

 

 

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Sicily is steeped in multicultural heritage, and navigating the island's complex history can be challenging. Thanks to historians like Palermo-based Louis Mendola, we have several comprehensive yet approachable books to serve as a road map. A leading medievalist, Louis leads his readers through the island's layered past, challenging stereotypes, unearthing hidden and forgotten histories, and giving voice to descendants. 

I recently reached out to Louis after reading The Peoples of Sicily: A Multicultural Legacy, which he co-authored with Jacqueline Alio. The book serves as an essential starting point for exploring the region's roots, highlighting the many conquerors, wayfarers, and rulers who left their mark on its food, architecture, and language. Louis, who grew up in Upstate New York, has called Sicily home for the past 30 years. It's a return to the place of his ancestors and a base for first-hand research. He shared with me how he got his start, surprising discoveries, his favorite historical period, challenges, future projects, and his hopes for his readership.

 

What led you to specialize in Sicilian history?

Mostly because I'm Sicilian. I've been reading a lot of these things since I was a teenager. So, in my case, I like to say that I didn't look to join the field, but the field kind of sought me. It makes sense that somebody would study a field of history that pertains to their own ancestry instead of, let's say, just choosing someplace else. 

 

What are some of the most surprising discoveries you've made in your research?

It's the holy grail for historians to find original stuff that nobody else has published. In my case, some of the original things I've found have been slightly arcane. For example, I found a reference in the Vatican Library in an uncataloged manuscript to the Assizes of Ariano of 1140. We have two manuscripts of that, two codices that were discovered after 1700: one at Monte Casino, the other at the Vatican. And I actually found a reference to them. It was written about four or five years after that, which was rather interesting. So, it wasn't an earth-shattering discovery, but it reinforced the dating of the documents. 

 

How has Sicilian history shaped the island's identity?

In my books, I make the point that by 1300, we had what I refer to as a monoculture. It was essentially Latin. It's what you see today.  

We have to consider that the Jews of Sicily were expelled or converted in 1493, a year after Spain. So from that point onward, we ended up with the monoculture, and you might even refer to it sometimes as an ethnocracy, which is a government or a place based on one ethnic group instead of many.

In some of my recent books, I discussed whether there's a philosophy to the study of Sicilian history. Many of us believe that there is, and part of it is the multicultural element. Sicily had all kinds of different ethnic cultures, and for some periods, you had them all at one time.

During the Norman period, up until about 1200, there were Muslims, Jews, Latin Christians, and Orthodox Greek Christians. So, there were four essential societies.

 

Which period is your favorite?

I would say the Norman-Swabian period. It was more interesting than a lot of other periods of Sicilian history. It also represented a period when the Kingdom of Sicily was actually independent because in 1266, with the Battle of Benevento, the Hohenstaufen Dynasty of Frederick II was defeated. The capital was transferred under the Angevins to Naples from Palermo. And then a little bit after that, in 1282, with the War of the Vespers, it actually split. So, you ended up with the Kingdom of Naples and the Kingdom of Sicily. That was true sovereignty and with kings in the case of Roger II, then Frederick II, his grandson, and all the others. These were people born in Southern Italy, even though their dynasties had come from elsewhere.

 

What challenges do you face researching and writing about Sicilian history?

Oddly enough, the greatest challenge is not the research or even the writing, which is very labor-intensive. That's not even it. The real issue is that you end up either debunking misconceptions to set the record straight, looking into things more profoundly, or expressing it in a cohesive way. Those are the real challenges. The work itself, a lot of people can do, and a lot of people do. It's a question of presenting the work in a cohesive, understandable way. That's the biggest challenge. 

 

Where is the biggest gap in understanding Sicilian history?

A few years back, there was a book that was written, and I remember verbatim the first lines in the prologue: "What's the first thing you think of when you think of Sicily? If you're like most people, you think of the mafia."

 

The mafia has only existed since about 1800, and it's evolved from that. So it was tantamount to somebody writing a book about Germany or the Germans and only talking about Hitler.

 

That's really rather recent, and for that matter, Fascism in Italy is frankly rather recent. So it's unfortunate that people look at this, and even a lot of Italian Americans, because there are people—screenwriters like David Chase writing The Sopranos and people on social media—who seem to promote this mafia-thug type of culture. It's not just professional actors and actresses. I could give them a pass because they have to work. But a lot of this ties in with the Guido macho, tough-guy mentality. I think it's just extremely unfortunate that in those circles, mostly in the U.S. and Canada, it has developed in that way. Because if you look at the diasporic Italians in places like Argentina or England—for example, I have cousins in England—it's nothing like that.

 

It's a very different view of the culture of Sicily or Southern Italy. So that's a matter of concern over time because some people in these other categories that seem to glorify that lifestyle or that limited view of Southern Italy can be very vociferous. They're adamant about their beliefs. They can even be obnoxious. And I've seen that on social media. That's extremely unfortunate because they've been sold a bill of goods and deceived. And it's not just the mafia stereotypes; it's even the idea that the unification of Italy saved Italy and that Garibaldi was greater than he really was and Meucci invented the telephone. These are ideas that, unfortunately, a lot of even Italian-American organizations support.

 

What's more, they have nothing to do with the people of Southern Italy. Southern Italy had a kingdom of its own until 1860. A lot of people who don't study history don't know that.

 

What future projects are you working on?

The first one is called Sicily by Sicilians. It's going to be 17 or 20 chapters, each written by a different person. And what they have in common is that they all have roots in Sicily or Southern Italy. So it's autohistory, which is what I promote in my other work. It's people writing about their own history and their own ancestors. The topics range from philology, which is a study of linguistic origins, to music, to the history of women, which doesn't get as much attention as it deserves. And it's a very interesting group of people, some of whom have not really written that much in these fields before, even though they're experts. And as it stands right now, three-quarters of the work is going to be written by women, which, again, is a little bit unusual.

 

Another project after that will be a general history of Sicily, which goes from pre-history up until the present. 

 

How do you hope your work influences the understanding of Sicilian history and culture?

The greatest impact of my work is in anglophone circles because I don't usually publish in Italian. My work until now—the books themselves—is in English. Most of the readers are not actually Italian descendants, but that is the growing percentage that we see—for example, Canadian Italians, Italian Americans, and Australian Italians. So there's certainly an interest there. And it's gratifying that, in some cases, we're setting the record straight about the history of Sicily because people don't always get that from other things that have been published in English. 

 

 

 

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