Stanford Excavations at Monte Polizzo, Sicily

Project handbook 4th edition, 2004

Table of Contents 1 Introduction (PDF Document) 1.1 The purpose of the handbook 1.2 Contact information (important!) 1.3 Timetable

2 Safety (PDF Document) 2.1 General concerns 2.2 Hygiene 2.3 Consideration

3 Maps and plans- Part I (PDF Document)

3 Maps and plans - Part II (PDF Document)

4 Project aims (PDF Document)

5 A very brief history of Sicily (PDF Document) 5.1 Earliest prehistory 5.2 Bronze Age Sicily 5.3 Colonial/archaic Sicily 5.4 Classical Sicily 5.5 Hellenistic and Roman Sicily 5.6 The end of the Roman Empire 5.7 Medieval Sicily 5.8 Modern Sicily

6 The excavation so far (PDF Document) 6.1 Project history 3.2 Summary of results (2000-2003) and goals for 2004

7 Excavation

Part I (PDF Document) 7.1 Teaching goals 7.2 Digging 2.1 Site formation processes 2.2 Stratigraphy 2.3 Organization 2.4 Tools 2.5 Sampling 2.6 Interpretation Part II (PDF Document)

7.3 Recording 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Recording sheets 3.3 Notebooks

Part III (PDF Document)

3.4 Profiles 3.5 Plans 3.6 Elevations 3.7 Triangulation 3.8 The Harris matrix 3.9 Working with Total Stations 3.10 Photography

Part IV (PDF Document)

7.4 On-site finds handling 7.5 Schedule 5.1 Calendar 5.2 Daily schedule 7.6 Project staff 7.7 Organizational structure

8 The lab (PDF Document) 8.1 Finds processing 8.2 Finds from Monte Polizzo

9 Preparation for publication (PDF Document)

10 Practical matters (PDF Document)

11 Glossary of archaeological terms (PDF Document)

12 Bibliography (PDF Document)

13 Recording sheets (PDF Document)

14 Harris matrices (PDF Document) 14.1 A1-A4 area 1.1 Key 1.2 Reverse key 14.2 A5 area 2.1 Key 2.2 Reverse key

Illustrations

Artifact 2423, an incised dipper found in place on the bedrock in area A1/4, sealed by layer A1.111. Cover Probably made in the late 7th century BC, but in use till nearly 550 BC. Restoration and photos Anne Haabu

3.1 Map of modern Sicily

3.2 Map of Salemi

3.3 Major ancient sites in western Sicily

3.4 Aerial photograph of Monte Polizzo

3.5 Monte Polizzo site plan (contour interval 20 meters)

3.6 Acropolis plan

Plan of period II (6th-century BC) structures in zone 3.7 A

3.8 West terrace, building A5, c. 600-550 BC

3.9 West terrace, c. 550-525 BC

3.10 Area of building A1, c. 600-550 BC

3.11 Building A1, c. 550 BC

3.12 Building A1, c. 550-525 BC

3.13 Building A1, c. 525-550 BC 3.14 6th-century BC antler deposits

3.15 Remains excavated in zone D, 2002

3.16 Remains of building A3 (c. 350-300 BC)

Profile drawing, west balk of trench 0X79-80, zone E, 3.17 2003

Possible Palaeolithic stone tool, found in survey in 6.1 2003

Part of a destruction deposit in room C1/1, c. 575 BC 6.2 (excavated 2002)

Artifact 2309, an indigenous grayware bowl with 6.3 stamped decoration

Artifact 2424, an indigenous grayware bowl with 6.4 incised decoration

6.5 Building A1, 2003 season

Collapsed storage vessel in zone D, c. 525 BC 6.6 (excavated 2002)

Coins and dice from around building A3, c. 350-300 6.7 BC

Green-glazed bowl from building C2, dating c. AD 6.8 1100-1125

7.1 Plan of building B1

7.2 Simplified profile through B1, along line a-a in fig 7.1

Formation processes of the archaeological record: 7.3 Monte Polizzo B1

7.4 Early stages of the excavation of zone A, 2001

Stratigraphy and elevation: Wheeler's example from 7.5 Pakistan 7.6 How to label the corners of a new 5 x 5 meter trench

Stanford Archaeology major Andrea Amico using the 7.7 pick in zone E

7.8 Small tools in use: excavation of trench K100, 2003

Lele Urquhart using a dental tool to clean around a 7.9 jawbone

7.10 Sweeping in building A5, 2003

7.11 Sieving in zone A, 2001, with a view towrad Mozia

7.12 Flotation in Salemi, 1999

Carbonized grape pips from Monte Polizzo, 550-525 7.13 BC

7.14 Abandoned building on the outskirts of Salemi, 2002

7.15 Erinn Evans recording in trench N107 (2002(

Chris Sevara and Bengt Westergaard using the high- 7.16 precision GPS

7.17 Completed context sheet for K100 layer ±

7.18 Laying out profile drawings

Kathryn Lafrenz drawing a profile in building A5 7.19 (2003)

7.20 Planning a destruction deposit BC in room C1/1

7.21 Taking elevations with the Dumpy level

7.22 Triangulating to a small find

7.23 Principles of the Harris matrix

7.24 3-D recording of Building A1, 2003 7.25 Backfilling zone A, 2003

8.1 Gautam Raghavan washing pottery, 2001

8.2 Emma Blake (University of Michigan) in the lab

Bronze fibula (safety pin), early 6th century BC, from 8.3 zone E

8.4 Bone ring or bracelet from building A1

8.5 Punic stele, c. 350-300 BC

Artifact 2441: East Greek B2 cup from the A5 8.6 terrace, c. 550 BC

14.1 A1 area Harris matrix

14.2 A5 area matrix

Tables

1 Basic chronology

2 Salemi highlights

1 Introduction 1.1 The purpose of the handbook Welcome to the fifth season of Stanford University’s excavation at Monte Polizzo! This handbook is required reading. It contains vital practical information, and introduces the methods that we use in the excavation. Even if you’ve dug at Monte Polizzo before, read the handbook. It’s better than ever this year. If you’re taking the Stanford course Classics 150/250/Archaeology 113, “Archaeological fieldwork in the Mediterranean,” in spring quarter 2004, you should read the handbook in conjunction with it. The information in the handbook is a necessary compliment to what you’ll read in Wheeler and the other texts. When you come to Sicily in July, BRING THIS HANDBOOK WITH YOU! It contains information you’ll need as the dig progresses. Even more importantly, if anything goes wrong during your trip, the handbook tells you how to contact us, so we can put things right. A lot of people miss plane connections in Milan or Rome, and if you show up in Palermo at a different time from the one you told us and don’t have the handbook with you, you won’t be able to reach us, and we can’t come and get you. So bring the handbook with you.

1.2 Contact information (important!) These are the crucial cell phone numbers. If you run into any difficulties, CALL SOMEONE. There’s some information on p. 115 about how to make phone calls within Italy. If you call us in Sicily from the US, please bear in mind that Sicily is 9 hours ahead of California. We’re normally up by about 6 a.m. (Salemi time) on weekdays; please don’t call after 10 p.m., Sicilian time, unless there’s an emergency. If you can’t reach a team member, leave a message with Tanya Brunot, who’ll serve as contact person. When you’re calling from the US to Sicily, add 011-39 before these numbers:

Emma Blake 339-824-8921 Brien Garnand 333-676-1620 Trinity Jackman 333-361-3151 Ian Morris 333-324 5369 Chris Sevara 339-224-2282 Bengt Westergaard 333-440-4214 Ufficio Turistico 924-991-320 Tanya Brunot Classics administrator: (650) 723-2582 Classics department Main number: (650) 723-2581 Police, ambulance 113 (within Sicily)

One final thing: if you’re away from Salemi overnight at any point during the project, you must give Brien Garnand a list of who’s in your group, where you’ve gone, when you’ll be back, and, if any member(s) of your group have cell phones, numbers we can reach you at. 1.3 Timetable Dig calendar: Monday July 12 Arrive in Palermo Tuesday July 13 First day on site For trench supervisors: orientation For everyone: site tour Saturday July 17 Work Saturday (Saturdays and Sundays are free, unless noted) Sunday August 15 Feast of the Assumption (Ferragosto) Saturday August 21 Work Saturday: last day of digging Monday August 23 Backfill site Tuesday August 24 Clean dig house Wednesday Aug 25 Go home!

Normal daily schedule: 5.30-6.00 am Get up (depending on how much time you need in the morning) 6.00-6.20 am Breakfast 6.30 am On-site team leaves dig house; lab teams clean up 7.00 am Start work 9.00-9.15 am Coffee break (though there’s no coffee on site) 11.00-11.30 am Lunch 2.00 or 2.30 pm Finish digging 3-4 or 7-8 pm Clean pottery and bones, do paperwork 3-7 or 4-8 pm Free time 8 pm Dinner

2 Safety 2.1 General concerns We’ve had very few accidents on site, and we want to keep it that way. If you follow the 25 rules, there should be no problems.

1. Never run in or around the trenches. 2. Never sit or stand on the balk (trench edge) or the top of profiles: these can collapse, causing serious injuries. 3. Don’t walk along the walls; the stones are sometimes loose. 4. Never run on your way up to or down from the site. In the summer the grass can be very slippery. If you start to fall, drop whatever you’re carrying to reduce the impact. 5. If you notice any problems in the path to the site, tell the Assistant Director immediately. 6. Don’t listen to music (radios, walkmans, etc.) on site. 7. No smoking on site or the lab, where there are flammable chemicals. 8. Never light a match on site. 9. Never leave tools where people might trip over them, or where they obstruct someone’s path. 10. Always leave shovels face down, so that no one can tread on the blade and flip up the handle, causing injuries. 11. Always gather up your tools and store them tidily, at a safe distance from the trench’s edge, when you’re on a break. 12. Always keep your backpack in the designated area, not in or near your trench. 13. Never overfill a bucket or barrow. It’s easy to hurt your back. 14. If a barrow starts to tip over, let it fall as gently as possible. Don’t try to catch it. 15. Be sure you always know where other people are working in your trench, and make sure that anyone using picks or shovels has adequate room. 16. Pay close attention if you use a knife to cut anything at all. Always make sure the blade is put away after use. 17. Watch out for injuries from tool use. Blisters are almost unavoidable, but if your back or wrists start hurting, tell your trench supervisor or the Assistant Director. 18. Never throw anything near the trenches. 19. Notice where there are strings around the trenches. Usually if you trip on a string it’ll just pull out a nail, which is annoying, but some of the strings are attached to large stakes and if you trip you’ll fall and get hurt. 20. Drink lots of water on site—3 liters per day is a good baseline. 21. If you’re sensitive to the sun, wear long sleeves and pants, a hat, and sunscreen. 22. Know where the first-aid box is kept. 23. Never pretend or make jokes about injuries; it makes it hard to know when something’s serious. 24. Always drive at safe speeds; never drive if alcohol may impair your judgment. 25. Use common sense. Most accidents happen when people aren’t paying attention.

2.2 Hygiene With a large group of people in the field, hygiene is a safety issue, so follow these rules. There are no bathroom facilities on site, but there are plenty of trees. Bring your own toilet paper with you. If you need to relieve yourself, go well out of sight, and keep away from the paths we use. There are plenty of loose stones; place one or more over anything you leave behind. To preserve some decency, we ask that in the main team working in zone A, ladies use the east slope of the hill (toward the left as you look back toward Salemi) and gentlemen use the right. In the dig house, don’t flush anything other than a little toilet paper down the toilets. They block very easily. Don’t leap on and off the toilet; the plastic seats break easily. With garbage, there’s one major rule: anything you bring up to site, take away with you. Never leave empty water bottles, yogurt containers, wrappers, etc., behind you. If you don’t finish a water bottle and want to leave it on site for the next day, put your name on it and leave it in the designated area for backpacks. All other water bottles will be emptied on the trees.

2.3 Consideration Everything will go well if people are considerate. Don’t take excessively long showers; sometimes water runs short. If you see someone carrying heavy things when you don’t have anything, share their load. If the cooks arrive with the food and water while you’re at the dig house, help them unload the cars. They work hard enough without doing weightlifting. Don’t take other people’s things out of the refrigerators.

3 Useful maps and plans Fig. 3.1 Sicily

1 Monte Polizzo 2 Salemi 3 Palermo airport (Falcone-Borsellino/Punta Raisi) 4 Fig. 3.2 Salemi

Map of Salemi. Monte Polizzo lies about 5 miles out of town, along the lowest road on the right-hand side of the map

Fig. 3.3 Major ancient sites in western Sicily

Fig. 3.4 Aerial photograph of Monte Polizzo

Fig. 3.5 Monte Polizzo site plan (contour interval 20 meters)

Fig. 3.6 Acropolis plan

Fig. 3.7 Plan of period II (6th-century-BC) structures in zone A

Fig. 3.8 West terrace, Building A5, c. 600-550 BC

Fig. 3.9 West terrace, c. 550-525 BC

Fig. 3.10 Area of building A1, c. 600-550 BC

Fig. 3.11 Building A1, c. 550 BC

Fig. 3.12 Building A1, c. 550-525 BC

Fig. 3.13 Building A1, c. 525-500 BC

Fig. 3.14 6th-century-BC antler deposits

Fig. 3.15 Remains excavated in zone D, 2002

Fig. 3.16 Remains of Building A3 (c. 350-300 BC)

Fig. 3.17 Profile drawing, west balk of trench 0X79-80, zone E, 2003

4 Project aims In the 18th century AD, some west Europeans began arguing that their civilization was inherently superior to all others, because they had inherited from ancient Greece a unique tradition of secular, scientific rationalism. They argued (i) that this special Greek culture formed during the archaic period (c. 700-500 BC); (ii) that Greek colonists spread it through the west Mediterranean; (iii) that this created the broadly shared culture through which the Roman Empire and Christianity expanded; and (iv) that this Greco-Roman-Christian background explained the 17th-century Scientific Revolution, the 18th-century Enlightenment, and, in 19th-century versions, the Industrial Revolution, democracy, and imperialism. Greek colonization of the west Mediterranean is a crucial stage in this theory of world history. We normally refer to the general theory about the Greek origins of a distinct western civilization as “Hellenism,” and the process by which Hellenic culture was transferred to other peoples as “Hellenization.” The Hellenist model holds that the Hellenization of indigenous west Mediterranean culture was deep and rapid. However, when modern archaeology began in the late 19th century, very few scholars were interested in directly testing the theory by excavating indigenous sites to document exactly what changed when Greeks came west. Most preferred to take the basic theoretical framework for granted, and to excavate the actual Greek colonies (Agrigento, Selinunte, etc.) to illustrate their assumptions about the spread of Hellenic culture. Archaeologists outside the Mediterranean largely abandoned Hellenist models in the early 20th century, developing broader evolutionary theories about the shift from simple hunter-gatherer bands to complex ancient states. In these theories, Greece is simply one example among many of a network of little city-states on the fringes of larger territorial empires, and Hellenization is just a fancy word for a process of diffusion. But in the west Mediterranean the first serious challenge to the Hellenist model came only in the 1990s, from scholars influenced by postcolonial theory. Postcolonial scholars, initially interested in the literature that had developed in and about former European colonies since decolonization began, emphasized that the kind of one-way transmission of cultural traits from the colonizing power to the colonized was an imperialist fantasy. They stressed that areas of colonial interaction see fluid interactions, contested meanings, and the construction of wholly new hybrid identities. They often spoke of the creation of a “third space,” between colonizers and colonized. In the 1990s, Mediterranean historians and archaeologists influenced by postcolonialism argued that colonial interactions in the seventh and sixth centuries BC were just as fluid and complex as those in the twentieth century AD. Archaic colonization did not transmit Greek culture to passive natives; rather, people reacted by constructing complicated hybrid cultures. Some argued that the very notion of a distinctive “Greek culture” only formed slowly, partly in response to western colonization and partly in response to the war against Persia in 480 BC; so speaking of “Greek” sites and documenting the transmission of their culture to “native” sites might in fact be meaningless. Postcolonial historians also pointed out that Phoenicians had settled some parts of the west Mediterranean well before the Greeks, and that any assessment of “Hellenization” would have to come to terms with prior “Phoneicianization.” The general conclusion of postcolonial critiques of Hellenist models seems to be that the consequence of the Phoenician/Greek expansion was one more episode in a much longer series of kaleidoscopic shifts in cultural identity, rather than a watershed in world history Hellenization vs. postcolonialism is now a major academic battlefield, but we lack adequate data to resolve the issue. There are two main reasons for this. First, although evaluating the consequences of the Phoenician/Greek expansion obviously depends on examining how the communities that were already in the west Mediterranean changed after colonization began, few archaeologists have excavated indigenous western sites. Second, the relatively few excavations that have taken place have rarely collected the kinds of information we need to test the theories. We are digging at Monte Polizzo to try to do just this. Several other projects (in south Italy, Sardinia, and southern France) are addressing the same problems, and our common goal is to produce a new history of the impact of the Greek/Phoenician expansion. This may have major implications for how we explain the social evolution of the Old World. We chose Monte Polizzo because it was a large (20 hectares) indigenous site in the only part of the Mediterranean (western Sicily) where Phoenicians and Greeks both settled, and was occupied during the major period of colonial expansion (c. 700-500 BC). Hellenization models imply the steady native adoption of Greek artifacts and behaviors, while postcolonial models imply more complex flows, with different groups and individuals adopting different novelties, and a tendency for entirely new material forms and practices to be constructed. To judge between these approaches (and to move beyond them) we need to do three things: (i) to measure exactly how much indigenous material culture and customs changed; (ii) to understand whether native peoples used Greek or Phoenician artifacts in the same ways as Greeks or Phoenicians, or used them in new ways; (iii) to quantify the development of hybrid material culture and practices; and (iv) to broaden the range of practices studied, through systematic analysis of bones, seeds, residues, and pollen. To accomplish these goals, we chose to focus on Monte Polizzo’s religious areas, since religion has been one of the major areas of debate between champions of Hellenization and postcolonial models, and to emphasize stratigraphy and context much more than has been normal in the west Mediterranean. Our initial results are providing a new picture of native religion. In the sixth century BC, activity focused on a round building (A1; see fig. 3.11 above) at the summit of the site. Red deer were dismembered and cooked, their antlers were modified and perhaps used in rituals, and then stored in large coarseware pots, which were later dumped. Lots of metal and bone ornaments were used around A1, although since the site was peacefully abandoned, only tiny fragments survive. Both the round building and the deer rituals suggest that the sixth- century peoples in this area (whom the Greeks called Elymians) were trying to evoke ancestral traditions. Round houses had been normal till about 650 BC, but by the time A1 was built, had been replaced by rectilinear houses (which are the norm at Monte Polizzo). Similarly, finds from the nearby site of Monte Maranfusa show that deer had been an important part of the diet around 800 BC, but by 500 had declined significantly. The architectural form and the content of the rituals both seem to be looking backward to traditional ways, and have little in common with Phoenician or Greek practices. It may be that Monte Polizzo zone A reveals resistance to new ideas—a kind of religious fundamentalism—rather than Hellenization. Two further aspects of our finds seem to support the postcolonial approach. First, there was tremendous fluidity in religious space. The sanctuary perhaps began around 600 BC with a rectilinear building (A5), which was replaced around 550 by a round hut-shrine (A1), only for A1 to be rebuilt as a peculiar mainly rectilinear structure, probably open to the air, around 500 BC. Second, there were surprising variations in finds between indigenous sites in western Sicily. In zone E, 100 meters north of zone A (see figures 3.5, 3.17), we’ve begun excavating what we think is a well stratified garbage deposit, going back probably to 700 BC. Other west Sicilian sites have lots of indigenous incised-and-impressed pottery in the 7th century BC, giving way to matt-painted geometric styles in the 6th century. But in zone E we’ve found consistent amounts of incised-and-impressed pottery across the whole period, combined with lots of matt-painted in the 7th century, dropping off to almost nothing after 550 BC. The most common indigenous decorated vessels at Monte Polizzo are plain gray plates with simple incised bands on the lip. We’ve also found surprisingly low percentages of Greek pottery, and almost no Phoenician imports, expect wine amphoras. All this suggests great fluidity, contingency, and scope for individual agency, as the postcolonial models predict. However, this is only true if we focus on short-term changes, measurable on the scale of an individual lifetime. Recent work in south Italy, Sardinia, and southern France is producing similar results. But before we announce the death of Hellenization, we should also put Monte Polizzo into a longer-term perspective, spanning several centuries. When we do this, we find that Greek and Phoenician artifacts, and even behavioral patterns, do largely displace indigenous traditions. In the 430s BC, people at Segesta (just 5 miles from Monte Polizzo) probably employed the same architects who built the Parthenon in Athens, and in the 4th century they added a superb Greek-style theater. Athenian black-glaze imports and local imitations dominate the decorated pottery from 4th-century deposits at Segesta, Salemi, Marsala, and other local sites, and Carthaginian coins are common (at Monte Polizzo we found 10 around the very small 4th-century-BC structure A3, built over A1). And if we broaden the geographical context, we find that despite the very varied local histories of sites from Sicily to Spain and Sardinia, they all share this inexorable movement toward Greek (and in some places Punic) material culture and practices. The decisive period seems to be the 5th century. In the 6th century, indigenous sites like Monte Polizzo have strong material culture traditions. Two-thirds of the native sites in western Sicily—including Monte Polizzo—are abandoned at points between 525 and 475 BC; and when they’re reoccupied, generally around 350 BC, most of the old material culture traditions have vanished. The abandonment of so many sites is not just an annoying obstacle to understanding; it’s part of a major change in ways of life, and probably has a lot to do with why the indigenous traditions died. The processes involved are debated, and need a lot more research. One prominent Sicilian archaeologist has suggested that the battle of Himera in 480 BC, when the Greeks crushed a Carthaginian army (explained in section 5.4 below) destabilized native society, causing a demographic and economic collapse after 475. This seems implausible to us on both economic and demographic grounds, and in any case many of the native sites were already abandoned before 480. We suspect that a process was at work like one we can see in eastern Sicily in the 480s: cities increased their power and wealth by persuading or forcing smaller neighbors to abandon their communities and resettle at the larger center. In the 450s, a native Sicel (east Sicilian) leader named Douketios did the same thing, briefly becoming a serious player in east Sicilian politics. The most likely explanation for the changes in settlement patterns and material culture, it seems to us, is that in the sixth century Segesta and a few other native sites (see fig. 3.3 above) —probably Erice and Entella, as well as Halikyai, probably under modern Salemi— became a lot more powerful than the others, by concentrating population. These bigger sites also have the first clear evidence for native adoption of Greek religious architecture. Possibly the elites of Segesta and other large towns saw themselves as rivals to the Greek cities in the later sixth century and refashioned themselves as the leaders of native states, squeezing out smaller Elymian towns like Monte Polizzo in the process. To answer this question, we need good data from Segesta, Erice, Entella, and Salemi. But because most of these sites have been occupied continuously since the 8th century BC, we don’t have that. Segesta’s fortifications and temples suggest the city was stronger than ever in the fifth century; in 416 she persuaded Athens to invade Sicily to help her get the better of Selinunte, and in 410 she persuaded Carthage to do the same. For the moment, all we can do is try to figure out as much as we can about the abandonment of Monte Polizzo. If we’re right (i) that the growth of Segestan state power in competition with Selinunte caused it, and (ii) that the abandonment of so many native sites and the concentration of people in larger towns drove the collapse of indigenous material culture and practices in the 5th century, it seems that neither the Hellenization nor the postcolonial models completely explain the impact of the Greek/Phoenician expansion. We might instead want to think more like analysts of contemporary globalization, linking economic, demographic, and military forces to cultural changes, looking at how fundamentalism co-exists with modernization, and how changes in the connectedness of regions created new winners and losers. But first we need well excavated, precisely recorded data from a tightly stratified excavation—and that’s where you come in.

