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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One of the highlights from my last trip to Sicily was a visit to the Solunto ruins just above my grandparents' former home in Porticello. Founded between the 8th and 7th centuries B.C. on the promontory of Sòlanto, Solunto was refounded after the tyrant Dionysius I's destruction of Syracuse on Mount Catalfano in the 4th century B.C. It represented a key settlement occupied between the Phoenician and Roman eras.

 

Getting there is part of the experience as you hike along a rambling path behind homes with wisteria-covered walls and sweeping views of the Tyrrhenian Sea.

I recently had the opportunity—thanks to the support of the team of Uncovered Sicily—to speak with Gabriella Sciortino, a Palermo-based archeologist specializing in Phoenician-Punic Sicily, who shared more about this special place, its multicultural roots, and its historical significance. 

 

 

What is the significance of Solunto and its location?

The location of the earliest Solunto reproduces a colonial settlement pattern that shows significant topographical similarities with the Phoenician foundations in the Mediterranean, particularly the ones of eastern Andalusia (such as Morro de Mezquitilla, Almuñecar or Toscanos). This colonial settlement was open from the most archaic stage to a multiplicity of socioeconomic relationships with the indigenous communities of this part of the island and the Greek communities, particularly with the very close colony of Himera.

 

The site was open to the Tyrrhenian Sea and its traffic and people, such as the Etruscans or the Greeks. Solunto was a very important economic and trade route in the Mediterranean between the East and the West; moreover, it was strongly connected with Southern and Central Italy. So, the location, in this case, is a key element of the importance of this ancient settlement. It mirrors some patterns already outlined by other Phoenician settlements in the Mediterranean.

 

 

How did various cultural influences shape Solunto?

Solunto was shaped by the influence of Phoenician and Punic culture, as well as Greek-Hellenistic and Roman elements. If we look at the name Solunto, we see the Greek name Soloeis or Solous, meaning "the rock." We call it by its Roman or Latin name, Solus or Soluntum. So, just beginning from the name, we can see how many layers there are about this culture. In fact, the original Phoenician name was connected to a toponym, Kfr, which is Semitic for "the village." We know that in the fifth century B.C., there were some coins with a double legend with the Greek name and also with the Semitic toponym Kfr. This strongly reflects the mix of cultures at this settlement.

 

 

Of course, we can recognize part of this cultural influence just by looking at the settlement and the ruins. For example, the sacred areas of the settlement are connected to the Phoenician and Punic religion. Along the main street, the agora street, there is a three-pillar altar, which is very typical of Semitic religion and culture. Another important area is close to the agora, on the terrace above the theater. It's a temple with two naves separated by a central wall and covered by a vault, where the niches and structural podiums in the rear must have housed two statues. The first is a bearded male statue seated on a throne, identified with Baal Hammon, in the Greek guise of Zeus, now preserved at the Salinas Museum. The second is the female one, probably depicting Astarte—the most important goddess of the Phoenician pantheon—seated on a throne, with two lions side by side, according to a widespread oriental iconography and dated in the Archaic period.

 

Tell us about the daily life of Solunto residents.

The settlement was very full of life. It can be demonstrated, for example, by the number of beautiful Roman houses that are quite well-preserved and also by the fact that there were important public buildings such as the theater. So it demonstrates that it was very alive. Moreover, along the main street, there were shops and commercial activities. So surely, the richest people of Solunto had to be involved in trade and agriculture. They had the possibility to have a rich life and enjoy all kinds of cultural activities.

 

What contributed to the downfall of Solunto?

The First Punic War was a very difficult period. At the time, Solunto was Punic. The city finally surrendered to the Romans in 254 B.C. Under Roman rule, we have information about Solunto, as Cicero names it, between the "civitates decumanae" vexed by Verre and later others. The historical source is a dedication on epigraph—dated between 202 and 205 A. D.—and some coins of the Commodo's age (180-192 A.D.). Finally, the city was naturally abandoned by its inhabitants since the beginning of the 3rd century A.D. as the territory was subjected to a progressive ruralization as usual during Late Antiquity.

 

The Ruins of Solunto. The Gymnasium by Pietro Volpes (photographed by Gabriella Sciortino)

What do you hope visitors will take away from a visit?

The experience can be strongly connected to the natural and cultural heritage, as it is possible to admire the painting by Pietro Volpes, The Ruins of Solunto. The Gymnasium (1891), exhibited at Villa Zito, the Pinacotheca of Fondazione Sicilia, in Palermo. There are very important archeological sites in Sicily, but Solunto's surroundings are very charming, and it is a very well-preserved settlement with a rich antiquarian constituting an added value for the visitors for a complete understanding of the site. It can be very interesting to visit and understand the daily life of a city on a mountain in ancient times.

 

 

 

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