Periodic Reporting for period 3 - SICTRANSIT (THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF REGIME CHANGE: SICILY IN TRANSITION)
Reporting period: 2019-08-01 to 2021-01-31
Contemporary society has much to learn from the experience, both positive and negative, of Sicilian farmers, artisans, merchants and their families during these episodes of regime change and realignment, in which lordship, kinship, spirituality and wealth creation were variously pre-eminent.
Our objectives are to demonstrate how social structure, settlement, agriculture, trade and demography changed using the methods of archaeology, bioarchaeology and biomolecular archaeology, and so to draw general lessons on which factors were most significant in the promotion of well-being, tolerance or strife.
Research in Laboratory at Lecce has identified plants new to Europe introduced by the Arabs, and developed new methods of identifying poorly preserved taxa
Research in the laboratory at Rome has detailed 700 years of the ceramic narrative for Sicily as a whole and is mapping the distribution of imports and exports - and thus the trade links through time - using the fabric of transport containers (amphorae). (FIG 4)
Researchers at BioArCh in York have obtained their first validated results on the contents of amphorae and of cooking pots using organic residue analysis. The first PhD relating to sictransit is nearing completing (on the use of animals). York researchers have successfully extracted samples for biomolecular analysis taken from 150 individuals buried in 16 Sicilian cemeteries, and are preparing protocols to report their origins, ancestry, mobility and diet (from aDNA, stable isotope analysis).
Results expected by the end of the project include a description of a sequence of seven centuries of settlement and agricultural production and diet, of the patterns of internal and external trade and of demography including mobility and identity as defined by place of origin, ethnicity and religion. This provides the basic material to construct the story of the ‘people without history’ as their governing regime changed from Christian Byzantine to Islamic Arab and Berber, to Christian Norman and Swabian – the objectives of the project.