5 A very brief history of Sicily Mortimer Wheeler wrote that “Dead archaeology is the driest dust that blows,” and he was right. If you don’t know where the things you’re digging up fit into a historical picture, then you’re just moving dirt—very slowly, and not getting paid for it. Knowing what the issues are and how our discoveries can answer major questions transforms the experience of doing archaeology. This section is meant to do two things. First, it provides a quick orientation to the history of Sicily across the last 13,000 years. Try to get some sense of where our site fits into the larger historical picture. Second, it gives you an overall context within which to read the more detailed studies we recommend in section 13 below.

Table 1 Basic chronology

Period name Years Early Bronze Age 2500-1500 BC Middle Bronze Age 1500-1200 BC Late Bronze Age 1200-900 BC Early Iron Age 900-734 BC [sometimes called the Sant’ Angelo Muxaro period in western Sicily] Colonial/archaic period 734-480 BC Classical period 480-323 BC [Athenian siege of Syracuse, 415-413; Dionysius I, 406-367] Hellenistic period 323-241 BC [First Punic War, 264-241] Roman Republic 241-31 BC Roman Empire 31 BC-AD 476 Gothic occupation AD 476-535 Byzantine period 535-827/902 Arab period 827/902-1060/1093 Norman/Swabian period 1060/1093-1266 Angevin, Aragon, Bourbon dynasties 1266-1860 [Sicilian Vespers, 1282; Black Death, 1347-50; Etna eruption and earthquake, 1693] Garibaldi lands in Marsala May 11, 1860 Fascist period 1922-1943

Notes on periodization 1. The “Bronze Age” and “Iron Age” phases are based on archaeological evidence for the kinds of metal in use. The idea of successive stone, bronze, and iron ages goes back to early 19th-century Danish archaeologists. Not many archaeologists nowadays think that the metal in use is the best way to characterize ancient societies, but the names are now a convenient short hand. 2. The archaic, classical, and Hellenistic periods take their names from phases of development in the political history of Greece. They partly correspond to important changes in Sicily (the beginning of Greek colonization in 734, the battle of Himera in 480, the end of the First Punic War in 241), but like the Bronze and Iron Ages, they’re basically a convenient short hand. You shouldn’t interpret them as meaning that ancient Sicilian history was more or less the same thing as Greek history. 3. The Arab and Norman conquests of Sicily were drawn-out affairs. The dates given above represent the first arrival of the new rulers and the fall of the last stronghold resisting them. It’s important also to bear in mind that these dates reflect military/political transitions; culturally, the transitions were much slower. There are still Byzantine Greek elements in eastern Sicily today, and Arab architecture and town plans can still be seen in Palermo. Sicilian cuisine has particularly strong Arabic elements.

Table 2 Salemi highlights

Halikyai (Salemi?) makes alliance with Athens, 418/17 BC Halikyai (Salemi?) narrowly escapes destruction by Dionysius I, 397 BC Castle rebuilt by Frederick II, AD 1210 Chiesa Madre built, 1616-1740 Church of Santa Maria dei Angeli (Crocifisso) built, 1622-23 Jesuit College built, 1696-1705 Garibaldi pronounces himself dictator of Italy in what’s now the Mayor of Salemi’s office, May 14, 1860 Earthquake, 1968 New urban plan approved, 1978 Sicilian-Scandinavian Archaeological Project begins, 1996 Stanford arrives in Salemi, 2000 Salemi is promoted from Commune to Città, 2001

5.1 Earliest prehistory The earliest traces of humans in Sicily are stone tools. None of these can be proven to be more than about 20,000 years old, although most archaeologists suspect that hominids have lived on Sicily for at least a couple of hundred thousand years. We found a stone tool at Monte Polizzo in 2003 that may be Palaeolithic ( = Old Stone Age), but it hasn’t yet been studied by an expert. There are hardly any traces of human activity in Sicily till the end of the last Ice Age, around 11,000 BC, even though it was joined to the mainland before then. We now know of several cave shelters dating around 10,000 BC, and there’s some amazing rock art from sites like the Addaura, Genovesi, and Niscemi caves near Palermo, and on the little islands of Levanzo and Favignana, accessible by ferry from Trapani (makes a good weekend trip). These date from about 9000-5000 BC. By this time, permanent villages based on cultivated crops and deliberate herding of animals had begun in what’s now northern Iraq and southeastern Turkey, but it took another 3000 years for these to reach Sicily. Stretto Partanna, near Salemi, has some of the earliest evidence for pottery technology in Sicily (5th millennium BC).

5.2 Bronze Age Sicily Cities, writing, metal use, and permanent inequalities in wealth appeared in southern Iraq, Egypt, and India by 3000 BC. The west Asian civilizations were organized around temples and palaces, often run by priest-kings employing large scribal bureaucracies that tried to control land and other basic resources. They expanded steadily for nearly two thousand years. As early as 2000 BC somewhat similar societies were well established in what’s now Syria and Israel, and were starting to take hold further west, on Crete. By 1500, palaces were flourishing in Greece, and Near Eastern traders were visiting Sicily, southern Italy, and Sardinia. But the actual institutions of Near Eastern-style palaces and temples didn’t take off in the west Mediterranean. The closest thing we know of is an unusually big building (about 450 m2) at Pantalica in eastern Sicily, dating around 1400. Archaeologists sometimes call this a “palace,” but that’s a bit misleading. By east Mediterranean standards it’s tiny; you could comfortably fit the Pantalica building into the central courtyard of the palace at Knossos on Crete. But all the same, the Pantalica building suggests that big changes were going on in the previously non- hierarchical societies of Sicily by 1400 BC. There’s also some evidence for Middle Bronze Age warehouses and Mycenaean Greek pots at Thapsos (now in the tremendous Archaeological Museum in Siracusa; well worth seeing), suggesting that by the 14th century eastern Sicily was being drawn into the east Mediterranean economic and cultural sphere. Had things carried on in this way, palaces of east Mediterranean type could well have been established in Sicily over the next few centuries. But that didn’t happen. Instead, around 1200 BC, most of the palaces in the east Mediterranean were destroyed by fire. We don’t know exactly what happened; in fact, it’s one of the greatest mysteries in history. Texts from Egypt mention migrations of “the Peoples of the Sea,” leading to destructions and great battles. The Egyptians called one of these groups of people the Shekelesh, which may well be an Egyptianized form of the later names Sikeloi and Siculi, which Greeks and Romans used for the population of Sicily. Whatever caused the destructions, population fell sharply in Greece, Turkey, and western Asia, and a “Dark Age” set in. Contacts between the east Mediterranean and Sicily broke off in the twelfth century. But this period of isolation seems to have done no great harm to Sicilian society. In fact the period after 1200, the Late Bronze Age, saw the first large villages in western Sicily. One of the most important of these is at Mokarta, just a couple of miles from Salemi. Our colleague Sebastiano Tusa excavated there, and in 2003-04 Niccolò Bruno has renewed the excavations of his behalf, exposing a large part of the village. It covered an area about the size of two football fields, and perhaps 300-400 people lived there (it’s worth remembering that ancient populations were very small; in the Late Bronze Age there were probably never more than a couple of thousand people living in NW Sicily). Professor Tusa found a group of large round huts. In one of them, which had been destroyed by fire, a woman’s skeleton was found in the doorway. The life-size model of this hut is now on display in the Museum in Salemi, along with some of the best finds from Mokarta—if you can get in.

5.3 Colonial/Archaic Sicily In the ninth century BC, the east Mediterranean began to rebound from the long depression of the Dark Age. New dynasties of kings in Assyria raided over large areas. In the eighth century climatic changes and population growth forced people to compete more over basic resources. Sometimes this took the form of trade; others times, of war. The most famous traders came from Phoenicia (roughly the modern Lebanon). Their ships reached Sardinia before 850 and Tunisia before 800. They probably came to Sicily in the ninth century, though we have no direct evidence till about 720. Sicily has always been connected to a larger world. At the height of the Ice Age, around 16,000 BC, it was part of the Italian peninsula. To the south, it was connected to Malta, and to the southwest, only a narrow strip of water separated it from Africa. Since then there have been constant population movements between the island, North Africa, and Italy. But all the same, the eighth century marks a real cahnge, as tens of thousands of people moved from the east Mediterranean to settle permanently in Sicily. The Phoenicians were the first to come. The Greek historian Thucydides, writing around 400 BC, says that Phoenicians set up bases on islands and promontories all around the coasts of Sicily, but adds that when Greeks started coming to Sicily in large numbers, beginning with a settlement at Naxos (near Taormina) in 734, the Phoenicians retreated to three sites in the west: Motya (modern Mozia), Panormos (modern Palermo), and Soloeis (modern Solunto). Phoenician Panormos and Soloeis are buried under the modern cities, but the little island of Mozia, just twenty miles west of Monte Polizzo and clearly visible from our site, has been extensively excavated. The oldest finds so far date back to about 720 BC: there are graves, remains of houses, and the tophet, a sanctuary where Phoenicians sacrificed babies to the gods (at least, this is what Greek, Roman, and Jewish authors said was going on; some archaeologists think that they may have misunderstood or distorted Phoenician religion. The museum at Mozia has a great display of the tophet). Greeks continued to arrive in Sicily through the eighth and seventh centuries. In 728, after wandering around for several years, a group of Greek from Megara near Athens founded a small city called Megara Hyblaea, just north of Syracuse (in modern Siracusa’s nasty oil-refining district; but it’s the most completely excavated Greek site in Sicily, worth a visit). Our colleague Franco De Angelis has done important work showing how Megara’s population increased ten- fold in one century, as a result of rapid natural population growth, voninued Greek immigration, and also in-migration from the indigenous population. In 628 Megara set up a colony of it own at Selinous (modern Selinunte), 25 miles south of Monte Polizzo. This changed the course of development in this part of Sicily. There’s no evidence that Greeks and Phoenicians were enemies in the 8th and 7th centuries, although it’s interesting that they hardly ever settled in the same areas. There’s also little evidence for hostilities between Phoenicians and Sicilians; but the semi-mythologized accounts that Greeks later wrote about the foundation of their colonies often report wars with the indigenous populations. At Syracuse (modern Siracusa), founded in 733, the Greeks even reduced the local population to serfdom, and in the 6th century there were definitely wars between Greeks and Sicilians. Some of the best evidence comes from our part of Sicily, where the settlers at Selinous expanded inland, fighting with local people that the Greeks called Elymians. In 1999-2000 Northern Illinois University carried out a systematic surface survey of ancient remains in the valleys around Monte Polizzo, Montagna Grande, and Mokarta. They’re working on the publication now, but they presented some initial results at the 2002 meetings of the Society for American Archaeology in Denver. It looks as if there were a few small villages and farms in the Late Bronze Age, but in the Iron Age there were just a couple of main settlements—Monte Polizzo itself, and a smaller site at the east end of Montagna Grande. It’s hard to date surface finds very precisely, by the 6th century there were settlements on most hilltops in the interior of west Sicily. A 6th-century Greek inscription found at Monte Castellazzo (Poggioreale), just ten miles south of Monte Polizzo, is written in the Megarian dialect of Greek that was spoken at Selinous. This strongly suggests that the Greeks had taken control of all the coastal plain by this point, and had driven the indigenous peoples back into the hills. We suspect that by 600, the native west Sicilians were withdrawing to easily defensible hilltop settlements. Despite, or perhaps because of, the increasing pressure from Selinous, the 6th century seems to have been something of a golden age in ancient western Sicily. There were more settlements than at any other time in antiquity. By the late 6th century there were probably 25,000+ people living in the hilly inland area where we work (compared to half that number in Salemi alone today). Aigesta (modern Segesta), just five miles north of Monte Polizzo, was probably the biggest settlement, and Eryx (modern Erice) the second; but Monte Polizzo was not far behind, with a population of probably 1500-2000 people. Later Greek writers say that Segesta was the leading community of the Elymian people. They tell us that in 580 BC the Elymians and the Phoenicians on the coasts united to defeat a Greek attempt to found a colony at Marsala. Several inland sites show signs of destruction around this time, and it’s possible that there was some general war. Some historians even link it to events in the east Mediterranean, but that’s highly speculative. Throughout the 6th, 5th, and 4th centuries, the hills around Monte Polizzo were one of the most hotly contested landscapes in the Mediterranean. Initial pollen analyses from the Swedish excavations suggest that there were very few trees in this area, and that the whole region was intensively cultivated. It was prime real estate. The late 6th century is particularly well represented at Monte Polizzo, and most of you will be excavating deposits or analyzing artifacts of this period. Possibly the Elymians were able to take advantage of their position midway between the Greek and Phoenician colonies to supply both, growing wealthy in the process. But it was a fragile balance. In 510, a Spartan adventurer named Dorieus tried to found another Greek colony, and provoked another successful Elymian-Phoenician alliance. But as we explained in section 4, by about 450 BC two-thirds of the rural sites in inland west Sicily had been abandoned. Some archaeologists have suggested that there was a massive economic decline and demographic collapse; but in our preliminary reports on Monte Polizzo, we’ve argued instead that there was a gradual concentration of population in a few large centers (Entella, Halikyai, Erice, and especially Segesta). The indigenous elites were getting richer and more powerful, building temples that rivaled the finest that the Greeks could manage at Selinunte. In the 460s-440s BC we hear about an indigenous Sicel chief in east Sicily, named Douketios, who fought back against Syracuse by concentrating the Sicels in one town and organizing it like a Greek state. We suggest that the same was happening in west Sicily somewhat earlier, around 500: resisting Greek incursions called for more organized military and economic power, which a few big towns like Segesta could provide better than a lot of small towns like Monte Polizzo. The result: the small towns were squeezed out, and, like Monte Polizzo, abandoned by 450 BC. We’ve also suggested that some of the differences in material culture between Monte Polizzo and larger towns like Segesta and Entella can be explained in terms of this process, particularly the conservatism of Monte Polizzo’s religious practices and pottery styles. People in some of the old towns didn’t want to get with the new program. They preferred traditional incised and grayware vessels to the new-fangled Greek stuff, and liked to carry on worshipping in small round hut-shrines, dancing around with antlers on their heads, instead of paying to build huge Greek-style temples. We think the 6th-5th century was a time of intense conflicts, both between native peoples and Greeks and between native communities. We know very little yet about their internal organization, and this is one of our big goals for the dig—to get some sense of what kind of wealth differentials there were in Monte Polizzo, what these people believed in, how they fed themselves, how comfortable their lives were, and what kinds of boundaries they drew both within their own communities and between themselves and outsiders. But despite all the conflicts, this was also a high point for the indigenous peoples of Iron Age inland western Sicily: leaving aside the growth of Palermo into a super-city of 300,000 people in the 11th century AD, rural west Sicilian towns wouldn’t be so numerous, so large, or so rich again until the 19th century AD. The late 6th century also saw great changes in the Greek cities in Sicily. Several were taken over by individual rulers (what the Greeks called tyrannoi, from which our word tyrant comes), who succeeded in centralizing power in their own hands. In the 490s, Hippocrates, the tyrant of Gela in southeastern Sicily, created a short-lived but substantial empire. In the 480s his successor Gelon took over Syracuse, and became one of the most powerful men in the Greek world. In western Sicily Akragas and Selinous had their own powerful tyrants, who extended their territory and brought in new wealth. They began building the breathtaking series of temples that can still be seen in Agrigento and Selinunte—among the most impressive examples of Greek architecture anywhere. In 2003, most of you will be excavating in the 6th-century settlement, and particularly in zone A, Monte Polizzo’s religious center. We’ve made great strides toward understanding native religion. Their cult involved the hunting, sacrifice, burning, and eating of deer; drinking wine; and some kind of ritual manipulation of deer antlers. We think the divinity was associated with nature and the earth, and may have been interpreted by the Greeks as a local version of their own goddess Artemis. We’ve excavated an altar where the 6th-century worshippers burned the deer, and an iron cleaver which they probably used to chop the carcasses up. We’ve also found the jawbone of a 12-14 year-old human. A site in Etruria called Pian di Civita has an interesting parallel to our zone A deposits: somewhat earlier (9th-8th century) these Etruscans produced large deposits of ash and red deer antler, and buried several children among them. The zone A bone may come from a similar child grave, disturbed in the 6th century BC. In 2004 we’re going to expand the area excavated, go deeper in search of activity dating from before the round hut-shrine A1 was built, complete the excavation of building A5 on a terrace in the west side of the ridge, and hopefully get a better idea of how the area was used in the 7th century.

