Title: Across the strait. New evidence about cultural interconnections and exchange between Calabria and Sicily during the Early Bronze Age

Recent developments in the archaeological research carried out in Calabria in last decades have considerably extended our knowledge about the Early Bronze Age (ca. 2200-1700 BCE). The scenario has been expanded and its knowledge deepened thanks to a series of territorial surveys carried out in the Region, especially important in the definition of local settlement dynamics. However, mostly recent stratigraphic excavations conducted in the southern area of Calabria (e.g. : Piani della Corona, Petti di Portigliola, Punta di Zambrone) have provided new data about the aspects/characters of intra-site inhabited areas, through the discovery of a variety of functional structures. This has allowed to deepen not only the chrono-typological classification and absolute dating through 14C analysis (left in background in this contribution), but above all to study the modes of interaction and assimilation within the areas encircling the lower Tyrrhenian area (Aeolian Islands, Strait of Sicily). In addition, recent archaeometric analyses realized in some Calabrian, Aeolian and Sicilian contexts, on different classes of materials and at different levels of depth, make it possible to better outline the complex relationships of contact and exchange inside this area during the Early Bronze Age, already generically assumed by the chrono-typological study of ceramics. Another element that has contributed to the construction of a renewed framework lies in the increasing evidence of the funerary ritual of inurned cremation (again from Piani della Corona), whose development and diffusion in the Mediterranean area finds comparisons in the important contemporary contexts of Diana in Lipari (Aeolian Islands) and Tarxien Cemetery in Malta. It is possible to link this ideological/religious shared behavior to other ideological and symbolic markers, such as exemplified in peculiar pottery decorations, like swastikas, shared in this phase between Calabria, Pantelleria and Western Greece (Olympia).

Author(s): marino, sara (Sapienza University of Rome)

свернуть