5.4 Classical Sicily By the late 6th century Carthage, a Phoenician colony near the modern city of Tunis, had become a major power in its own right. It made a peace treaty with Rome in 509 dividing up trade in the west Mediterranean, and it controlled much of Sardinia. In 480, Carthage sent a large army into western Sicily. We don’t have an account written from the Carthaginian side. Some Greek writers claimed that back in 483 the Carthaginian leadership had held secret meetings with Xerxes, the ruler of Persia, and had planned to attack the Greek world simultaneously from the east and the west, though that seems far-fetched. More likely the Carthaginians were worried that the rulers of Syracuse were getting too strong a grip over the Greek cities of western Sicily, and planned a kind of police action, to restore the status quo ante by capturing the Greek city of Himera. In any case, the Syracusans destroyed the Carthaginian army outside Himera. One story says that the astounding Greek temples at Agrigento (definitely worth visiting: one of the world’s great archaeological sites) were built largely by Carthaginian prisoners of war enslaved after the battle of Himera. As we pointed out in section 4, this is just about the time that most of the indigenous sites in inland western Sicily were abandoned. Monte Polizzo was one of these: we have late 6t-century pottery from most places on the acropolis, but then almost nothing that dates between 500 and 350 BC. We want to know why our site—and most others in the area—went out of use. Most likely the Elymians retreated to Segesta, Erice, Entella, and Halkyai (probably under Salemi), commuting from these centers to farm the hills around Monte Polizzo. The major native centers apparently flourished in the 5th century; in the 430s Segesta replaced its large 6th-century temple with the famous, spectacular Doric temple that you’ll all visit, and became a major diplomatic force, playing the various Mediterranean great powers off against each other to preserve its independence. The Segestans did very well, but their maneuvers led to disaster for everyone else in the late fifth century. A historian named Diodorus, a native of Sicily writing in the 1st century BC, tells us that in 416 BC

a war broke out between the Segestans and Selinuntines from a difference over territory, where a river [probably the Mazaro, which starts on Monte Polizzo] divided the lands of the quarreling cities. The Selinuntines, crossing the stream, at first seized by force the land along the river, but later they cut off for their own a large piece of the adjoining territory, utterly disregarding the rights of the injured parties. The people of Segesta, aroused to anger, at first endeavored to persuade them by verbal arguments not to trespass on the territory of another city; however, when no one paid any attention to them, they advanced with an army against those who held the territory, expelled them all from their fields, and themselves seized the land. Since the quarrel between the two cities had become serious, the two parties, having mustered soldiers, sought to bring about a decision by recourse to arms. Consequently, when both forces were drawn up in battle-order, a fierce battle took place in which the Selinuntines were the victors, having slain not a few Segestans. Since the Segestans had been humbled and were not strong enough of themselves to offer battle, they at first tried to induce the people of Agrigento and Syracuse to enter into an alliance with them. Failing in this, they sent ambassadors to Carthage to beseech its aid. And when the Carthaginians would not listen to them, they looked about for some alliance overseas; and in this, chance came to their aid. (Diodorus 12.82)

The chance that came to their aid was an alliance with Athens. Athens was the most powerful city in Aegean Greece, and was trying to build up a power base in Sicily. In 418 or 417, Athens made treaties with Segesta and Halikyai, which may well be Salemi itself. Fragments of inscriptions recording the actual terms have been found on the Acropolis in Athens. Thucydides said that there had been earlier treaties, probably made in the 420s, and the 418/417 inscriptions probably merely renewed these. Like most great powers, Athens made a lot of treaties, but only honored them when it had something to gain. When Carthage refused to help Segesta in 416, the Segestans pulled one of the greatest scams in ancient history. They asked Athens to intervene, promising to pay for the war if Athens would attack Selinous. The Athenians, sensing a chance to establish themselves better in Sicily, sent ambassadors to check out the Segestans’ claims to have great wealth, and the Segestans fooled them. They took them to the temple of Aphrodite in Erice and showed them chests which (they claimed) were full of gold and silver; but under the top layer, the chests were just full of rocks. They also took the ambassadors to dinner party after dinner party, with elaborate gold dishes at each one; but in fact it was just the same set of gold dishes being passed from house to house. The Athenians fell for it, discovering only when it was too late that Segesta didn’t really have the money to pay for the war. But Athens had in any case set her ally’s interests to one side. Instead of attacking Selinous, the Athenians used the Segesta-Selinous crisis as the pretext for a direct assault on Syracuse in 415. The two-year siege cost more than 50,000 lives, and ended in total Athenian defeat. Books 6 and 7 of Thucydides’ History give an unforgettable account. It was a turning-point in Mediterranean history. Segesta was in a tight spot after Athens’ defeat in 413. In 410 Selinous attacked again and tried to take over even more territory; the fertile hills around Monte Polizzo and Salemi would once again have been at the center of the dispute. Ignoring the disastrous consequences of their previous appeal to outside great powers, the Segestans again asked Carthage to save them, and this time—for reasons we don’t understand—the Carthaginians said yes. Prior to 410, the Phoenicians seem to have had little interest in actually taking over territory in Sicily (unlike the Greeks). Even in 480, Carthage was probably interested mainly in restoring the balance of power. But the Segestan call for help unleashed a huge series of wars. Armies marched from one end of Sicily to the other in 409, 406-405, and 398-396. The wars cost tens of thousands more lives. Selinunte, Himera, Agrigento, Gela, and Mozia were left in ruins, and terrible plagues ravaged Sicily and Carthage. Halikyai had a narrow escape from destruction in 397. A brutal tyrant named Dionysius seized power in Syracuse. He spent almost as much time using mercenaries to fight his fellow citizens as he did fighting external enemies, but he got most of Sicily and parts of southern Italy under his control by the 370s. The other big winner was Carthage: by the 370s it had established formal political control over western Sicily, dominated by the new city of Lilybaion, under modern Marsala. The hills around Monte Polizzo were no longer a no-man’s land. They now lay firmly within the Carthaginian sphere, and there are signs that rural population revived in the 4th century. Interestingly, a lot of the new sites have distinctively Punic (the word archaeologists use for Carthaginian culture in this period, derived from the Latin word for Phoenicians, Poeni) material culture. There’s a spectacular example at Monte Adranone, near the south coast of Sicily between Selinunte and Sciacca. Monte Polizzo was no exception: a small shelter was built on the very top of the hill around 350 BC, and since 2001 we’ve found a Punic limestone stele, 10 Punic bronze coins, and 5 limestone dice. The 4th-century material culture from Monte Polizzo is very different from that of the 6th century.

5.5 Hellenistic and Roman Sicily Much is obscure about 4th-century Sicily. In the 370s Dionysius of Syracuse was perhaps the most powerful Greek alive. He directly or indirectly controlled all of Sicily except the area where we’re working, and was busy fighting wars in mainland Italy, across the Adriatic, and in Greece. But after he died in 367 Syracuse tore itself apart in bloody civil wars. It remained a major center for a few years (this was the time when Plato showed up there to put his plan for philosopher-kings into action by educating the young Dionysius II, only to have the ungrateful student sell him into slavery), but by the 350s demographic collapse had set in all over Sicily. We really don’t know why, though we can identify some important factors. One was disease: a plague broke out among the Athenians besieging Syracuse in 414, and returned in 405, 396, and several more times. A second was disorder: Greeks and Carthaginians alike hired large numbers of mercenary soldiers, especially from Spain and Campania in southern Italy, and just turned them loose (often without paying them) when they were done. Some ex-mercenaries became bandits; others took over whole towns. In 405 a group of Campanians captured Entella, just a few miles east of Salemi, and since the 1980s archaeologists have dug up an amazing series of inscriptions there showing that people were still using the Campanian dialect in the 280s BC. Things got so bad that in 337 the Greek city of Corinth, which had founded Syracuse nearly 400 years before, sent a man named Timoleon to restore things. He chased off Carthage and brought more than 60,000 Greek immigrants to Sicily. By the 320s the Greek cities on the coast were flourishing once again. By this point, in sharp contrast to the situation in the 6th century, there’s no real difference between the material culture that we excavate in the Greek sites and what we find in inland sites. The NIU excavations in Salemi in 2001-2003 found 4th- century levels dominated by Greek-style Black Glaze pottery, and neutron activation analysis has shown that it comes from different clay sources than the 6th-century pottery from Monte Polizzo. This whole period is very obscure, and if we can cast any light on the mid-4th-century demographic collapse and subsequent Greek revival, that’d be a major contribution. At the end of the 4th century a new Syracusan tyrant, Agathocles, began a series of wars that once again came close to uniting all of Sicily. In 307 he even put Carthage under siege, causing such panic that (according to Diodorus, writing 250 years later) the Carthaginians engaged in an orgy of baby-burning to appease their savage gods. They survived, and with Agathocles’ death Carthage reasserted its power over western Sicily. The 3rd-century Greek cities were wealthy and cosmopolitan. Sicily boasted some of the greatest Greek poets, like Theocritus, and scientists, like Archimedes. But politically, demographically, economically, and militarily, their days were numbered. Both the Aegean world and Italy had gone through great changes. Since 338, the kings of Macedonia had dominated the Aegean city-states, and between 336 and 323 Alexander had conquered the entire Persian Empire. This pulled the economic center of gravity of the Greek world to the east, and also generated previously unimagined levels of wealth among the Greek ruling classes. Meanwhile, Rome had conquered most of the Italian mainland, and some elements in the Roman elite were looking for ways to draw the Greek cities of southern Italy under their control. The struggles that began around 300 drew in more and more players. In 282 Rome went to war with the Greek city Taras (modern Taranto), which asked Pyrrhus of Epirus (modern Albania) to come to its aid. Pyrrhus saw a chance to get a toehold in Italy, and in 280- 279 defeated the Romans twice. However, the Roman inflicted such heavy casualties on him that he’s said to have told one of his soldiers “One more victory over the Romans and we are completely done for” (Plutarch, Life of Pyrrhus 21.9; hence our expression Pyrrhic victory). So in 278 he abandoned Taras and took his army to Sicily, thinking that Syracuse and Carthage would be weaker opponents than Rome. He captured Erice by storm (well worth thinking about what an accomplishment that was is you visit Erice, a great medieval town on top of a steep mountain). He caused a lot of trouble, but achieved very little. The main outcome of his raid was that in 276 Selinous and Segesta defected from their old alliance with Carthage to join Pyrrhus. After he abandoned them too, going back to Italy. A final defeat in 275 persuaded him to return to Greece, where a woman stunned him with a rooftile and a man stabbed him to death during a street battle in Argos. Pyrrhus’ invasion left Sicily in chaos once again, and this time Rome reaped the profits. Rome found an excuse to intervene in 264, when a group of ex-mercenaries seized Messina. The former government of Messina asked Rome to restore them. The Roman Senate decided that this was just (and would also be easy). The mercenaries holding Messina then made an alliance with Carthage, but Rome intervened anyway, beginning a terrible 23-year war. Most of it was fought at sea between enormous fleets; the casualties on each side ran well up into six figures. The last ten years of the conflict consisted of a Roman siege of Lilybaeum (modern Marsala) and a guerrilla war through the hills of western Sicily. From the top of Monte Polizzo you can see the entire theater of war. So far nothing from the First Punic War period has been found on the site, though it’s probably only a matter of time before it does. The Romans won in the end by outlasting Carthage, raising more money and men. In 241 Lilybaion fell, and Sicily came under Roman control for the next 700 years. The Roman conquest had a profound effect on life in Sicily. In the 2nd and 1st centuries BC Rome grew into a city of a million people, the largest that the world had seen up till that time, and Sicily was one of the major food-supplying regions. The NIU survey reveals a huge leap in the number of datable finds in the second century BC, and also a great shift in settlement patterns. Back in the 6th century BC, most sites are on hilltops, like Monte Polizzo. In the 5th century, settlement contracted on a few centers; then in the late 4th many of these were reoccupied, gradually being abandoned in the third. In the 2nd century, settlement shifted drastically to lowland locations, which were easier for the Romans to control. This was a long- term, shift. The pattern lasted for 500 years. Population declined slightly in the 3rd century AD, only to peak again in the 5th century AD. The agricultural landscape had never been so intensively exploited before, and wouldn’t see comparable levels of population and activity again until the 20th century. Much of the island was given over to vast estates (latifundia) producing grain for export, and worked by imported slaves. The estates were generally run by absentee landlords, and in 134 BC a Syrian named Eunos, who worked on an estate near Enna in the highlands of east-central Sicily, led a revolt. By 131 there may have been 70,000 rebels (Diodorus says 200,000, but no one believes him). It took several Roman legions to defeat the revolt. There was a terrible siege at the spectacular town of Taormina in eastern Sicily (a great place to visit after the dig). Diodorus says that the Romans “reduced the rebels to such indescribable famine and suffering that they began to eat the children, then the women, and were finally even driven to eating one another.” The Romans climbed the almost vertical cliffs, captured the city by treachery, and crucified everyone in it. The end of the revolt came when the Romans stormed the equally formidable fortress of Enna, and Eunos and 600 picked men committed suicide rather than be captured (probably wisely). After 131 BC the Romans reorganized production on Sicily. There was one more great slave revolt, which began in 104 BC, in the hills around Salemi; but this too was brutally crushed, and there were no more major uprisings. The other really famous episode in Roman Sicily came between 73 and 71 BC, when a man named Verres was sent to run Sicily as its proconsul. He was corrupt even by Rome’s remarkably low standards, selling guilty verdicts, shaking down entire cities, and even crucifying one Roman citizen for refusing to pay bribes. But what made Verres stand out was that he actually got prosecuted, by a rising lawyer named Cicero. Verres packed the jury and manipulated the calendar to avoid trial till 70. To everyone’s surprise he was found guilty, but, Rome being what it was, Cicero agreed to a mild penalty to avoid offending all the important people who had received favors from Verres. In his brief against Verres Cicero mentions rich landowners from Alicia (the Roman name for Halikyai, probably Salemi), with the Greek names Sopatros and Eumenides, and also tells us that another Alician had made a profit of 15,000 sesterces on tax collection in 71 BC. This was the happiest age for super-wealthy Sicilian landowners until the Bourbon regime in the 18th century. There are big Roman villas with fine mosaics in Marsala, Palermo, and other west Sicilian towns. The major site in our area was Alicia. As noted several times above, this may be under Salemi, but there’s been hardly any excavation in town. Back in 1893, Baron Antonio Salinas (a huge name in west Sicilian archaeology; the museum in Palermo is named after him) carried out the only systematic excavations of ancient material in Salemi till NIU began work there in 2001. In town he found a fine mosaic of the 2nd century BC (the inscriptions on it are published in Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum 33 [1983] 218 no. 744), along with parts of adjacent rooms from a substantial Roman town house. There are a few bits of literary evidence suggesting that Alicia did well under Rome. It had the privileged status of “free city,” and it had citizens rich enough to attract Verres’ attention. In the 1st century AD Pliny called Alicia a civitas, and it was still a recognized town in the 3rd century. Digs in the 1970s found pottery of the 1st through 4th centuries AD at several small sites around Salemi, and the NIU survey has recovered a lot of artifacts from the whole period c. 200 BC-AD 500. There was a slight decline in the first two centuries AD, but even at its lowest point that number of Roman artifacts is far higher than at any other time in antiquity.

5.6 The end of the Roman Empire In the 160s AD things began to go seriously wrong in the Roman Empire. Bubonic plague broke out, killing millions, and returned regularly for generations. At the same time, more and more Germanic peoples were trying to move into the empire. Sometimes they were welcomed. Population was in decline, and the Germans would be extra taxpayers and potential defenders of the frontiers. But sometimes they were uncontrollable, and disorder along the frontiers could turn into real wars. In the 3rd century the empire lost control, and security broke down. Central authority was restored in the 280s after fifty years of chaos, but things were never quite the same again. There had been a major shift in power, from the emperors to the regional aristocracies, and much of the peasants’ surplus that had previously been drawn to Rome as tax now stayed in the local elites’ hands as rent. Population declined, pressure on the frontiers grew, and landlords squeezed more and more out of the peasantry. The emperors had increasing trouble keeping raiders out. Finally, the Romans lost control of things in the Balkans in 378 and a large band of Goths went on the rampage. Whenever possible the Romans bought them off, and when they couldn’t do that, they hired other Goths to fight them. In 408 Alaric the Goth besieged Rome, and got a huge bribe to go away; but he came back in 410 and sacked Rome anyway—the first time anyone had done that in exactly 800 years. Meanwhile, things were going from bad to worse. In 375 the Huns moved out of central Asia, destroyed a Gothic kingdom in the Ukraine, and started a snowballing population movement into the Mediterranean basin. The Rhine frontier collapsed on New Year’s Day, 406. German tribes overran France. The Vandals moved on into Spain in 409. The next year, after his sack of Rome, Alaric moved into southern Italy, planning to cross to Sicily and north Africa, but died there. In 429 the Vandals invaded Africa and took Carthage, beginning a long series of raids on Sicily. In 455 they sacked Rome, deliberately destroying its art works (hence our word vandalism). By this point, the western Roman Empire had effectively ceased to exist as a p;olitical organization. In theory there were still emperors, but Gothic warriors ran things. In 476, Odoacer, the most powerful of the Goths, simply deposed the young emperor Romulus Augustulus, and took charge for himself. This is usually treated as the symbolic end of the western Roman Empire. The eastern (Byzantine) parts of the empire were also struggling against Germanic and Persian invaders, but weathered the 5th-century storm. The interesting thing is that despite political chaos, most parts of the Mediterranean experienced an economic boom in the period c. 300-550. Sicily was no exception. The NIU survey suggests that population was growing around Monte Polizzo (though there’s nothing, as yet, from the site itself), and Salinas’ 1893 investigations uncovered part of a church with 5th- and 6th-century mosaic floors at San Miceli, on the northern edge of Salemi. One of the fifth- century mosaic floors has Greek inscriptions on it, recording the names of two local Christians, Quodvultdeus and Maxima (Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum 36 [1986] 248-49 nos. 828-31). There was also a tomb, of to the presbyter Dionysus, probably dating soon after 500. The San Miceli mosaics are still in place, protected by a locked building. They’re quite pretty, and formed part of a larger complex, including a pottery kiln. There may have been a separate village here through the whole Roman period, since Roger Wilson, the leading expert on Roman Sicily, says he saw 2nd-century AD sherds on the site. Some people in Salemi have been trying to raise money to restore them and set up a proper visitors’ center, but at the moment to see them you have to talk to the owner of the Persian imports shop in the old town, who looks after the key. There’s quite a bit of controversy over the date of the San Miceli mosaics, but they’re probably just slightly later than the much grander examples at Piazza Armerina in east-central Sicily, which may have belonged to a Roman emperor. Piazza Armerina is a must-see. Its mosaics include the famous “girl in a bikini,” one of the most- photographed images in late Roman art. The basilica at San Miceli was a Christian structure. At the beginning of the 4th century, Christianity had still been a minority sect in the empire, but after the emperor Constantine converted in 312 (to get support in a civil war) the Church quickly became the richest institution in Europe. Syracuse had had a Christian community as early as 61, when Paul stopped there on his way to Rome, but it wasn’t a major religious center in the Christianized empire of the 5th century (the Sees of Rome and Carthage were vastly more important).

5.7 Medieval Sicily When Justinian took over as Byzantine emperor in 527, the Empire’s finances had improved enough for an attempt to reconquer the western empire. His general Belisarius took control of Sicily in a single campaign in 535, and destroyed the Vandal kingdom in North Africa in a couple more years. By 553 Justinian had taken back most of Italy, and in 554 seized part of Spain. But these wars bankrupted Byzantium, and in 568—just three years after Justinian’s death—a new group of Germans, the Lombards, overran Italy. Between about 565 and 700 we can speak of a transition from the ancient to the medieval world. Very severe plagues ravaged the Byzantine empire. By 600 population was tumbling everywhere, and trade shrinking. In 610 a then-obscure Arab named Mohammed had a vision of the archangel Gabriel, and started preaching Islam (submission to the way of God). In 634 his successor Omar led armies into the Byzantine Empire in the first jihad. They took Damascus in 635 and Jeruslaem in 638; in 642 they took Alexandria and overthrew the Persian Empire. The first Arab raid hit Sicily in 652. At this point the Arab fleet was tiny, but the Byzantines felt that the threat was real enough for emperor Constans II to come to the west in person in 662. He worried that if the Arabs overran Sicily and southern Italy, Byzantine Greece would be surrounded by Islam. Things didn’t go well for Constans. Despite his presence, Mu‘awiya ben Khudayj, caliph of Egypt, sent a much bigger raid in 667, which carried off tremendous plunder and slaves; and in the same year Mu‘awiya ben Abi-Sufyan launched the first of many Arab assaults on Constantinople (modern Istanbul), the Byzantine capital. Beset by crises on all sides, Constans was murdered by his own troops in Siracusa in 668. Things just got worse and worse. In 698 Arabs took Carthage, the last Byzantine stronghold in North Africa. A great Byzantine counterattack from Sicily failed in 702, and from that point on the initiative was firmly in Arab hands. The Byzantine Empire had been reduced to a rump around Constantinople, plus Sicily and southern Italy. All three areas were under constant attack. In 711 the Arabs invaded Spain and India; in the west, they were only turned back in 732, on the outskirts of Paris. Many Christians thought that the apocalypse was near, and things got very weird. Byzantine Christianity had long attached importance to beautiful religious icons, whereas Islam (following Judaism) banned artistic representations of religious subjects. In the 720s a movement called Iconoclasm (“image-smashing”) caught on in Byzantium in an effort to recapture God’s favor, on the assumption that God preferred the Muslim rejection of representational art. Traditional religious authorities resisted this, and by the 740s Byzantine Christians were killing each other over iconoclasm almost as quickly as the Muslims were killing them. The Byzantines were too busy fighting each other, the Arabs in the east, and the Slavs in the Balkans to do much for Sicily and Italy. Major Arab raids plundered the island most years between 727 and 753. The 8th century was a real Dark Age in Sicily, as it was in much of the Mediterranean. We know of so little activity on the island that some archaeologists suspect that there must be a technical problem that has prevented us from identifying 8th- century pottery correctly. But that is at most only part of the problem. 250 years of plagues and a century of Arab raids caused population and trade to collapse. Habib ben Ubayda probably would have occupied Sicily in 740 had he not been recalled to fight a Berber revolt in what is now Algeria. Western Christians felt that they were on their own. The Bishop of Rome made a separate alliance with Pepin, king of the Franks, in 754, and from then on distanced himself from the Eastern Church. This finally drove the Byzantine emperor Constantine V to do something about the west. He sent a large fleet in 754, which defeated Arab plans to invade both Sicily and Sardinia. He also confiscated vast papal lands in Sicily. The political/religious situation was even messier in the second half of the 8th century than before, with Muslims, Catholics, and Orthodox Greeks scheming against each other. Constantine V’s intervention stabilized Byzantine rule, and for roughly sixty years there were no major raids. But it was expensive to hold the Arabs off, and by 800 the Byzantines were cutting back, with disastrous results. In 812, only the loss of an Arab fleet in a major storm and a last-minute intervention by the Frankish emperor Charlemagne saved Sardinia and Sicily. In 826 there was a new crisis, this time entirely of Byzantine making. One account of the events says that Euphemios, commander of the Byzantine fleet in Sicily, fell in love with a nun named Homoniza. He forced her to marry him. Constantine, the general in charge of Sicily, was an enemy of Euphemios, and reported the matter to emperor Michael II. Michael ordered Constantine to end the marriage and to cut off Euphemios’ nose. Euphemios, not surprisingly, rebelled. He killed Constantine and occupied Siracusa. His troops declared him emperor. But another general, Balatas, then rose against Euphemios and defeated him in turn. Euphemios now fled to North Africa and offered rule over Sicily to Ziyadat-Allah, if he would agree to keep Euphemios, with his nose intact, as governor. There was heated debate in Cairo over whether it was just to break the treaty with Byzantium. The advocates of jihad prevailed, and in June 827 an Islamic army of Arabs, Berbers, Spaniards, Cretans, and Persians sailed for Sicily. In 1789 a Maltese scholar named Giuseppe Vella published a text called the Arab Diplomatic Codex, which contained two letters dated March 26th and April 2nd 828, from Ahsed-ben-forat, the general in charge of the Arab force that took Marsala, to one Aadelkum- el-Kahbir. The letters told how after capturing Marsala, 20,000 Arabs marched inland and took Alicia after two days of fighting. 918 Arabs were killed, including Ahsed’s son Ahsed Saleiman. Alicia was renamed Saleiman (later corrupted to the form Salemi) in his honor. This story links Salemi directly to Roman Alicia and Elymian Halikyai. Unfortunately, 19h-century philologists proved that the Arab Diplomatic Codex is actually a forgery. Genuine Sicilian texts, from the 16th century on, gloss “Salemi” as a corruption of an Arabic word meaning “place of delights.” We still can’t be sure that Salemi was Alicia, although the NIU excavations may yet come up with proof. The Arab Diplomatic Codex simplifies the story of the Arab conquest. The war was a see-saw affair. There were tensions between the Spanish and African Muslims, and several Byzantine victories. Things were up in the air in western Sicily till September 831, when the Arabs captured Palermo. After that it was clear that the Arabs were there to stay, and over the next 11 years immigrants from North Africa took over most of the land in the Val di Mazara. From 842 on the theater of war shifted to eastern Sicily. The Arab conquest of the west left many Byzantine fortresses in ruins, and a number of towns were rebuilt in typical Arab style. A small part of Salemi between the Jesuit College and via Bastone has a very Arabic-looking street plan, which may go back to the 9th century. Immigrants from North Africa (not actually Arabs, but Islamic Berbers from Algeria) continued to move into western Sicily. By 950, there were probably half a million Muslims living in the Val di Mazara. The area around Salemi and Monte Polizzo was thoroughly Islamic in the 10th through 12th centuries. Arab rule in Sicily was tolerant, so long as Christians and Jews paid their taxes. Palermo grew into a major port under the Kalbite dynasty (940-1052), with a population of perhaps 300,000. Here Arabs from Spain and North Africa exchanged goods with Christians from Italy and France. The Arabs diversified Sicilian agriculture by introducing cotton from Syria, pistachios from Persia, and sugar cane, most often produced in western Sicily by slaves. Arab farmers improved irrigation and extended olive and citrus cultivation. Some experts think that ice cream was invented in Arab Sicily, and perhaps even spaghetti. The growth of Palermo, Mazara, Trapani, and Marsala in the 10th century improved markets for agricultural goods, and farming expanded. The NIU survey found evidence of an expansion of settlement in the Islamic period, and at Monte Polizzo, people returned between 950 and 1050 and built new houses, using the ruins of 1500-year-old Iron Age structures as their foundations. We know that this was part of the general Islamic economic revival, but we don’t know exactly what these new settlers were doing, or what they thought about the ruins that they renovated. By 1050 western Sicily was ethnically and culturally quite distinct from central and eastern Sicily. It was overwhelmingly Muslim, and had large plantations run by slave labor, often producing sugar. In the 11th century the various groups warring over southern Italy (Byzantines, Lombards, Popes, and local powers) started hiring particularly ferocious mercenaries from among the Normans. The Normans were descendants of Vikings who had settled in northern France in 896 and had received legal title there in 911. They only gradually converted to Christianity across the 10th century, and everyone wanted them as mercenaries. They fought and settled in Russia, creating the state of Novgorod; attempted coups in Byzantium; and colonized Iceland, Greenland, and (briefly) Newfoundland. In 1066, Duke William seized the throne of England for himself, and in southern Italy, his relatives realized that they were stronger than the states that employed them. In 1059 Robert Guiscard negotiated his own deal with the Pope and became Duke of Calabria and Apulia. In 1061 he took Messina, and in 1072 Palermo, destroying Arab power. The Normans formed a small but violent ruling class. They destroyed many of the Arab towns in Sicily, and very few physical remains survive from the Arab era. The La Kalsa neighborhood in Palermo, near the train station, has much of the plan and feel of an Arab city, but this isn’t a good area to be wandering round. Despite the Normans’ violence, they came to terms with the Arabs, enough of whom stayed in Palermo to keep it going as a trading center. The small settlement at Monte Polizzo also survived the conquest. The 12th century was one of Sicily’s richest periods. Palermo was the undisputed marketplace of the west Mediterranean, and Norman lords introduced still more new crops. Most Sicilian sugar was cultivated by imported chattels from Slavic lands (from whom our words “slaves” comes), but slavery was in fact growing increasingly rare in the Middle Ages. In its place, the feudal system had been evolving since the 10th century. Feudalism worked on the principle of superior lords delegating control over resources (particularly land and people) to inferior lords, in return for various obligations (particularly military). A minor lord would serve as a knight and provide foot soldiers for the king in return for lands and control over serfs. He might then grant some of these lands and serfs on to other lesser knights, or hold them directly himself. Feudalism produced a complex world, with overlapping chains of authority and loyalty. Often Church and personal ties so fragmented authority that it was hard to speak of a “state” at all. Sicily had an unusual version of feudalism, though. The Normans had conquered southern Italy by putting together alliances of dozens of ambitious lords, each of whom gave his allegiance only in return for a fief of lands and peasants. But when Robert Guiscard overran Sicily, he brought very few lords with him. This made his job harder, but once he got control, he kept more power in royal hands than was possible on the mainland. Sicily was probably the most centralized kingdom in Catholic Europe. An unusual number of Sicilian villages were autonomous, paying taxes to the king, but not belonging directly to a local lord. We don’t know Monte Polizzo’s status, but Salemi was part of the king’s demesne, or personal holding. The Normans built spectacular churches and palaces. You should definitely see the cathedrals at Monreale and Cefalù. Erice preserves a lot of its medieval character, and the Cappella Palatina and Palazzo dei Normanni in Palermo are the masterpieces of Arab-Norman architecture. The church of San Giovanni degli Eremiti in Palermo is a Norman-period building but looks much more Arabic with its red domes. The Castle in Salemi dates back to Islamic times, but the version we see now was built in 1210 (the chains and planks were added after the 1968 earthquake). The castle was officially reopened with a grand ceremony in summer 2002, and in 2003 was open reasonably often. German (Swabian) kings replaced the Norman dynasty in 1194, but the dynastic change was less important than the social, economic, and cultural changes that were under way in the 12th and 13th century. Kings all over Europe were getting more control over their unruly barons and the Church, strengthening the institutions of the central state and capturing a larger share of the revenue flows within their territories. One way to do this was by demonstrating the superiority of state institutions over other kinds of institutions, by doing things that only the state was in a position to do. In 1224 Frederick II founded Europe’s first state university, on the mainland at Naples; and in 1230 he drew up a new constitution, including Europe’s first codification of civil law since Justinian, 700 years earlier. Naples and Palermo had wealthy, cosmopolitan, and educated elites, moving back and forth between French, German, Greek, Italian, Arabic, and Jewish culture. A second way to demonstrate the need for greater state power was by persecuting internal enemies and persuading people to submit to central authority as a way to resist these threats. From England to Sicily there were crackdowns on heretics, Jews, lepers, and homosexuals. The Swabian kings put pressure on Arabs, and after a revolt at Mazara in 1221, expelled all Muslims from Sicily. That was a bad idea. The reign of Frederick II (1197-1250) was in many ways Sicily’s grandest period, but economic decline had already begun. Then in 1270 a Sicilian army brought back a new variety of the plague from North Africa, and a sharp demographic decline began. Tax documents record that Salemi was unable to pay its dues several times in the late 13th century. Monte Polizzo was abandoned again during the 13th century, like many rural sites. Calatafimi near Segesta lasted a little longer, but by 1400 Salemi was virtually the only town in the region. Economic crises brought on political crises, and in 1266 Charles I of Anjou seized the throne in Palermo. This was a pretty good prize for a minor member of the French royal family, but Charles had even bigger things in mind. In 1204 French and Norman crusaders, supposedly on their way to Jerusalem, had sacked Constantinople and divided up most of what remained of the Byzantine Empire among themselves. In 1261 Greeks had recaptured Constantinople, but Charles retained a family claim on the throne. In 1268 he started organizing an army to assert his claim. He thought he had papal blessing—vital for getting legitimacy—but in fact the Pope had sold him out, and made his own deal with the Byzantines in 1274. Charles’ mission evaporated, but in 1281 he got a new papal blessing, and started putting together an army and navy at Messina. His many enemies had been plotting for 15 years to kick him out of Sicily, and were terrified by the new situation. So the king of Aragon, Swabian exiles from Sicily, and King Michael Palaiologos of Byzantium formed a plot together. Michael bankrolled an uprising against the unpopular French rulers in Sicily. On March 30th 1282, the normal ringing of church bells for Vespers in Palermo was instead the signal for a bloodbath. Shouting “Death to the French,” hundreds of Sicilians stormed the palace and slaughtered the court. One result of the Vespers uprising was that a Spanish dynasty from Aragon replaced the French dynasty from Anjou. But there were more important results. The various Popes’ disgraceful double-dealings were exposed, and the resulting decline in the papacy’s already low moral authority seriously weakened the institution. Through much of the 14th century there were two Popes, one in Rome and one in exile at Avignon. By 1418 there were no fewer than three competing Popes; and a century later, Martin Luther began the Reformation. The Sicilian Vespers also provides much of the background to Dante’s Inferno. The economic disasters of 14th-century Europe, culminating in the Black Death of 1347-50, hit Sicily particularly hard. In 1377 all authority collapsed, and after a quarter-century of more bitter wars, the island’s independent status ended. In 1412 it was incorporated as a province of the kingdom of Aragon, under a viceroy.

5.8 Modern Sicily The viceregal system survived till 1713, and Sicily slid from being one of the wealthiest parts of Europe to being one of its poorest. Being a colonized province is rarely a good thing, but in Sicily things were made worse by the fact that Spain itself, after a huge economic boom fueled by American silver in the 16th century, collapsed in the 17th. The Spanish kings tried to milk Sicily for everything they could get. To cap it all, the decision to expel the Jews from all provinces of Spain did as much economic damage as the Norman expulsion of the Arabs. The Spanish kings wanted tax revenue from Sicily and for the island to stay quiet, so they would not have to spend their own cash on policing it. In return, they were prepared to make all kinds of concessions to the Sicilian aristocracy. The Sicilian elite gave up all claims to political power and their long warrior tradition in return for virtually a free hand in governing their estates. During the 16th and 17th centuries a handful of families became virtual kings in their own right, administering vast feudal domains in the countryside. With Spanish support they sucked wealth to the top of society. Their major concerns were competing with one another, through titles and precedence at the Viceroy’s court, and through adorning the towns they controlled with ever more lavish churches and monuments. The most visible buildings in most Sicilian towns (including Salemi) belong to the 17th and earlier 18th century, the so- called “Sicilian baroque.” A huge eruption of Mt Etna and accompanying earthquakes on January 9th, 1693, destroyed 23 towns in eastern Sicily. Some of these towns, like Noto, were quickly and completely rebuilt. If you like baroque churches, you’ll love Noto, where you can see the Sicilian baroque in its most developed form. There are also many fine 17th- and 18th- century palazzi in Palermo. Some of the finest are in the suburb of Bagheria, but it’s best to stay away from here, and stick to downtown. Early-modern Sicilian history is a dismal story of rural poverty and governmental graft and incompetence. Sicily remained one of the most fertile parts of Europe, but nearly all its wealth now came from the export of wheat. The Viceroys were expected to deliver a fixed sum of cash to Madrid every year, and most of them were prepared to sell off control of the wheat trade to Sicilians in return for that amount (plus a little extra for themselves). The Sicilans who controlled the trade would then sell off exemptions from taxation to other nobles, making huge profits; and would impose enormous export taxes on everyone else. The result was constant complaints that large areas of good land were not being farmed, because the taxes on wheat were so high that the peasants would lose money if they brought it to market. The country spiraled into economic disaster and regular famines in the 18th century. The only parts of the island that the Viceroys took much notice of were Palermo and Messina, the two main cities. The urban guilds of workers often rose up in revolt in Palermo, and several times briefly ran the city as a kind of commune, though each time their leaders were co-opted and corrupted. As the wheat export trade declined, access to administrative posts and the bribes that went with them became the main source of aristocratic income, and so the location of the Viceroy’s court was the most important economic fact in Sicily. The city governments of Palermo and Messina planned virtually open wars against each other over this question; the compromise solution was that the Viceroy would spend half each year in each city, requiring him to maintain two complete (but independent and antagonistic) bureaucracies and two Viceregal courts. Every year all the official records had to be shipped from Palermo to Messina and back again (until, inevitably, they were all lost in a storm). The regime’s inefficiency, corruption, and incompetence are mind-boggling: 18th-century Sicily had one of the worst governments in the history of the world. Sicily was a bargaining chip for Spanish, Austrian, French, and Neapolitan kings throughout the 18th century, but by the 19th century this kind of medieval politics was clashing with nationalist sentiment. Feudalism was only legally abolished in Sicily in 1812, by Napoleon’s regime. The first of many revolts against Bourbon rule broke out in 1820; and in 1848, when revolutions rocked virtually every country in Europe, the entire island rose. King Ferdinand II bombarded them into submission. Giuseppe Garibaldi’s successful campaign to unify Italy and drive out all foreign powers began in Sicily. In May 1860, at the head of 1000 Redshirts, he landed at Marsala. His men fought some skirmishes with Bourbon forces, and marched on Salemi, the regional center. On May 14th Garibaldi announced the formation of the Italian state, with himself as dictator, and Salemi as its first capital. He declared himself dictator in what is now Mayor Mastrangelo’s office in Salemi. In March 1861 he handed over power to King Vittorio Emanuele, who ruled from Rome, although the Papal States were only forced to join Italy in 1870. The Museum in Salemi has one of the best collections of Garibaldi memorabilia. This is well worth a visit. So too the battlefield at Calatafimi, where what passed for an army under the Bourbons failed to resist Garibladi’s untrained followers, and confirmed him control of Sicily. 1860 was not the end of Sicily’s troubles, however. In the late 19th century northern Italy was rapidly industrializing, while the south (the Mezzogiorno) remained agricultural. Sicily in particular lost population to the north, and in the 1890s massive emigration to America began. Industrial growth was slow in Sicily, with the main non-agricultural activity being sulfur mining. This was done in horrible conditions, with most of the underground work left to children. The new Italian state introduced compulsory primary schooling and other social schemes, but class hostilities grew ever more severe in Sicily. In 1893-94 workers’ leagues organized the Fasce uprisings, which disrupted food supplies and led to famines. In 1901 there were violent clashes between striking workers and police, and in 1920 there was a full-blown farmers’ rebellion against landowners, in which kidnapping was first used as a political tool. Patterns of landholding were more unequal in Sicily than in any other part of Italy. The Mafia emerged as a major force in these years, being used to break up workers’ organizations and to assassinate state officials. As if these political and economic troubles were not enough, on December 28th, 1908, an earthquake destroyed Messina and killed 10,000 people. The right-wing Christian Democrat party, which was exposed in the 1990s for its close links with the Mafia, was founded in Sicily as the Partito Popolare in 1919. But this was relatively mild by interwar Italian standards. Socialist uprisings shut down Milan and Turin in 1920, and in 1922 Benito Mussolini’s Fascists seized the government in a coup. Political repression was the norm, and in 1930 Mussolini sent a special prefect to try to stamp out the Mafia, who were helping Sicilian landowners fight the Fascists. Some of the main Mafiosi (including the notorious Lucky Luciano) emigrated to America; those who stayed became the main anti-Fascist group in Italy. Sicily was the bane of Mussolini’s existence. People simply ignored his attempts to drag them into the 20th century. He was particularly upset about the southern tradition of hours-long coffee breaks and siestas, and insisted that all state employees (a high proportion of the male population in Sicily) work 9-5. The Sicilians ignored him, and some Mafiosi won a certain amount of respectability by organizing resistance to fascism. Sicily suffered badly during the war. After the Allies chased Rommel out of North Africa in 1943, they bombed Palermo heavily. Parts of the city have still not been rebuilt, 60 years later. In July 1943 US forces landed in western Sicily, on beaches visible from Monte Polizzo, and thanks partly to assistance from Luciano’s contacts, encountered little resistance. The British and Canadians landed in eastern Sicily, where the Mafia was much weaker, and had to fight very hard battles. Postwar Sicily remained very troubled. Sicilian separatists waged an armed rebellion against Rome in 1944-46. Bandits, police, and Mafiosi fought pitched battles and also switched sides in complicated double-crosses, but all three generally united to suppress Communists, labor organizers, and peasant cooperatives. In 1947 the bandit gang led by Salvatore Giuliano fired machine guns into a village May Day celebration at Portella della Ginestra, just outside Palermo, killing 11 people and wounding 56. Giuliano then evaded arrest for 3 years, despite making himself available for dozens of press interviews and photo shoots, meeting with the US Army’s advisor in Sicily (New York Mafia boss Vito Genovese), and spending Christmas Eve 1949 with a police inspector-general. In this complicated political landscape, the Truman Doctrine, an American commitment to helping democratic European governments rebuild and fight Communism, led to very flawed outcomes. Most historians think that by 1950 a covert alliance had formed between the Christian Democracts, police, and the Mafia, with tacit American approval, in which preventing land reform in Sicily was the price of keeping the Communists out of power. In 1968 a devastating earthquake at Gibellina, ten miles east of Salemi, killed 400 people. Half the houses in Salemi were damaged, and more than a third of the population left the area. It took ten years for a new urban plan to be approved, and for work to begin on the lower town. The ruins of Gibellina were turned into a monument (Ruderi di Gibellina). The artist responsible, Alberto Burri, covered part of the old town with a thick layer of white cement, with cracks running through it following the lines of the streets. A new town, Nuova Gibellina, was built in the 1970s, notable for two unusual utopian features of its planning. No block can have more than one commercial outlet, because the architects felt that downtown areas were a tool of subtle capitalist hegemony; and every few blocks there’s a piece of monumental outdoor art. The most famous is Consagra’s “Star of Gibellina,” across the road to Salemi. It also has an excellent Museum of Modern Art. But overall the effect is depressing. The rebuilding of Gibellina, Salemi, and other towns after the 1968 earthquake generated new scandals. There were accusations that politicians with Mafia connections had diverted the emergency funds into secret bank accounts, then delayed the construction so that they could keep the interest on the money. Up till the end of the 1970s the Mafia generally worked closely with politicians (especially Christian Democrats), even offering in 1978 to free Aldo Moro, the Italian Prime Minister who had been kidnapped and was then murdered by the Red Brigade. But in the 1980s a group of families from Corleone, about twenty miles east of Salemi, fought a bloody war with families from Palermo, and took control of organized crime. The Corleonesi increasingly acted independently from the politicians, and were more willing to use violence against the state. In 1982 they murdered the prefect of Palermo. Some state officials reacted by cracking down and getting top Mafiosi—often men who expected that they themselves would become victims of the Corleonesi—to turn state’s evidence. In 1987 a maxi- trial in Palermo sentenced hundreds of Mafiosi to a total of 2600 years of jail time. The Corleonesi retaliated; in May 1992 they blew up the armored cavalcade of Judge Giovanni Falcone on the highway at Capaci, near the Palermo airport, and in July 1992 they blew up Paolo Borsellino as he visited his mother in Palermo. But this time they’d gone too far. A popular backlash toppled the Christian Democrats. Giulio Andreotti, the Prime Minister until 1992, went on trial in 1993 for corruption and in 1995 for murder. New maxi-trials in 1995 and 1996 broke the power of the Corleonesi, and to add insult to injury, Palermo’s airport was renamed Falcone-Borsellino (don’t panic if your tickets say Punta Raisi; that’s the old name). Murders and kidnappings have drastically declined since 1992, though organized crime has hardly gone away. Andreotti was acquitted on both charges in 1999 (I saw him giving commentary on a soccer match on TV in 2001, which was very bizarre), and when in 2000 the UN held its first ever conference on organized crime, it chose the obvious location—Palermo.

6 The excavation so far 6.1 Project history Monte Polizzo is 6 km. northwest of Salemi, in Trapani province, western Sicily (37° 56’ N, 12° 46’ E. The site consists of an interconnected group of ridges. The highest point is 725.9 meters (2359 feet) above sea level. Vincenzo Tusa is the most famous archaeologist of Sicily in the 20th century. There’s a very sympathetic account of Professor Tusa, including his bravery in standing up to organized crime, developers, and politicians, in Gaia Servadio’s book Motya: Unearthing a Lost Civilization (2000). He conducted major excavations all over the island. But when he took over as Superintendent of Archaeology for Palermo province in the 1960s, there was hardly any evidence from inland western Sicily. In 1970 Professor Tusa launched an ambitious campaign of excavations to change this. Monte Polizzo was one the main site that he chose. The residents of Salemi had known that there was an ancient site here at least since the nineteenth century, and had picked up bronze ornaments from graves, building up a small collection in the City Museum in Salemi. But there had been no systematic investigation. In 1970 Professor Tusa excavated several trial trenches, uncovering Iron Age remains, including a substantial part of a 6th-century BC house, just 70 meters from where we’re digging. There things remained for a quarter of a century, until 1996, when Sebastiano Tusa— Vincenzo Tusa’s son, who just moved form being Superintendent of Prehistoric Archaeology for Trapani province to running a new Superintendency, for underwater archaeology—got together with Kristian Kristiansen, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Gothenburg, and then the President of the European Archaeology Association. They founded the Sicilian- Scandinavian Archaeological Project to explore the site and its region in more detail. Fieldwork began two years later (fig. 3.5). Christopher Prescott of the University of Oslo excavated a 6th-century BC building (House I) in 1998-2001, a deeply stratified Iron Age deposit (the Profile) in 1998-99, and a series of soundings on the northwest slope of the acropolis in 1999 (http://www.hf.uio.no/iakk/sicilia and http://www.eoec.org). Sebastiano Tusa excavated Iron Age building remains at the Portella Sant’ Anna in 1999-2000. Michael Kolb of Northern Illinois University surveyed around Monte Polizzo in 1998-2000, excavated a Bronze Age tomb on Montagna Grande in 2000-2001, and in 2001 excavated two trenches in Salemi, finding medieval and 4th-century BC deposits, and some material from the 6th century BC. A trench dug in 2003 recovered parts of a disturbed 5th-century-BC building (http://www3.niu.edu/acad/anthro/programelymi.htm). In 1999 Michael Shanks and Emma Blake led a small group of Stanford students in analyzing the finds from the earlier seasons of excavation, and in 2000 Stanford began excavations on the acropolis. Ian Morris was Director, Trinity Jackman was Assistant Director responsible for excavation, and Emma Blake was Assistant Director responsible for the lab, as well as directing lab activities for the Scandinavian and Sicilian teams. A larger Stanford team returned in 2001, and Brien Garnand joined the staff as Assistant Director responsible for project management. In 2001 Jennifer Trimble also carried out a flux gradiometer magnetometry survey, detecting sub-surface features. A preliminary report on the 2000 season appeared in the Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 46 (2001) 253-271, and one on 2001 will be out this spring in MAAR 47 (2002) 153-98. The report on the 2002 season, by Ian Morris, Trinity Jackman, Emma Blake, Brien Garnand, and Sebastiano Tusa, will appear as MAAR 48 (2003) 243-315, and the 2003 report is currently under review for MAAR 49 (2004). Professor Trimble’s magnetometer survey will be published in Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 48 (2003). Stanford’s excavation at Monte Polizzo is funded by the Tressider Fund in the Department of Classics and the Undergraduate Research Projects program of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education. The American Academy in Rome is a sponsor.

6.2 Summary of results (2000-2003) and goals for 2004 We’ve identified 5 periods of occupation on Monte Polizzo.

I Bronze Age. We have found a dozen fragments of pottery that date to the Bronze Age, probably spread across the period 1500-900 BC. But we haven’t yet found any intact traces of Bronze Age activity. 2 of the Bronze Age sherds came from very near the top of the hill; maybe there were Bronze Age huts there, which have been destroyed by erosion. Or maybe we just haven’t looked in the right place yet. Survey work in 2003 also found a stone tool that could be Palaeolithic, pushing the site’s history back by millennia.

Fig. 6.1 Possible Palaeolithic stone tool, found in survey in 2003

II Archaic. Everywhere there’s been digging on Monte Polizzo, people have found remains of this period, and particularly of the years 550-525 BC (sub-period II.c). In 2004 we’ll continue doing survey and topsoil sampling to try to determine more accurately the size of the settlement. We currently think it’s 15-20 hectares (roughly 20-30 football fields), with a population of maybe 1,000-2,000 people. The earliest intact remains from period 2 belong in the 7th century (sub-period II.a): we’ve found a pit in zone C, perhaps a storage vessel in zone A, and stratified deposits in zone E (see fig. 3.6). It seems that there was quite a large settlement in the 7th century, but it’s been almost entirely destroyed. The 6th-century occupants moved a lot of earth around, cutting new terraces into the hillside and building foundations on bedrock, and so far the only things that survive intact from the 7th century are pits cut into the bedrock and remains that got buried under the town dump in zone E (fig. 3.17). In 2004 we’ll excavate more of the zone E deposits, and try to figure out what’s going on with the possible 7th-century storage vessel in zone A. The 6th-century remains, however, are abundant. The most substantial remains from sub-period II.b (600-550 BC) come from zone C, where in 2001-2003 we excavated one room (C1/1) that had two destruction phases. It produced a lot of material, including numerous complete vessels. There are also remains of badly preserved 6th-century buildings in zone C.

Fig. 6.2 Part of a destruction deposit in room C1/1, c. 575 BC (excavated 2002)

Fig. 6.3 Artifact 2309, an indigenous grayware bowl with stamped decoration, from layer C1.24 in room C1/1. Diameter 14 cm, height 5.3 cm, c. 575. BC. Restoration Anne Haabu, photo Emma Blake

Fig. 6.4 Artifact 2424, an indigenous grayware bowl with incised decoration, from layer C1.24 in room C1/1. Diameter 18 cm, height 6 cm, c. 575 BC. Restoration Anne Haabu, photo Emma Blake.

In acropolis zone A, the large structure A5 was built on a terrace on the west side of the hill, perhaps around 600-575 BC (sub-period II.b; fig. 3.8). At that time, the summit of the hill was apparently open to the elements, and had a coating of white chalk (fig. 3.10). We excavated parts of A5 in 2003, and completing the excavation is the top priority for 2004. We’re not sure yet whether A5 was a precursor of the later 6th-century hut-shrine A1, or whether it had a completely different function. Around 550 BC (sub-period II.c) most of A5 was thoroughly cleaned out and deliberately demolished (fig. 3.9). Round building A1 was set up at the summit of the hill, perhaps reusing building stone from A5 (fig. 3.11). It had a tile roof, which was a novelty in

Fig. 6.5 Building A1, 2003 season Sicily at this time, and inside there were two pits and a clay basin. Outside were an altar (A2) and a small stele, Rituals involving red deer went on around A1, and every so often the remains of antlers and storage vessels were dumped down the hillside (fig. 3.14). A large deposit of ash and antler lies around the north and east sides of A1. We plan to complete excavating this in 2004. In 2002, we found the jawbone, some loose teeth, and a long bone from an adolescent human aged 12-14 years in this deposit, and it may be that one or more special humans were interred here as part of the deer rituals. The open areas around A1 (particularly area A1/4, against the southwest face) were used for sacrificial fires. The terrace west of A1, where building A5 had stood earlier, was now used in connection with A1’s rituals, and a small rectangular room, A6, was built on it. We plan to excavate more of A6 in 2004, and to clarify the stratigraphic relationships between the west terrace and A1. A1 was modified several times between 550 and 525 (fig. 3.12, still within sub-period II.c). The spaces north and east of it were paved, covering over the deposits of ash and antler, but the paving was done in a rather peculiar way, and making sense of that process is an important goal for 2004. About 20 meters north of A1, we excavated an extraordinary concentration of storage vessels in several rooms in 2002 (zone D; fig. 3.15). These probably

Fig. 6.6 Collapsed storage vessel in zone D, c. 525 BC (excavated 2002) date around 525 BC. We want to know the relationship between zone D and zone A. We may widen the excavation toward zone D in 2004, or that may have to wait for a future season. Between 525 and 500 (sub-period II.d), A1 was completely remodeled (fig. 3.13). The northern part of the round building was demolished, and a rectilinear structure, probably open-air, replaced it. The southern part of the old round building was remodeled, apparently forming a low platform against the outside of the new rectilinear structure. This final version of A1, combining curvilinear and rectilinear forms, is unique in 6th-century Sicily; although in more general terms its combination of elements parallels the famous site of Sabucina, where worshippers built a rectilinear shrine in the 7th century, replacing it with two round ones in the 6th century, then building a squarish porch with columns onto one of the round buildings, before replacing them all with a new rectilinear building in the late 6th century. The complex, rapidly changing religious practices at Sabucina and Monte Polizzo are important evidence in the debates over Hellenization. Some of the details of the architectural remodeling remain obscure, and we plan to clarify these in 2004. Most of Monte Polizzo was abandoned by 500 or even 525 BC, but A1 continued to receive visitors across the 5th and 4th centuries BC. We’ve found very small amounts of imported Athenian pottery that definitely dates to these periods. We suspect that the sanctuary remained a sacred spot long after the town was abandoned, just like many of the rural churches that dot the Mediterranean landscape today. III Late fourth century BC. In 2001-2002 we excavated a small rectangular shelter (A3; fig. 3.16) that was built on top of the ruins of A1 around 350 BC. It was poorly preserved, but it included imported Greek pottery and Punic (Carthaginian) artifacts, including a stele, a glass bead, and bronze coins. There were also several limestone dice, and very large amounts of wine

Fig. 6.7 Coins and dice from around building A3, c. 350-300 BC

amphora fragments. It was abandoned around 300. The builders of A3 also widened the flat area around it by laying a clay floor over the terrace where building A5 had stood a quarter of a millennium earlier. This pattern—of reoccupation of rural sites in the late 4th century—is common in western Sicily, and probably has something to do with the expansion of Carthaginian military control. Some archaeologists think that sites like this are watchposts. IV Medieval. Zones B and C were reoccupied around AD 1000, and went out of use by 1150-1200. In zone B a 6th-century-BC room was reconstructed, and a second rectangular room added to it. Both had paved floors and tile roofs. A stone drain was installed, and a short enclosure wall. In zone C a new house (C2) was built, closely following the alignment of some of the 6th-century-BC walls. In 2003 we uncovered extensive remains of walls on the west

Fig. 6.8 Green-glazed bowl from building C2, dating c. AD 1100-1125. Restoration, Anne Haabu; photo, David Connolly slope of the hill, which look like a planned settlement, and in two places in zone F (trenches G105 and G109; fig. 3.6) we excavated small trenches to find out whether these walls are medieval or Iron Age (or both). It looks like they’re medieval, but we’ll do more digging in 2004 to confirm this. We’ll also continue survey work to find the limits of the medieval settlement. At the moment it looks like it was much smaller than the Iron Age town, and was restricted to the west slope of the acropolis ridge. In 2003 the study of seed remains from the zone B medieval buildings produced interesting results. The 6th-century-BC settlement had a mixed economy, based on barley and several different kinds of wheat, and it looks like they weren’t very efficient at cleaning the grains of chaff and weeds. By the 12th century AD, though, the people using the house in zone B seem to have switched over entirely to one kind of wheat, which was very carefully cleaned. This pattern of wheat monoculture aimed at export markets was probably introduced by the Romans in the 3rd century BC, and apparently continued or revived in the Arab-Norman periods, but it contrasts strongly with the 6th-century-BC finds, which seem much more typical of subsistence agriculture. This is important, because one of the major theories about the Elymian population boom and rising living standards in the 6th century BC is that they were involved in a profitable export trade, selling grain to the Greeks. V Modern. We’ve found no traces of activity datable between 1200 and 1950. At that point, the entire hill was plowed in a series of tree trenches that often disturb earlier deposits, and tree saplings planted in the furrows. When we excavate the tree trenches, we regularly find fragments of the flowerpots that the saplings were transported in. In zone A, a small shepherd’s shelter (A4) was built on top of A1 and A3, causing severe damage to the ancient remains. Some people in Salemi say that this was a German observation post in 1943, but the earliest datable remains are coins and beer bottle fragments from the late 1970s and 1980s. The only rabbit bones from the site come from layers associated with A4, along with numerous shotgun cartridges. We suspect that the rabbit hunters who still frequent Monte Polizzo each spring built A5 around 1975-80.

7 Excavation 7.1 Teaching goals By late August, everyone involved in the excavation should have learned the basic field skills:

a) surface cleaning (what we experts call weeding) b) tool use (picks, shovels, wheelbarrows, small picks, trowels, brushes, sieves) c) record keeping (context sheets, notebooks, profiles, plans, taking elevations, manual triangulation, Harris matrix, working with Total Stations, preparation for photography) d) interpretation (stratigraphy, defining deposits, identifying activities)

Some people will be working in the lab, cataloguing and analyzing artifacts , or in more specialized activities (digital recording, study of animal bones, seeds, etc.). Some of these require at least 2-3 weeks of field training before you begin to master them; others require a lot of classroom preparation; and others still call for reading knowledge of Italian and familiarity with previously published archaeological sites in Sicily. The result is a division of labor. Not everyone will be involved every technique and method used on the site, but if you express an interest, we’ll do what we can to provide some experience in:

a) Total Station (on-site digital recording, data entry, computer troubleshooting, support services) b) lab work (sorting pottery, identifying fabrics, joining vessels, restoration, data entry, drawing, photography) c) faunal analysis (identifying and interpreting animal bones) d) flotation (recovery of macrofossils by wet-sieving) e) supervision (overseeing trench excavation)

In section 7, we describe our excavation methods. This section compliments readings from Mortimer Wheeler’s Archaeology From the Earth and Ian Hodder’s The Archaeological Process. You should read the parts of these books listed on the syllabus for “Archaeological Fieldwork in the Mediterranean” and this section before you start digging. People interested in the past have been digging up artifacts and ruins for at least 4,000 years, but modern excavation methods date back only about 150 years. Methods have progressed significantly in that time. The main tendency has been toward standardized methods of digging and recording that allow us to compare results between sites and even between different parts of the world. On the other hand, what works well on a waterlogged site in Denmark may not work well on an arid site in Arizona; a Palaeolithic cave shelter calls for different methods from a medieval cathedral. Every site is different. So even if you’ve dug many times before, read all of section 7.

7.2 Digging 7.2.1 Site formation processes Sites get formed through natural and cultural processes. If Mt Etna erupts and dumps a layer of lava over the towns on its slopes, that’s a natural process; if people then come back and build new houses on top of the lava, that’s a cultural process. Sites are normally formed through a combination of both natural and cultural processes. Excavators identify the layers of soil that accumulate or are removed by these processes, and in so doing, can reconstruct the details history of activity. As an example, we’ll talk about Monte Polizzo acropolis building B1, on the west- facing slope of the hill (see figs. 3.6, 7.1-7.3). Around 575 BC, people developed this part of

Fig. 7.1 Plan of building B1. Black walls date to the 6th century BC; white walls to the 11th and 12th centuries AD

Fig. 7.2 Simplified profile through B1, along line α−α in fig 7.1

the hill by building wall h and a path that curved up the slope of the hill through a door in h (fig. 7.3.a). They built h from limestone blocks, probably quarried from an outcropping 400 meters away. The wall stood on exposed sandstone, the natural matrix of the acropolis. Over the next few years layers of clay-like soil and a small hearth accumulated downslope (i.e., west) of wall h as the area was used. After a while (maybe around 550 BC) they decided to use this space differently. People blocking the door in h and dumped a thick fill of dirt behind it (i.e., east of it), creating a new flat surface. On this surface they installed a drain, which emptied out over wall h, suggesting that they’d now stopped using the area west of the wall for any significant activities (fig. 7.3.b). A few more years went by; and somewhere between 550 and 525 the area changed functions again, and dumped a great heap of ash, storage pottery, and bone (especially deer antler) on top of the drain (fig. 7.3.c). There are good reasons to think this material was dumped from sacrificial fires in zone A. The, around 525 BC, they built the small rectangular one-roomed structure B1/2 on top of this ashy dump (fig. 7.3.d). The whole area was abandoned between 525 and 500 BC, and B1/2 gradually fell down, creating a thick layer of fallen limestone blocks. Dirt blew in around the blocks, and rainwater eroded some of the material downhill, while simultaneously bringing other dirt, stones, and pottery down into our area from the crest of the ridge (fig. 7.3.e). Things stabilized like this for long centuries; shepherds probably brought their flocks up here throughout Roman times, but erosion and deposition found an equilibrium and the site stabilized. Then, around AD 1000—a millennium and a half after B1/2 was left empty—new settlers came here. They must have been able to see some of B1/2’s ruins on the surface (just as, when we came here in AD 2000, we could see a little bit of the medieval ruins on the surface). Rather than quarry new limestone blocks a quarter of a mile away and carry them here, they did the obvious thing, and recycled the Iron Age debris. They dug pits to pull up usable stones, rebuilt the walls of B1/2, and added on B1/1, a brand-new room (fig. 7.3.f). When we dug here in 2001-2002 we found no direct evidence for the stage shown in fig. 7.1.e, because the medieval builders reused all the Iron Age rubble. In the 11th century house B1 fell down, producing a thick layer of broken rooftiles. People rebuilt it, but dug a deep pit down to bedrock outside it (fig. 7.3.g). In the last episode in the area’s medieval history, two new walls were installed over the pit (fig. 7.3.h). During the 12th century building B1 burned down, preserving large amounts of wheat in room B1/1, which was presumably a storeroom. B1 then collapsed again, creating new rubble layers (fig. 7.3.i). Over the next 800 years erosion moved this debris and the topsoil around, just as had happened between 500 BC and AD 1000, until about AD 1950, when the Italian Forestry Service plowed a series of furrows around the entire hill, and planted saplings in them. Fig. 7.3.j shows the area as it was in AD 1999, immediately before we began digging. Since 2000, we’ve disentangled this sequence of natural and cultural processes. An archaeological site is a palimpsest: everything that happens on it adds to the deposits in some places, and takes away from them in others. Not all these traces can be detected by archaeologists, but it’s sometimes surprising just how much we can piece together. The 6th- century builders took limestone from one place and put it in another. Then they swept up ash and sacrificial debris from one part of the acropolis and threw it here, then built a room on top of it. 1,500 years later someone cleaned up all the mess from the house’s collapse and reused it. Then they did the same thing again when their own house fell down. Under other circumstances, someone might have taken away this mass of useless garbage and dumped it

Fig. 7.3 Formation processes of the archaeological record: Monte Polizzo B1

somewhere else, changing the archaeological record again. But as it was, no one did; the house was abandoned in the 12th century. And on the process went, century after century. Our job is to identify every process that has left a trace in the soil, and when these processes have removed evidence of other processes, to infer the existence of what we call “negative deposits.” We pick places to dig because we think they’re going to help us answer the questions we described in section 4 above, then we try to understand what happened there. It takes a long time. Excavation is a cross between an art and a science. It calls for common sense, experience, close attention to detail, tidiness, rigor, stamina, record-keeping, and consistency; but it also calls for imagination, lateral thinking, and risk-taking. There’s nothing in the world quite like it. The principles are extremely simple, and can be picked up in a few minutes, but the practice is difficult, and takes years to learn.

Fig. 7.4 Early stages of the excavation of zone A, 2001. In the foreground is altar A2. To the right, students are excavating a very large deposit of antler and storage pottery; at the center, they are exposing hut-shrine A1 7.2.2 Stratigraphy Stratigraphy—a modern compound of ancient Greek words, meaning literally “layer- writing”—is the key to everything in archaeology. Geologists formalized the principles in the 1850s: in a nutshell, when layers of rock are laid down in the earth’s crust, new layers lie on top of old ones. What matters is not necessarily how deep under the contemporary surface a vein of rock lies, but its position relative to other veins. By the 1870s archaeologists were routinely applying this principle in fieldwork. The word “layer” can be misleading, since most archaeological layers aren’t smooth or flat. You can think of a layer is the result of an event in the history of the site. The event might be something that happened quite quickly—a wall someone built, a hole they dug—or it might be a drawn-out process, like the infilling of a pit through natural processes, or the accumulation of dirt on the floor of an abandoned house. Some layers, like floor surfaces, do tend to be flat and quite even; but pits can be small and deep. Layers can be any shape or size. Each layer gets its own layer number (explained below) and is recorded on its own context sheet(s) (see section 7.3 below). Fig. 7.5 is a classic example, from Mortimer Wheeler’s Archaeology From the Earth (p. 71, fig. 11). In the top picture, a coin from 100 years ago,

Fig. 7.5 Stratigraphy and elevation: Wheeler’s example from Pakistan (Archaeology From the Earth p. 71, fig. 11)

another from 1,800 years ago, and a seal stone from 5,000 years ago are all found at the same elevation. If we just sliced off layers of dirt, we’d have no way to tell what the relationship was between them, or how to date the two walls. The bottom picture shows the superimposed layers that Wheeler identified as he dug, so that he could tell right away that the coins of the 20th and 2nd centuries AD were so far under the surface of the earth because people had dug deep pits in those periods, one for a tree and one for a wall foundation; while the 3rd-millennium-BC seal stone was found in association with a wall of the same date. When we dig, we identify the layers in the archaeological record. We number them, following a system called Continuous Trench Numbering. Within each trench, you start with layer ← (ALWAYS put a circle around layer numbers in your notes, so they’re easy to spot). When you identify a new layer you give it the next number in sequence. Three important points to remember about Continuous Trench Numbering: i) Each trench has its own single continuous sequence of layer numbers. DO NOT start a new sequence for each trial trench within the larger trench (see section 11 for definitions of terms); start with ←, usually a tree trench or the topsoil, and give a new number to every new deposit that you identify. ii) As a trench expands in area, it often happens that a newly exposed layer in fact comes later in the stratigraphic sequence than a layer that’s already been exposed and been given a number in another part of the trench (e.g., the newly identified layer → is in fact later than layer ↑). DON’T WORRY about this. Just keep going ahead with the numbering, making sure that the fact that → is later than ↑ is clearly marked on the records. iii) If you’re digging in a trench that was begun in earlier seasons, start numbering the layers at the point that the last team stopped; i.e., if they reached layer ×, you start with ∝.

As you excavate the layers, you fill out context sheets and a notebook, draw plans and stratigraphic profiles, and produce Harris matrices (all explained in section 7.3 below). You’ll keep separate everything we found within each layer separate from everything found in other layers, carefully labeling the bags containing the finds from each layer. We then use the finds from each layer to date the deposits. We have to be able to place every single find within its unique stratigraphic context, and use the Harris matrix to lock every artifact into position relative to every other artifact from the site. Reading the stratigraphic sequence is the most important thing you do, and they key to archaeology. If there’s a problem with the stratigraphy, everything else—pottery analysis, digital recording, faunal analysis—is undermined. Nothing could be easier in principle than stratigraphy, but in practice it’s tricky. Stratigraphic excavation (as distinguished from simply digging a big hole and keeping the things we find in it) was developed first in the wet soils of northern Europe and the east coast of North America. In these conditions, layers often have strikingly distinct colors. If someone digs a hole for a post in white chalk, the wooden post decays leaving a black stain, which any fool can spot. Further, soft wet soils can be removed with small tools like trowels and brushes, making it easy to keep track of what’s going on. In the semi-arid Mediterranean climate, things are different. The soil is baked hard and dry, and colors are bleached. Once in a while, we have clearly colored deposits (especially when we have ash and burning); and generalizing broadly, the medieval and modern deposits tend to produce dark gray-brown soils at Monte Polizzo with a lot of silt, while the Iron Age levels tend to be yellowish, with a lot of clay. But most of the time you’ll be trying to see a difference between one deposit that’s brown, hard, dry, and full of rocks and another deposit that’s brown, hard, dry, and full of rocks. And because the soil’s so hard and rocky, north European excavation techniques relying on trowels generally don’t work well. To make things worse, we never know what shape a layer is until we excavate it. It could be thick or thin, flat or sloping, filling a whole trench or just part of it. At Monte Polizzo, the ground slopes steeply in unexpected ways, and even layers that were originally flat often slope because of the differential erosion of the soft conglomerate rocks. Because of these difficulties, some archaeologists will say that there’s no such thing as stratigraphy in the Mediterranean world. This is nonsense: if there were no stratigraphy, it’d be impossible to explain how the sites got formed. What they mean is that they’ve never excavated carefully enough to distinguish the stratigraphic sequence on their sites. People who feel this way often excavate by arbitrarily removing 5- or 10-centimeter thick slices of dirt, which they call “spits.” Doing this means giving up on distinguishing the kind of sequence shown in fig. 7.5 above. It’s quick, but it loses too much information. We don’t work this way. If we did, we wouldn’t have made sense of the complex sequences we’ve uncovered. Instead, we rely on every little clue—soil color, texture, granularity, different kinds of inclusions, the direction the inclusions slope—to tell the layers apart. This is where the real skill comes in. No amount of theory can prepare you for actually confronting the hard dirt and jumbled rocks that make up an archaeological site. 7.2.3 Organization The entire acropolis has been divided into a 5 x 5 meter grid, denoted by numbers running from north to south, and letters from west to east (see fig. 3.7). Every 5 x 5 meter grid square has a unique letter/number code (e.g., M99, L108, etc.). The corners of the grid squares are marked on site by large orange stakes. The stake at the SW corner of each square has a label with that square’s code. These stakes are very important; if you dislodge one of them, TELL THE DIRECTOR IMMEDIATELY. We begin digging by treating each grid square as an independent unit. Following the method advocated by Wheeler, we excavate a 4 x 4 meter trench within each 5 x 5 meter grid square, leaving 1-meter wide balks so we can draw profiles. The 4 x 4 meter trench is always

Fig. 7.6 How to label the corners of a new 5 x 5 meter trench placed in the southwest corner of the 5 x 5 meter grid square, so the balks are always along the north and east faces. Label the corners of the trench as marked in fig. 7.6: the NW corner of the 5 x 5 m. grid square is A, the NE corner B, the SW corner C, and the SE corner D. In the actual 4 x 4 m trench, the NW corner will be E, the NE corner F, and the SE corner G. NEVER VARY THIS UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. Before digging you’ll fill out a “starting sheet,” on which you draw a measured, scale plan of the shape of your trench, label all reference points, and write their elevation above sea level. As you lay out smaller trial trenches, carry on through the alphabet. If you end up with more than 26 points, start again with AA, BB, CC, etc. Before digging, get elevations for all named points (see section 7.3.6 on taking elevations). If you’re in any doubt about what elevations to get, consult the assistant director or director. A team of excavators is assigned to each trench. Normally there’s an experienced supervisor with 2 or 3 students who’ve either not dug before, or only dug once or twice. The supervisor is responsible for a lot of the hands-on decisions, for filling in the context sheets, keeping the notebook, and deciding when to get extra advice. By the end of the season all students should have learned the basic skills, and be able to run the trench themselves for at least one day. The grid system makes it easy to know where we are in the larger plan and to control the digging process. But people in the past rarely laid out their settlements on a convenient north-south plan. So, depending on just what we find, we often move off the grid as the excavation progresses. We might subdivide a trench into smaller trial trenches, so that we have profiles in different places from the balks between the grid squares, in order to solve particular problems. Other times, we combine parts of several grid squares to make a single trench. For example, room B1/2 runs northeast-southwest, cutting across grid squares L107, L108, M107, and M108 (see fig. 7.1). It would be very confusing to excavate this single room in four separate trenches, and it would also leave us with balks at peculiar angles to the walls. So we treat B1/2 as a single unit. In 2004, we’ll be using both on- and off-grid trenches. Some of the rooms in A5 will form individual excavation units, while north and south of A5, where we haven’t dug and don’t know yet what’s under the surface, we’ll start with 5 x 5-meter trenches. We’ll treat A1 as a unit, but use squares in the paved area north and east of it. People digging in zones E and F will use rectangular trenches, because we’re not excavating rooms, but will be off-grid—in zone F because the trenches are placed to give us dates for particular walls, and in zone E because there’s only one angle we can use to squeeze our trench between the trees.

7.2.4 Tools There’s a lot of theory and gadgets in excavation, but moving dirt is still job #1. We have highly formalized ways of moving it, but if you do this basic job badly, then no amount of micromorphology, flotation, and quantification can make it right again. So knowing which tool to use for which task and how to use it best are among your main challenges. The basic rule is the same for all these tools, though: we removing one layer at a time, reversing the sequence in which they were deposited—starting with the most recent activity on this spot, and working back to the very earliest thing of which any traces survive. You start removing the layer that’s exposed; as soon as you encounter anything that looks different from that layer, you stop. 7.2.4.1 Heavy tools: big picks, shovels, wheelbarrows People living on Monte Polizzo built big houses out of stone and mudbrick. When these fell down, they produced thick deposits over large areas. A typical house produces several tons of debris (as a rule of thumb, one cubic meter of dirt weighs about one ton). Sometimes erosion has carried away some of this debris; for those of you working down the slopes, it may have piled still more earth on top of the ruins. We could remove the many tons of topsoil with dental tools; but since an excavation on the scale of ours averages out at a cost of over $4,000 per workday, that would be a bad use of resources. We’d end up knowing an awful lot about the topsoil, but not answering the questions we listed in section IV. The only effective way to remove these deposits (what we call “open” deposits, because they are constantly moving around), and to get to the sealed floor deposits produced by deliberate activity (“closed” deposits), is with heavy tools. The big pick (Italian, piccone) is a powerful and efficient tool. Its function is to loosen soil that can then be removed with a shovel. You don’t need to put much effort into using the big pick: letting it fall under its own weight breaks up the soil. You should very rarely lift the pick head above shoulder height or put your whole effort into the down swing. A pick blade driven hard into the ground can penetrate 10 cm., and you don’t know what’s lying that far under the surface. Use the pick to go down no more than 3-5 cm. at a time, working evenly and steadily across the whole area being excavated. It’s best to work moving forward, so that you don’t spread the loosened soil across areas that you haven’t yet picked. So long as the pick is sharp, the broad blade is usually more effective than the pointed end.

Fig. 7.7 Stanford Archaeology major Andrea Amico using the pick in zone E, with Colleen Ferrand-Andrew at right (2003)

After a single sweep across the area with the big pick, shovel up the loose dirt (shovel = pala; to shovel = spalare). Break up the clods to avoid throwing artifacts away. One member of the team look through the dirt as a second one shovels it. The third should be the pick person, who’ll rest while the other two shovel. If you have four people in the trench, use two shovelers and one sorter to one picker. When possible, you can save time by shoveling the loose dirt directly into a wheelbarrow. Often, though, you’ll need to put it into a bucket that someone carries to a wheelbarrow or directly to a spoil tip. Either way, don’t throw the soil through the air from the shovel to the receptacle. Tip it in gently. Throwing soil tips over wheelbarrows, meaning that you have to shovel the dirt up all over again. There’s a fine art to shoveling well. Use your knee to push the shovel whenever you can. When you empty the shovel, use your shoulders rather than your lower back. Turn the shovel over and use it to scrape the loose soil into heaps before shoveling it up. This is hard on the stomach muscles but more efficient than trying to shovel up thinly scattered loose dirt. Even when you’re working through topsoil or washed out mudbrick, always sweep all the loose soil up into a dustpan after you’ve shoveled up and before you begin picking again. Loose soil makes it impossible to see what’s happening in your trench, and it’s the prime cause of mixing layers—the ultimate archaeological sin. Never, under any circumstances, start a new pass with the pick while there’s any loose soil remaining in the trench. Don’t forget this. Sweeping (brush = spazzola; to sweep = spazzare or scopare) is the most important part of the digging process: the mantra is keep your dirt clean. Don’t overfill wheelbarrows or buckets because you’ll end up losing control and tipping them over. This is especially true if you have to use a ramp to get to the spoil tip. Heap the dirt at the front end of the barrow, over the wheel: it’s easier to push that way. When you start moving a wheelbarrow, life the handles using your shoulders or knees, not your back. Often rocking the barrow backward and forward slightly makes it easier to get it moving. Be sure to rotate barrow and bucket personnel; this is the most tiring activity.

7.2.4.2 Light tools: small picks, trowels, brushes The big pick and shovel should only be used when you’re confident that you’re working in thick deposits of topsoil, mudbrick, and rubble collapse from walls. Keep brushing up constantly so that you can be sure what’s happening. As soon as you have any doubts, switch to lighter tools that give you more control and sensitivity to nuances in the soil. The small pick (piccola piccone) is a primary tool in Mediterranean archaeology. To people used to excavating in wet northern climes, it looks unsubtle, but in the hands of an expert, it’s not. Because it’s very light, it requires more forearm effort than the big pick. If you just let it fall under its own weight, nothing much will happen. So put some effort behind it, but only take off just a centimeter or two at a time. As with the big pick, work systematically, moving forward, so you’re not spreading loose dirt over the area where you’re about to dig. The big pick and shovel are stand-up tools; the small pick, trowel, and brush are squat- down tools. Much of the distinction is instinctive, but remember that the small pick, trowel, and brush are squat-down not sit-down tools (see fig. 7.9). If you sit on your behind to use these tools you can’t get much power to them. Nothing much will happen as you use them, and you’ll get bored. You’ll have no fun, plus you’ll make mistakes. It’s also harder to move from one place to another if you’re sitting, because you have to make the effort to get up; so you’ll tend to dig too long in one spot, messing up the evenness of the dig. Don’t sit down; squat. Squatting can be hard on the knees, so if you have any trouble, use a pad to kneel on, and get up and stretch a lot. But from a squatting position you’ll be able to control what you’re doing a lot better and move around more easily.

Fig. 7.8 Small tools in use: excavation of trench K100, 2003

There are two rules: don’t dig holes and—again—keep your dirt clean. The first rule means work evenly and systematically, taking off the layer you’re working in steadily across the entire area that it’s visible. If you sit on the ground and pick between your feet you can’t do this. If you dig down very far in one place you can’t see what you’re getting into and you’ll probably mix layers. The second rule means sweep up constantly. It’s every bit as important when you’re using the small pick or trowel as when you’re using the big pick. Almost all serious mistakes happen when someone hasn’t swept up and can’t see what’s going on. Never use the small pick for more than one minute without sweeping all the loose dirt into a dustpan. Usually 30 seconds is about right. The trowel (cazzuola) is the most versatile tool in the excavator’s kit. You can take off very small amounts of dirt very precisely, but you can also focus a surprising amount of power at the trowel’s edge. When you’re actually working in floor deposits or around any concentrations of artifacts you’ll use the trowels or even more precise instruments—dental picks, knives, or even the point of a nail or pin. But usually the trowel will do just fine. Unlike the big and small picks, you use the trowel by scraping the surface toward yourself. This means that you spread the loose soil over areas that you haven’t yet touched; and that means that you have to sweep up even more often. When troweling, keep your work area spotless. The long edge of the trowel is the most effective part of the tool, giving you greatest control. Avoid the temptation to jab the point of the trowel into the ground breaking off the soil in lumps. And as with the picks, work from the known to the unknown: start at the point where you’re sure you know what the deposit is, and keep going until something changes.

Fig. 7.9 Stanford graduate student Lela Urquhart using a dental tool to clean around a jawbone in a late 6th-century-BC sacrificial deposit just west of building A1. Note the other essential tools—trowel, small brush, buckets for different finds from the layer (2002 season)

Fig. 7.10 Sweeping in building A5, 2003

Finally, the brush. Cleanliness is better than godliness in excavation. As we keep saying, sweep up constantly. The most effective way to sweep is with small, rapid, flicking movements from the wrist. If you press the brush against the loose dirt using long strokes, you’ll just mash the dust into the ground, covering everything with a thin layer of loose material, and making it very difficult to see what’s going on. There’s a huge difference between the results when an experienced excavator brushes and what a novice does, so watch how other people use the brush. When you’re using the brush properly it’s quite tiring, especially on the forearm. The best brushes are straw whisk brooms, about 6-8 inches long, held together with stitching and a steel cap. We have to import these from the US. In Sicily we can only get broom heads, which work OK, but not as well.

7.2.4.3 The sieve When you excavate floor deposits, pits, or any other important feature, you’ll pass all the soil that you remove through a 5 mm. mesh screen. This is laborious work, but it means we can control our recovery patterns: in all the deposits that we sieve (setaccio; to sieve = setacciare), we know that we’ve recovered everything over 5 mm. across. We’ll also recover a lot of things that are smaller than 5 mm., but with these tiny objects we can’t be sure what the recovery rate is. This becomes very important when we want to quantify our data. We could pass the soil through an even smaller mesh, but with the kind of soil we’re dealing with, full of chips of limestone and sandstone, the time it’d take would be out of all proportion to what we’d gain from doing it. Similarly, we could pass all soil from the dig (including the topsoil) through the sieves, but the results wouldn’t justify the time it took. Screening all closed cultural deposits through a 5 mm. mesh is standard practice in many parts of the world, making it easy to compare results without fear of inter-observer errors in data collection.

Fig. 7.11 Sieving in zone A, 2001, with a view toward Mozia

NEVER throw buckets of dirt into the sieves. They’re not built to withstand that.

7.2.5 Sampling Some of our main questions depend on analysis of bones, seeds, and pollen. We recover all possible bones (one of the reasons sieving is so important is that it allows us to be precise about which bones we’re definitely finding, and which bones we may be missing), even the tiniest fragments. But some very small bones (especially from fish) and carbonized seeds are too small for the naked eye to detect easily, and we have to rely on other techniques.

Fig. 7.12 Flotation in Salemi, 1999

The most important of these is flotation (also known as wet-sieving). Dr Hans-Peter Stika of Hohenheim University will set up the flotation machine in Salemi, and some of you will get a chance to work with him on the flotation of the samples and sorting the finds. The flotation machine separates soil into a heavy fraction of stone and pottery and a light fraction, containing tiny bones and seeds. Whenever we are excavating a deposit particularly likely to contain these materials, such as a hearth, pit, garbage dump, or the inside of a closed pot, we take samples of the soil back for flotation. Since the 1980s archaeologists have argued passionately over whether it’s better to do bulk samples, taken from a single location within a layer), or scatter samples, made up by taking a series of small “pinches” from several places in a layer. Because of low densities of macrofossils at Monte Polizzo, we’re effectively forced to combine both methods: the typical sample size is 10 liters (roughly 2 large plastic bags), which regularly means bagging all of the soil from the layer. When dealing with large deposits, it’s best to take multiple bulk samples (e.g., 5 samples of 2 liters each). Our flotation program has already produced important results, including the first botanical evidence for cultivation of wine grapes in Sicily, dating c. 550-525 BC.

Fig. 7.13 Carbonized grape pips from Monte Polizzo, 550-525 BC. Scale = 1 mm.

We also take much smaller samples for pollen analysis (palynology). Pollen samples have to be collected very carefully, and there’ll be a tutorial on this at the start of the season. Scatter samples normally work best for pollen, because the distribution of pollen is rarely homogenous throughout a layer. If funding allows, Dr. Kari Hjelle of Bergen University in Norway will give lessons in collecting pollen samples at the beginning of the season. In 2002 we began a program of micromorphology. This technique was developed in the 1950s, but only became practical in the field in the mid-1990s. It involves taking out chunks of earth roughly 10 x 10 x 6 cm., and extracting from these thin sections cutting through the layers of earth. Back in the lab these are made into slides and examined under microscopes. This way we can study stratigraphic features too subtle for the naked eye to see. Micromorphology can often tell us whether a particular layer formed gradually, say by dirt and water dripping into an abandoned room, or abruptly, by a deliberate dump of earth. This has already given us important information. It can show us phosphate particles in the soil, telling us whether animals were stabled in a room. Often it can tell us whether a space was roofed or open to the sky, and whether an earth floor was repeatedly repaired.

7.2.6 Interpretation As noted in section 7.1 above, one trend in excavation techniques since the 1850s has been toward standardization, increasing objectivity and making comparisons between sites and regions easier. But you may have noticed that a lot of the techniques described in section 5.2, from decisions about which tools to use to decisions about whether to sieve the soil or take pollen samples, depend on prior interpretive decisions. Only those excavators with the skill to know whether they’re digging a floor deposit will know that they should be changing the methods they’re using; the less skilled the excavators, the less likely they are to use the appropriate methods, and the less likely to realize that they’ve made an error. As a result, archaeologists sometimes talk about “interpretation at the trowel’s edge”— digging involves a constant process of rethinking what you’re doing. Only experience can really equip you to do this, though there are some things you can do to improve your interpretive skills. Keeping the digging area clean is one of them: if there’s loose soil no one can interpret the layer, and if the trench’s balks are dirty and crooked no one can read the stratigraphic sequence. Another big thing is to look at abandoned buildings (fig. 7.14). People with backgrounds in construction are often very good archaeologists, because they know what happens to buildings when they collapse or burn down. Salemi is full of abandoned houses of somewhat similar architectural types to the ones we’re digging up. Look at how the rubble and dirt accumulate, and try to relate it to the site.

Fig. 7.14 Abandoned building on the outskirts of Salemi, 2002

7.3 Recording 7.3.1 Introduction The main differences between looters (what the Sicilians call tombaroli or clandestini) and archaeologists are that the clandestini find all the good stuff, and the archaeologists write a lot of things down. Careful recording is the defining feature of modern excavations.

Fig. 7.15 Stanford freshman Erinn Evans recording in trench N107 (2002). Jacqui Martin (also of Stanford) and Mauro LoCastro (of Salemi) are excavating a medieval pit

We have two interconnected recording systems: digital and paper-based. The digital system revolves around two Leica Total Stations, which record find spots and stratigraphic information with a margin of error of less than 0.5 millimeters. This is supplemented by a more extensive GPS (Global Positioning System) survey of surface features, with a margin of error of less than 2 centimeters. The data are then displayed and can be queried in the ArcView GIS (Geographic Information System) program. The paper system is controlled directly by the excavators, and revolves around standardized “context sheets” and a centralized stratigraphic (“Harris”) matrix. These are supplemented by profile and plan drawings, photographs, and lab analyses of artifacts, faunal and floral samples, etc. The two systems meet when the context sheets, hand-drawn profiles and plans, and other data are digitized and entered into ArcView. The artifact database prepared in the lab will also be linked to ArcView, and the entire recording system will be available on the web in an XML (extensible markup language) format through a project run by the Alexandria Archive Institute of San Francisco (www.alexandriaarchive.org). Bengt Westergaard from Gothenburg and Chris Sevara from Tucson run the digital system and provide on-site training in its use. They take three-dimensional recordings for special finds, walls, trench locations, etc. These can then be integrated into other GIS databases. But the Total Stations don’t record stratigraphic information. By itself, the digital system produces only the kind of information in Wheeler’s upper diagram in fig. 7.4 above. They’re incredibly accurate and very fast, but their information only means anything when fully integrated into its stratigraphic context. We spend the rest of this section explaining how this record works, and particularly the use of context sheets (fig. 7.17). You’ll be directly controlling this system yourselves.

Fig. 7.16 Digital gurus Chris Sevara (left) and Bengt Westergaard (right) using the high-precision GPS, 2002 7.3.2 Recording sheets The recording sheets are the backbone of the stratigraphic recording system. This cannot be emphasized too strongly. These standardize recording within and between trenches. They’ll be the first place to look for all scholars interested in the site in the future. The trench supervisor’s major responsibility is filling out the recording sheets, but the process of filling them out correctly must involve consultation, involving everyone digging in the trench, the assistant director, and the director. The trench supervisor should also keep a notebook discussing interpretation and problems, but the notebook is secondary to the recording sheets. There are blank examples of the recording sheets at the end of this handbook. The recording sheets should either be with you on site or in the project lab. Never take them anywhere else to work on them. We need to be able to get access to them immediately at all times, either on site or in the lab. As soon as you get back to the dig house at the end of a day, put the sheets in the designated place in the lab. Before going up to the site in the morning, go back to the designated place and get your sheets. If they’re not there, ask the director right away. There are two types of recording sheets: context sheets, relating to a specific layer, and summary sheets, relating to the whole trench. There are three types of context sheets (“normal” context sheets, continuing sheets, and structural sheets), and four types of summary sheets (starting sheets, small finds lists, closing sheets, and final Harris matrix sheets). Each type of recording sheet has a specific job to do, so fill in everything on every sheet. At the end of the season, arrange your recording sheets in their folder in the following order:

1 Starting sheet 2 Context sheets, continuing sheets, and structural sheets, arranged by order of layers. Begin with layer ←. First you put the regular context sheet, then the continuing sheets (if there are any), arranged by order if the dates you filled them out. The repeat for layer ↑; then layer →; and so on. If a layer is a wall, it should have a structural sheet instead of a normal context sheet. 3 Small find list 4 Closing sheet(s) 3 Final Harris matrix

In the rest of section 7.3.2, we describe how to fill out the sheets. It’s very important that you follow these instructions exactly.

7.3.2.1 STARTING SHEETS Before you even begin digging, fill out one of these. First, fill in the boxes in the top row. The left-hand box says “Monte Polizzo Acropolis 200_”; remember to enter “4” at the end of the year number. If you don’t know what zone and trench you’re in, ask! Leave the last box blank. When you’re happy that the sheet’s complete, ask the assistant director or director to check it over, then s/he will sign and date this box to show that everything’s correct. Don’t do any digging till the sheet has been approved. Draw a measured plan of your trench at 1:50 scale (2 cms on the plan = 1 meter on the ground). Assign a capital letter to each corner and write in their elevations above sea level. During the season, as you subdivide your trench into smaller trial trenches, come back to the starting sheet and mark the position of each trial trench on it, labeling the corners and entering the elevation at that point on the modern ground surface. As you uncover walls in your trench during the season, again come back to the starting sheet and sketch them in, marking on each the lower-case letter that has been assigned to it and its layer number, in a circle. Finally, still before you start digging, ask the director for pre-excavation photos of your trench, and enter the numbers on the sheet.

7.3.2.2 “NORMAL” CONTEXT SHEETS Before you do any digging, begin a normal context sheet for your first layer. Fig. 7.17 shows you a completed example from building A5 in 2003. If you’re beginning a new trench your first layer will be layer ←; if you’re excavating a trench that was worked on in previous years, you’ll continue the already-established numbering sequence. You must consult the previous season’s records and check with the assistant director or director before starting digging to make sure you’re starting at the right point. Fill out the boxes in the top row, following the same rules as for the starting sheet, with the following additions: (i) You may just be excavating part of your trench, rather than the whole area. We call such smaller units “trial trenches,” and label them with letters of the alphabet, in the lower case. Always use the lower case, to distinguish trial trenches from trench corners, which are labeled in the upper case (i.e., you have Tta [trial trench a], but point A). (ii) Enter the layer number. ALWAYS enter this in a circle: whenever you write anything about a layer, always circle the number, so it’s easy to see. Remember that we use the Continuous Trench Numbering system. Your trench has a single continuous sequence of layer numbers; don’t start new numbers for each trial trench.), (iii) In the top right hand corner of the context sheet, write the trench number and the layer, for quick reference (e.g., K100 ±, as in fig. 7.17). Then fill in as much of the rest of the sheet as possible before starting to dig; anything that can’t enter before digging should be entered as soon as possible. DON’T write the information in your notebook with the intention of transferring it to the context sheet later on. The context sheet is the primary recording location. The assistant director and director will ask to see the sheets on a regular basis; if information’s missing they’ll ask you to stop digging until all sheets it caught up. Never allow the sheets to fall behind. Never postpone filling in information. You can always change it if there’s a mistake. Never dig if there’s information missing from the context sheets that can be entered right away.

Fig. 7.17, on pp. 76-77: Completed context sheet for K100 layer ±, filled out by Stanford graduate student Kathryn Lafrenz, 10 July 2003. Note that every part of the sheet is filled out. The drawings are clear and simple; the writing is legible. The stratigraphy box has been filled in, and there’s a straightforward interpretation of the deposit. There are plenty of elevations, and their locations are clearly marked in the sketch plans. The plans also indicate the corners of the trench, which way is north, and have a scale.

Then fill out all the sections of the context sheet, as follows:

7.3.2.2.1 Description Here you describe the actual soil that you’re excavating. You need to respond to ten questions about it. 1. Color. At Monte Polizzo, this is usually some variation on “brown,” but the color can be light, dark, consistent, or inconsistent; gray-brown, yellowy-brown, reddish-brown, etc. Occasionally it’s a strikingly different color—white, black, red, gray, etc. In the 1970s archaeologists were fond of using Munsell color charts, originally designed for geologists, to classify soil color (so much so that they even introduced the verb “to Munsell” something), but Mediterranean soils change color as they dry out, producing enormous inter-observer error, if people Munsell the soil at slightly different moments. Rather than creating a spurious feeling of precision, simply enter a brief description. The color description must include three elements: modifier, hue, and color (e.g., dark grayish brown). Choose from the following list:

Modifier Hue Color light pinkish pink mid reddish red dark yellowish yellow brownish brown greenish green blueish blue grayish gray black white

Sometimes a straightforward modifier-hue-color description will do; but sometimes the layer consists of several colors, like the “Oreo” soil created by some mudbrick collapses, where yellow clay contains many flecks of darker brown clay. When a layer extends beyond your trench into someone else’s, consult with the other trenches and make sure you’re all using the same descriptions. This applies to all of sections I.1-4 on the context sheet. 2. Composition. Basically, what’s the soil like? At Monte Polizzo, there are five basic soil types: humus (i.e., topsoil), sand, clay, silt, and ash. The easiest way to establish soil composition is to rub a little of it between your thumb and forefinger. As a rough guide, humus is dry and crumbles into chunks; sand is gritty; clay is sticky, and can sometimes be rolled into little balls; silt feels smooth; and ash will virtually disappear, leaving a fine coating on your fingers. Most deposits combine several types of particles. Where there are two constituents, the first word is the modifier, and the second word is the major element. So, when a layer consists of clay mixed with a little ash, it is ashy clay. When it is mainly ash with a little clay, it is clayey ash. You may have sandy humus, silty sand, etc.—basically any combination of humus, sand, clay, silt, and ash. Where there are three (or more) constituents, give a rough estimate of the percentage of the soil that each element makes up—e.g., 70% sand, 20% silt, 10% ash. You can estimate this by spreading some of the soil on a sheet of paper and dividing it up into its constituent parts. Remember that overly fine distinctions aren’t always useful; most of the time, a two- constituent description is adequate. Again, when a layer continues into other trenches, consult with the other trenches to make sure you all describe it the same way. 3. Stones. Like many Mediterranean sites, the soil at Monte Polizzo is full of rocks. The hill is made up of alternating layers of limestone and a sandstone conglomerate. The parts of the site where we’re digging are conglomerate sediments formed 11-6 million years ago. The conglomerate has a sandy matrix, binding together large, water-rounded boulders. You can see the conglomerate well in the road cuts that we drive up to the site. On the context sheets, always refer to these rounded boulders as “pebbles.” People built their houses from limestone slabs, almost certainly quarried from an outcropping 400 meters NE of zone A. On the context sheets, always refer to these flat limestone blocks as “slabs.” Often, the major contrast between layers is the stones in them. Many layers include both pebbles and slabs. On the context sheet, circle pebbles and/or slabs if either/both are present. The circle one of the three modifiers many/some/few, and one of the three measurements >20 cm/10-20 cm/<10 cm for the typical size of the pebbles and/or slabs. If you have other types of stone (unusual at Monte Polizzo) say so. Again, when a layer continues into other trenches, consult with the other trenches to make sure you all describe the stones the same way. 4. Compaction. That is, how solid is the layer? Use the following terms:

(a) Loose: crumbles easily in the hand (typical of ash, sand, fill of tree trenches) (b) Friable: crushes under gentle pressure (typical of humus) (c) Compact: crushes under moderate pressure, but resistance is distinctly noticeable (typical of humus deposits under the surface topsoil) (d) Hard: strong pressure required in the hand to crush the soil (typical of clay that’s dried out) (e) Very hard: very difficult to crush with the hand (typical of clay floors that have dried out, and burned clay)

Here too, check with other trenches when the layer extends beyond your balks. 5. Thickness. This is easy if the layer is a uniform deposit across the trench, but normally it’s not. For example, a tree trench might be very deep in the middle, thinning till it disappears at the edges. Give as much detail as you think someone who’s never been to the site will need to figure out what you’re talking about. 6. Shape in plan. Most layers don’t fill the entire trench, so what shape is it? Is it round, oval, linear, square? Keep the description simple. 7. Top elevations. When you begin excavating a new layer, you need get its precise elevations. Normally you’ll use the Dumpy Levels that you’ll be trained on at the beginning of the season (see section 7.3.6 below). Usually you need to take multiple readings, because the layers are rarely flat. Consult with the director and assistant director about how many elevations to take, and where, until you feel confident in making these decisions yourself. At Monte Polizzo most layers need at least four points. Whenever possible, take elevations at the same points for every layer, directly above one another. The more complicated the deposit and the more sloping your trench, the more elevations you’ll need to take. Number each elevation, and on the sketch plan of the layer mark where each elevation was taken. If the layer runs into the balk, it’s often easiest to get the elevation at that point, particularly if you can take the elevation at a labeled corner. An important point: remember that we’re interested in the height above sea level of the layer that this context sheet is describing, so if the layer runs into the balks of your trench and you’re using the points A-G established at the beginning of the season, DON’T write down the height of that point on the surface; we want to know what elevation the top of the current layer was at that point. 8. Bottom elevations. When you’ve excavated away the whole of a layer, use the Dumpy Level to make new readings. As with question 7, number the elevations you take and mark the points on the sketch plan on the back of the context sheet. Sometimes you excavate an entire layer in one day; if this happens, you should write the elevations for the bottom of the layer on line 8. You can then subtract the elevations on line 8 from those on line 7 to get thickness measurements to enter on line 5, and the numbers you enter on line 8 for the bottom of (say) layer ↑ will often correspond to the top of (say) layer →, entered on line 7 of layer →’s context sheet. Quite often, though, it takes several days to excavate a layer. If you haven’t completed a layer at the end of the day that you begin it, enter on line 8 the elevations of the points at which you stopped digging that day. This is important—if there’s any confusion and mixing of layers, we may be able to separate the finds into the correct layers if we know how much you removed each day. If you don’t complete a layer in one day, when you start work the next morning you’ll begin a continuing sheet for that layer (explained below). 9. Excavation method. What did you use to remove this layer? Trowel? Big pick? Etc. 10. Other comments. Anything that strikes you as significant. For example, you might observe that the junction between the layer you’re excavating and the one above or below it is fuzzy, or that the layer was really hard to distinguish. If there are significant inclusions in the layer, mention it here. Inclusions means things like chalk, charcoal, particular kinds of pebbles, etc., that help characterize the layer. Mention the inclusions’ shape, color(s), and size(s). Finally, the description section asks you whether you sieved this layer. You should consult the assistant director or director about when to sieve. Normally we sieve all closed deposits but not topsoil, tree trenches, or rubble collapses. Just circle Y or N. 7.3.2.2.2 Stratigraphy In the central box, enter the number of the layer you’re excavating. In the boxes above it, enter the numbers of those layers that you know date later; in the bottom boxes, the numbers of those layers that you know date earlier. Consult with the director and assistant director, because this is important information. You need to be thinking all the time about what the most important features in your trench are, and make sure that this section makes it crystal-clear how the layer under excavation relates to them. If you have walls, hearths, floors, or other major cultural features in your trench, include as many of them as possible here. Add extra boxes as necessary. Always fill in the stratigraphy box. Always include layers above and below the one you’re excavating. Always think about the relationship of the layer you’re excavating to the most important features in the trench—walls, floors, hearths, pits, foundation trenches, etc. Always include these important features in the stratigraphy box. If at any point you realize that a mistake has been made in earlier context sheets, tell the director or assistant director right away. 7.3.2.2.3 Interpretation The first line asks you for basic information: is this layer part of an internal (roofed) space, an external (open air) space, a structural activity (e.g., a wall, a posthole, a ditch, a foundation cutting), or something else? Circle the relevant word; if in doubt, explain the situation under “Other.” Then, enter a brief description of what you think the layer is—e.g., a hearth, a pit, mudbrick collapse, building rubble, a tree trench, etc. Consult with your zone supervisor. This doesn’t mean a description of what the soil was like. “Same as”: ancient activities often overlap several of our trenches, so what we call 2004 X99 ≥ may be the same as a differently numbered deposit is an adjacent trench, such as 2003 Y99 ∝. Figuring out the “same as” relationships involves consulting last year’s notebooks and profile drawings, and discussing the stratigraphy with the people working in neighboring trenches. Always fill in the ”same as” box if the layer was partly excavated in a previous season or if it runs into another trench. Any time you think that two of the layers you’ve excavated are in fact two parts of the same layer, consult with the director or assistant director and then mark this in the “same as” box. 7.3.2.2.4 Recording Here you cross-reference the context sheets with the formal plans and profiles, drawn at 1:20 on large sheets of graph paper (as distinct from the measured sketch plans and profiles that you enter on the back of the context sheet itself), photographs, the trench notebook, and other filming. Sections 7.3.4 and 7.3.5 below explain how to do plans and profiles. Each plan and profile that you draw in your trench is given a number specific to that trench, which you write in big letters on the plan or profile. The numbers and dates of all the plans and profiles that involve the layer you’re working on get entered here. You’ll mark the position of all formal profiles and plans on the trench’s closing sheet (see below), and the assistant director will keep a separate log of their positions. Enter here all the photographs taken of this layer, under the categories CS (color slides) and D (digital); the page(s) in the official trench notebook that discuss the layer you’re working in; and whether or not there was any videotaping of the excavation in this layer. Photo numbers are always recorded inside rectangles, as | D.2-5 |, so they’re easy to spot. 7.3.2.2.5 Finds We divide the main categories of artifacts up into simple sub-categories. Pottery is split into fine ware, coarse ware, pithos (an ancient Greek word widely used in the Mediterranean for large storage vessels), tile (i.e., clay roof tiles), bone/shell, and “other”—any unusual categories that are needed that day. Under each heading, note how many bags you collected today. The “diagnostics” category makes it easy to see at a glance what easily datable material came from this layer. Dr Blake will give one or more lectures on how to identify the different categories of finds at the start of the season, and in the field, you MUST have the director or assistant director review each bag of fine ware before you close it, to advise you on what diagnostics are present. This section is very important, because the context sheets then allow people to assign a rough date to the layer at a glance. Just circle whichever categories are present. “Black Glaze” is a type of imported Athenian pottery that only starts to show up in quantity in the late sixth century. Although we call it glazed, technically speaking it’s not glazed at all, but covered with a very shiny black paint. “Cor.” means Corinthian imports, typical of the early sixth century, though at Monte Polizzo they seem to continue down till 500. “East Greek” is also imported. The main cup types used to be thought to date 620-540 BC, but Monte Polizzo and other recent excavations have shown that the East Greek B2 cups continue till 500, or even later. “Incised” means 6th-century indigenous wares with very distinctive decoration scratched with a sharp tool; we also enter indigenous stamped decoration under this heading, to save space. “Gray ware” is the commonest indigenous material of the 6th century BC. “Painted ware” means indigenous Iron Age matt-painted vases. “Norman tile” is a very distinctive medieval roof tile, which is very light, and has lots of organic inclusions. “Glazed” means medieval pottery with true glaze, usually lead-based and greenish. Turn over the sheet: at the top of p. 2 is a section for “small finds.” This means especially significant finds. Anything made of metal, worked bone, or worked stone counts as a small find, and certain clay items—particularly interesting pottery fragments, all lamps, and all loomweights. Consult in consultation with the director and assistant director about what to record as small finds. Small finds must always be recorded in position by the Total Station, unless you find the object during sieving. Always put small find (SF) numbers inside triangles, so that they’re easy to spot (e.g., SF /1\). Always get the TS point number and the elevation from the Total Station team and write it down here. Also always take manually triangulated location readings (see section 7.3.7 below). The artifact # will be assigned by Dr Blake and entered at the lab, but you always need to enter a brief description on site, in consultation with director or assistant director. Next there’s a section for samples. Always call the Total Station to record samples taken for flotation, charcoal, pollen, micromorphology, or radiocarbon dating (during the main period of the site, in the 6th century, the radiocarbon calibration curve is almost flat, and C14 can only yield a date between 770 and 400 cal yr bc, so we haven’t taken C14 samples; but if it looks like we might be getting back to 9th-century or earlier deposits, we’ll start). Put an X against the category for each sample you take, and enter the TS number. Mark all small finds and samples on your sketch plan, with the TS number. Write in a provisional date after consulting the director or assistant director. 7.3.2.2.6 Sketch plan with elevations On p. 2 of the context sheet there’s space to enter a sketch of the plan and profile. Page 2 is on graph paper to make it easier to do this accurately. This isn’t meant to be a great work of art, but it should be properly measured. Look at the examples in fig. 17.7. Normally you’ll draw the plan at 1:100 scale (1 cm on the plan = 1 meter in reality), though you may need to vary that. Always draw a scale on it (don’t write in the scale as 1:50, etc., because if people xerox the recording sheets they may reduce or enlarge them), and which way is north. Always label as many points as possible, particularly the A-G points, so we can relate the sketch to the trench sketch on your starting sheet. Mark on the sketch plan the locations of all Total Station readings and elevation points that have been taken in this layer, including top, bottom, and any other points on the layer itself; small finds; flotation, micromorphology, and pollen samples. Every Total Station point needs its TS number and elevation. Also mark on the plan the points between which you’re drawing the sketch profile. It’s very important for this sketch plan to give an accurate sense of the shape of this layer and its relationship to walls, labeled corners, and elevation points. If the sketch plan starts getting crowded, draw a second plan and enter some of the data on that. 7.3.2.2.7 Sketch profile with elevations Again not meant to be a work of art, but it needs to be clear, roughly measured, and fairly accurate; again, look at fig. 17.7. It’s a quick drawing to show the relationships between the layer you’re excavating and the other deposits you’ve already identified. In consultation with the director and/or assistant director, choose the most representative line along which to sketch the profile. Sometimes that’ll be along one of the balks, and then you just draw what you see; other times it won’t be along a balk, and you’ll need to rely on the elevations that have been taken and on your own measurements to make the drawing. You might want to practice a little bit on a separate piece of graph paper before committing your drawing to the context sheet. ALWAYS enter at least 2 elevation points on your sketch profile. You’ll normally draw the profile only when you complete excavating the layer.

7.3.2.3 CONTINUING SHEETS If you don’t complete a layer on the day you began it, you’ll need to fill out a continuing sheet as well. As soon as you start work on the layer for a second day, enter the date and write day 2 of _ (leaving the _ blank until you complete the layer, when you’ll know what number to enter). Then enter the top elevations for the layer at the point you started excavating today, which should be the same as the bottom elevation readings you entered on line 8 on the original context sheet. Then, as on the original context sheet, enter the details about today’s photos, finds, SF’s, samples, etc. Each continuing sheet has room for an additional 4 days of work; if your work in this layer goes beyond the fifth day, just start a second continuing sheet. As with context sheets, you need to get the director or assistant director to sign off.

7.3.2.4 STRUCTURAL SHEETS Give each wall you excavate a lower-case letter as its name (assigned by the director) and a number in your trench’s layer sequence. We’ll normally refer to the wall by its letter, but on occasion its layer number is more important. Instead of filling out a regular context sheet for a wall, you fill out a structural sheet. As soon as the wall’s surface is cleaned, get the Total Station to map it. Get a printout of the Total Station plan that evening. Next day, check the plan against the stones in the ground (“ground-truthing”) and if there are any problems, ask the Total Station to come back. Attach the printout to the structural sheet. For every wall, take at least 2 elevations on its top and at least 2 at its bottom (usually the highest and lowest points of its top and bottom courses, with more, as necessary). On the printout, mark the position and elevation of each of these points. On the structural sheet, enter the number of preserved courses; total preserved length of the wall (including parts of it that lie outside your trench); typical sizes of wall stones; the layer that the bottom of the wall rests on; if the wall has a foundation trench, the layer from which that trench was dug, and the layer(s) into which it penetrates; the earliest layer(s) that definitely post-date the wall; the earliest layer that covers the top of the wall; the letter names of any walls that this wall abuts (i.e., the walls it touches but is not physically built into); whether the walls are bonded (i.e., whether the stones are interleaved); and whether there is any other evidence for the relationship between the walls. Where the form asks you “Slabs / pebbles . Comments?” circle the category/ies of stones used. Finally, enter a brief description of the wall, and a sentence or two on its interpretation. When it’s a slab wall, describe the slabs, using the following categories:

Rough hewn (i.e., irregular) Roughly squared: approximately rectangular with rough edges Squared: rectangular with sharp edges Ashlar: mooth, accurately cut stones laid in regular courses

If there are traces of tool marks, or if the wall includes sandstone blocks, record this. We need everything filled out. If your trench contains walls that were excavated in previous seasons, fill out a structural sheet for each of these, in addition to new walls excavated this year.

7.3.2.5 SMALL FIND LISTS At the back of your set of context sheets, keep a small find (SF) list. For each SF, enter its number. Keep a continuous sequence for your trench; don’t begin at /1\ again in each new layer or trial trench. Even if your trench was excavated in previous seasons, begin at /1\ again in 2004 (this is in contrast to the system of layer numbering, where you continue the previous year’s numbering sequence). Always enter SF numbers in triangles for easy recognition. Enter the layer the SF was in, the trial trench, its Total Station number (or that it was found sieving or cleaning), the date of its discovery, photo numbers if any were taken. Un the “description” section, enter a few words telling us what the object is. Describe each find by material and function, using the following categories: 1) Materials. Bronze, iron, silver, gold, stone, carnelian, amber, bone, ivory, glass, faïence, plaster, clay. 2) Function. For metal finds, normally choose one from: bead, blade, bowl, chain, coin, construction material, fibula, figurine, flake, fragment, grater, hatchet, jug, knife, lid, nail, ornament, pendant, pin, plate, vessel, saw, spear, sword, tool, weight. Use blade when you can’t tell if it’s a knife or a sword; flake for small pieces of very thin metal; ornament when it’s not obvious what kind of ornament it is; vessel when it could be a bowl, jug, plate, or something similar. If you find something that doesn’t fit into these categories (e.g., gold death mask, suit of armor) let someone know. For worked stone, normally choose one from: bead, die, doorpost, figurine, fragment, grindstone, mold, ornament, tool, weight. Carnelian is a red stone; normally it’s used for beads. Amber is crystallized sap importer from the Baltic Sea. It’s translucent and orangey, normally used for ornaments. For worked bone, normally choose one from: bead, disk, fibula, fragment, handle, needle, ornament, pendant, pin, tool. Ivory is mostly used for ornaments; but in fact what people think is ivory almost always turns out to be bone. Glass and faïence (a paste very like glass) were mostly used for beads, but the Phoenicians also made small flasks for expensive perfume from both materials. Plaster has so far always been wall construction material. Clay SFs are usually interesting potsherds, loomweights, tiles, figurines, or “other.” With potsherds, identify the fabric (Corinthian, East Greek, Attic black glaze, Attic black figure, Phoenician, Punic, indigenous incised or stamped, indigenous matt painted, grayware, medieval, glazed), the type of pot (amphora, bowl, cup, jug, pithos, plate), and, if necessary, the part of the vessel (base, belly, foot, handle, leg, lid, neck). When it seems useful, include a small sketch. With a loomweight, say whether it’s pyramidal, rectangular, or tapered; decorated (incised, painted; describe the motifs); pierced. Tiles: most finds of tiles aren’t very exciting, but sometimes the context makes a tile significant. Say whether it’s a pan tile or a cover tile; what color it is; whether the fabric is dense or has inclusions; and whether it’s medieval or ancient.

Use these categories whenever possible, to make comparisons between trenches more systematic; but if the object clearly doesn’t fit into these materials or functions categories, it’s very important to say so. The most peculiar finds are often the most interesting. Finally, measure each small find, and write its dimensions down.

Make sure that Emma Blake sees all ceramic small finds from your trench. Check with the director or assistant director on the description. People who study the site later need to be able to get the basic information about the SFs from this list, rather than having to go through all your context sheets and correlate the information with Dr Blake’s SF database. Keep the SF list up to date, and keep it with your other context sheets. At the end of the season, ask the Total Station team to print out a map showing the locations of all small find spots and samples in your trench. Attach this to the small finds list.

7.3.2.6 CLOSING SHEETS Because you’ll be keeping the context sheets up-to-date as the digging goes along, at the end of the season all you’ll have to do is fill out a closing sheet. On this, you enter a series of sketches, one for each layer you’ve excavated, showing its position within the trench and elevation points from its top. You should normally do these at 1:100, like the original drawings. If you’ve filled out the context sheets properly, you can simply copy these from your earlier sketches. If you have a particularly complicated set of layers, you might need to do it at1:50 to make the relationships clear. The sequence of drawings showing the position of the layers is the main closing task, but there are also three smaller jobs: 1. Provide a simple plan showing the position of all the profiles you’ve drawn. 2. If your trench has changed shape significantly during the excavation, provide one or more plans showing this. 3. Provide one or more drawings showing the positions of the trial trenches that you divided the main trench into during the season.

7.3.2.7 FINAL HARRIS MATRIX The last task is to draw up a final Harris matrix (explained in section 7.3.7 below) showing the relationship of every layer in your trench to every other layer, so far as the stratigraphic sequence allows it. During the season the director and assistant director will be meeting with you regularly to discuss the stratigraphy and draw up a series of provisional matrices, so the final matrix should just take a few minutes. If for some reason the director or assistant director don’t discuss the stratigraphy with you regularly, or you’re not making provisional matrices, draw their attention to this. Every trench must draw up a matrix at least every second or third day. It’s the best way to make sure you’ve understood the interrelations of the layers properly.

7.3.2.8 The golden rules If you do all these things, your trench will be a complete success, and you’ll have made a significant contribution toward answering our questions. The recording sheet system really is the core of the recording for the whole excavation, and so long as you’re in control of the context sheets and keep them up-to-date, everything will be fine. There are ten golden rules:

1. Excavate methodically and carefully. Don’t dig holes; keep the dirt clean; stop, sweep up, and discuss the situation the instant anything starts to change. 2. Fill out every box on the context sheets, and keep them up to date. 3. Remember that all your records will be posted on an open-access website, so: a) Don’t write anything silly on the context sheets b) Assume that readers will have no previous knowledge of the site c) Write and draw clearly and simply. If your handwriting is hard to read, use capital letters 4. Always think about the relationships between the layers in your trench. 5. Do you know how the layer you’re excavating relates to every other layer? If not, discuss it with the whole team, and then you need to talk to the director or assistant director. 6. Always look out for inconsistencies. Check the stratigraphy boxes: do you say that layer ± is above layer ″ on some sheets, but that ″ is above ± in others? If so, put it right. 7. Never ignore problems. 8. Discussion is the best way to resolve stratigraphic problems: involve the whole trench, other trenches around you, the assistant director, and the director. 9. Again, fill out everything on the recording sheets. 10. Again, fill out the recording sheets while you’re on site; keep them up-to-date.

Finally, remember: We use a Continuous Trench Numbering system for layers, starting either at ← or wherever the numbers left off in 2003. We use a continuous SF numbering sequence within each trench, beginning anew every year starting at /1\ . Walls are identified by a lower case letter (wall a, wall b, etc.), and get a layer number. Trial trenches get a lower case letter (Tta, Ttb, etc.) Corners are labeled with an upper-case letter (A, B, C, etc.) Enter all layer numbers in circles: ←. Enter all SF numbers in triangles: /1\. . Enter all photo numbers in rectangles: | D.1-2 | or | CS III.1-2 |.

7.3.3 Notebooks In addition to the recording sheets, which form the core of the documentation system, the trench supervisors will also keep notebooks. The disadvantage of notebooks is that it’s hard for people who didn’t take part in an excavation to make sense of narrative accounts of the digging, and also hard to find specific things in them. But the disadvantage of context sheets is that they sometimes create a spurious sense of certainty: everything fits neatly into predesigned categories, even though reality is always more complicated. Use the notebooks to write down concerns about interpretation, how and why you change your mind, and details that don’t fit into the rigid framework of the context sheets. The notebooks are less formal than the context sheets, but please remember that they’re still part of the official record. Everything will be posted on an open-access website where archaeologistst from all over the world can look at it, and the original notebooks and hard copies will be kept in the excavation archive at Stanford and in the library of the Archaeological Superintendent in Trapani, and at Stanford. If you write anything weird or disrespectful about any members of the project or our hosts in Sicily that’s a serious breach of professional standards. If you write things that you think are funny, they probably won’t seem funny to other readers, and you’ll make yourself and the whole team look ridiculous.

7.3.4 Profiles As you’ll now know from reading Wheeler’s chapter 4, stratigraphic profile drawings are the key to understanding a multi-period site like Monte Polizzo. Some archaeologists like to say that excavation reports are really nothing more than commentaries on a series of profile drawings. There’s a little more to it than this, but there’s still no good archaeology without good profiles. During the season you’ll draw profiles of the stratigraphy of the significant balks in your trench. The first rule of profile-drawing is always keep the balks absolutely clean, straight, and vertical. Expect to have the zone supervisor and director ask you repeatedly to straighten the balks. Sloppy balks are sure signs of a bad excavation. The second rule is that in the Mediterranean sun, stratigraphic distinctions that are clear while you’re digging and the soil is moist rapidly disappear as the sun bleaches the earth and everything turns light brown. Using a knife or the point of a trowel, mark the junctions between layers on the balk as you expose them. Otherwise when you come to draw the balk at the end of the season you won’t be able to find the distinctions that were so clear a couple of weeks earlier. Also label the layers whenever possible. Before starting a profile drawing, consult with the zone supervisor and director. Normally we draw profiles at 1:20 scale (1 cm on the profile drawing = 20 cm on the ground, so 5 cm on the drawing = 1 meter in reality). When doing the drawing, begin as far into the corner of the sheet of graph paper as you can; if you put it in the middle you can’t get much else on that sheet, wasting paper, and making more records for us to carry back. Roll the drawing up when you’re finished rather than folding it. When you roll it, make sure that the drawing is on the inside; if it’s on the outside, the pencil lines rub off the paper. Finally, make sure the drawing is labeled—MP Acrop 2004, the zone, trench, trial trench/es if relevant, which balk, the date, and your initials. There’s a checklist at the end of section 7.3.4; use it. Make sure the profile has at least one, and preferably two, elevations marked, and include a small sketch plan showing where in the trench the profile is. When you’ve finished, get the assistant director and director to go over the drawing with you, and get one of them to initial and date it. Write on the drawing what number it is in your trench-specific numbering system, and enter that information on the context sheets. The assistant director will keep a log of all profile drawing numbers. The best times to draw profiles are first thing in the morning or in the evening, when the light is less strong, and strikes the balks at an oblique angle. Unfortunately, things rarely work out that conveniently, and you’ll probably end up drawing profiles in the noonday glare. If that’s the case, though, whenever it’s possible you should bring your drawing back to the site next day and check it against what you see in better light. The easiest way to draw a profile is to drive in a nail at the end of the profile that has the lowest elevation (point 1 in fig. 7.18a). Then, using string and a line level, put in a perfectly horizontal line and drive in another nail at point 2 (if you’d started the operation from point 3 in fig. 7.18a you’d need to put in the other end of the leveled string at point 4, which is obviously a problem). Use big nails so they don’t fall out. If you’re drawing a steeply sloping balk, this procedure might not work; instead, you may need to repeat it several times, producing a stepped series of strings (fig. 7.18b). Use the Dumpy Level to check that the nails at points 1 and 2 (and the other nails, if you’re dealing with a series of steps) are indeed level. Write down the scale of the drawing, and label the ends N, S, E, W, etc. Fig. 7.18 Laying out profile drawings

Next, measure along your string from point 1, and mark it at 1-meter or 50-centimeter intervals. Drive pegs into the wall of the trench, with the distances marked on them. Don’t attach a tape measure or line-level to your string, because the weight of these will pull the string down so that it’s no longer level. The first step is to draw in the shape of your balk—where the ground level lies, and where the trench stops. Use the plumb bob and a stiff tape measure. Hold the plumb bob so that its tip touches the ground at point 5 in fig. 7.18a. Pinch the string on the plumb bob where it crosses the leveled string; then measure how far from point 1 the two strings cross, and the distance from where you pinched the string of the plumb bob to the tip of the plumb bob. Make a mark on your drawing to show where point 5 is. Measuring back from point 2, repeat the process to establish point 5. Get point 6 by measuring down vertically from the ground to nail 2. There’s no fixed rule about how many points to take; do enough so that you can get an accurate rendering of the shape of the profile you’re drawing. On the whole, the more experience you have the fewer points you’ll need to measure. Next, repeat these steps to plot in all significant “landmarks” in the profile, such as large stones, potsherds, tree roots, etc. Once you’ve got these in, and double-checked some of them, you can start using some of them to measure to points in the junctions of the layers. At this stage you’ll be very glad if you marked the layers clearly as you were excavating.

Fig. 7.19 Kathryn Lafrenz (Stanford) drawing a profile in building A5 (2003)

Mark the distinctions between the layers with strong, clear, lines, except in those relatively rare cases in which layers really do blur into each other. Wheeler is right (Archaeology from the Earth, pp. 78-79) to reject “pictorial” renderings of stratigraphy. No two layers are ever completely distinct, since they are continuously in flux, and when examined microscopically they inevitably blur, meaning that distinctions between layers are really statistical abstractions from the data. But profile drawings are stylized representations designed to convey information, and at the level at which the human eye works, it makes sense to treat the layers we identify as discrete objects. Number all the layers, using the same numbering sequence as in your context sheets. Don’t add the kind of symbols for the composition of the soil that Wheeler illustrates on p. 77, and that we use in the published preliminary reports; that’s best left till the final inking of the drawings. Instead, write a brief description/interpretation of the layers represented in the profile next to the drawing. The first time you draw a profile it can be a nerve-racking business, and it may take you a long time. But the more you do, the easier it gets.

PROFILE DRAWING CHECKLIST MP Acrop 2004 Zone Trench Trial trench Balk Corner labels Sketch plan showing location At least 2 elevation points Scale North Your name, date Profile number Layer numbers Have you drawn in the most significant features—walls, floors, pits? Does your profile clearly show the layers’ relationships? Does your profile clearly show the layers’ junctions with walls, floors, and pits? Description of layers Approval from director or assistant director

7.3.5 Plans The Total Stations produce many plans for us, but we also need hand-drawn plans. Total Stations are extremely accurate and they do many things faster and better than humans. But Total Stations become very slow indeed if we ask them to map in every tiny stone in a wall or sherd in a destruction deposit. So we produce a lot of composite plans. In these the Total Station maps in the main features of a wall, and we then take a printout, put millimeter tracing paper over it and trace through the features that the Total Station has recorded, and add manually dozens of smaller stones and sherds. The margins of error on manually drawn plans are higher than with digitally produced ones, but Total Stations can’t capture the nuance and character of deposits in the same way as human beings. Producing a plan or a profile is an interpretive act, and there’s a place for human input as well as digital.

7.20 Vic Schorn (left) and Ben Grant (right) of Stanford planning a destruction deposit dating around 575 BC in room C1/1 (2003)

Before starting a plan, consult with the assistant director or director. The rules are much the same as with the profiles; normally draw at 1:20 scale; put the drawing in the corner of the paper; roll rather than fold the paper; make sure that the drawing is on the inside; make sure it’s labeled—MP Acrop 2004, the zone, trench, trial trench/es if relevant, the date, a north arrow, at least 2 elevation points (and probably 5 or 6 times that many), and your initials. When you’ve finished, get the assistant director and director to go over the drawing with you, and get one of them to initial and date it. Write on the drawing what number it is in your trench-specific numbering system, and enter that information on the context sheets. As with a profile, start by getting the framework in place. Draw your trench onto the paper. Label the corners, as described in section 7.2.3 above. Again as with the profile, you need to identify the most important landmarks, and get them onto the plan first. Sometimes you’ll be able to work from a Total Station plan; other times you’ll need to triangulate their positions, as described in section 7.3.7 below. You don’t need to triangulate every point; some you’ll be able simply to measure on the ground. Also if you’re working in a relatively flat and open area, you can use a planning frame. Using line levels, make sure that it’s absolutely flat. Triangulate the corners onto the plan, and then you can easily draw in the details within the 20 cm squares. The planning frame is very helpful with complicated floor deposits, scatters of pottery and bone, etc. There are other tricks—if you’re drawing a straight wall that for some reason hasn’t been recorded by the Total Station, put a nail at each end and run a string between them, then all you need do is triangulate the two nails, draw the string onto the plan, measure along the string to the end of each wall stone, then transfer the points onto the plan. Repeat for the other face of the wall, and you can do even a long wall in half an hour or so. One thing to remember—a plan is like a map, reducing the sloping and uneven world to a perfectly flat, level, two-dimensional fiction. Remember that all measurements must be horizontal, and done with a line level. If you take even one measurement that’s not level, it’s going to mess up the entire plan, and it may take hours to figure out what went wrong.

PLAN DRAWING CHECKLIST MP Acrop 2004 Zone Trench Trial trench Corner labels At least 2 elevation points (usually a lot more) Scale North arrow Your name, date Plan number Layer numbers Description of the layers shown on the plan Have you drawn in the most significant features—walls, floors, pits? Approval from director or assistant director 7.3.6 Elevations On a site like Monte Polizzo where the ground slopes steeply, it’s vital that we have lots of accurate elevation readings to keep control of the stratigraphy. The Total Stations provide very accurate elevation readings, but it’s very inefficient to use such an expensive technology for taking the hundreds of readings we need each day. The main tool for taking elevations is the Dumpy Level.

Fig. 7.21 Lela Urquhart (Stanford) and Olivier Mariaud (Bordeaux) taking elevations with the Dumpy level in building A1, 2003

This is a two-person instrument. One person holds a measuring rod at the point being recorded while the other sights through the instrument, takes the reading , enters it in the site notebook, does a simple calculation, then enters the final result on the context sheet, profile, or plan. It’s not safe to leave the Dumpy levels in position all season, because they’ll get damaged, so we set them up every morning. The assistant director will nominate volunteers each day. Chris Sevara will give the trench supervisors lessons in using the Dumpy level at the start of the season; they’ll then teach the other members of their teams. Everyone must know how to use the Dumpy levels.

7.3.6.1 Set up 1. Put the tripod in a relatively level place, above the points to be measured, and (if possible) away from the main foot traffic. 2. Use a line level to make sure the top of the tripod is roughly level. 3. Mount the Dumpy level on the tripod. 4. Adjust the leveling screws on the Dumpy level until the bubble is in the center of the circle. 5. Place the measuring rod on a known elevation point (established by the Total Station at the beginning of the season). 6. Looking through the Dumpy level, center the crosshairs on the measuring rod, and read the height. 7. Add this measurement to the elevation of the known point. This is the Dumpy level’s height. 8. Write the date and the instrument’s elevation on a piece of tape and attach it to the tripod in a prominent place. Make sure all previous days’ pieces of tape have been removed. Also write the elevation of the instrument in your trench notebook.

7.3.6.2 Taking elevations 1. Place the measuring rod on the point in question. Make sure that there’s been proper communication between the rod-holder and the person taking the reading—the rod-holder needs to know exactly where the base of the rod should be. Poor communication is the source of most errors. 2. Looking through the Dumpy level, center the crosshairs on the measuring rod, and read the height. 3. Subtract this measurement from the instrument height. This gives you the right of the point being measured. 4. Write the result on the context sheet, profile, or plan.

7.3.6.3 Things to remember 1. Check the instrument is still level before taking readings. If the bubble is slightly off-center, adjust the leveling screws without touching the tripod. If the bubble is completely off-center, someone has knocked the tripod, and you need to re-do the set up. If that happens, tell all the other trenches that use that Dumpy level. Remove the tape showing that day’s instrument elevation, and replace it with one showing the new elevation. 2. If you knock the tripod, set it up again, and let everyone know that the elevation has changed. 3. When taking an elevation, never lean on the Dumpy level. 4. Think about the elevations you’re getting. If at the end of the day the readings are higher than those at the beginning of the day (“digging upward”), something’s gone seriously wrong. Cross-check your results occasionally to make sure that the elevations make sense. 5. To avoid confusion, you should normally use the same instrument throughout the day. That way if it turns out there’s been a mistake in set-up, you only need to make one calculation to correct all the figures. 6. Keep all your readings and calculations in the site notebook, and label each one, so that if there are any errors it’s easy to go back and check the numbers. 7. Be careful when you’re carrying the instruments; they’re easy to damage. 7.3.7 Triangulation Despite all the high-tech Total Stations and GPS, things can still go wrong and data can disappear, so as a backup you need to take manual triangulated readings for all small finds and flotation, charcoal, pollen, micromorphology, and C14 samples. This is the way archaeologists took most readings before Total Stations were available. You enter the manually triangulated readings on the context sheets where it says “manual.” Always do this. If the paper-based recording system ever gets disassociated from the digital record, triangulation may be the only way to pinpoint particular finds or samples. Triangulation is very simple. You can fix any point so long as you have two points to measure from. Hold a plumb bob over the point you’re measuring to (marked X in fig. 7.22). Stretch the tape measure (pulling it very tight) from corner E to X. Use the line level to check that it’s horizontal; or, as a shortcut, since the shortest distance between two points is always the horizontal, simply move the tape up and down against the edge of the string until you get the lowest reading, and that’s the horizontal. Convert this distance to 1:20 scale for your formal plan or 1:100 for a sketch plan, set the compasses to that distance, and draw a curve on your plan. Repeat the whole process from corner C. Where the two curves cross is the exact point X.

Fig. 7.22 Triangulating to a small find

Under normal circumstances, use triangulation only to establish a point in horizontal space, and use the Dumpy level to fix the point vertically. Taking elevations manually is much harder than fixing a point horizontally, and we only do it in dire emergencies where no other devices are available. This is because when measuring horizontally from B or E to X in fig. 7.20 it’s hard to be off by more than a centimeter, which, on a 1:20 plan, is only half a millimeter, and virtually invisible. When using a line level to get a string horizontal and then measuring the length of the string on the plumb bob, it’s easy to be 5-10 cm. off. Manual elevations should only be used when there’s no alternative. It’s good to know how to do manual elevations for emergencies, but normally take elevations with the Dumpy Levels. 7.3.8 The Harris matrix Excavators have always faced a dilemma. The best way to control stratigraphy is to dig narrow trenches, so that there are lots of balks. That way you can draw plenty of profiles, and you’ll probably have profiles running through most of the important deposits on site. However, the narrower the trench, the harder it is to see what you’re excavating. So there’s a competing tendency to excavate large, open areas (championed most forcefully by Philip Barker in Techniques of Archaeological Excavation [1st ed. 1977]). That way you can tell what kind of structures you’re finding, but the price is some loss of stratigraphic control. Open-area excavation works very well when the team does absolutely everything right, but if there’s a mistake, there are no balks to consult, and no way to figure things out. Mortimer Wheeler aimed to get the best of both worlds: a grid of 4 x 4 m trenches separated by 1-m. wide balks gives a broad view, and the balks gave continuous profiles (e.g., Wheeler, Archaeology from the Earth fig. 5). At the end of the season he could remove the balks to give wide-open areas, or leave them in place to give future excavators a way to check his work. This still has certain problems, because even with 4 x 4 m. trenches, there’s no guarantee that the most important features will be cut by a balk that can be drawn. It’s unusual for the walls to be aligned on a north-south axis, so at best you end up with profiles with strangely distorted walls because the balk cut them at an oblique angle. There’s some evidence that some of Wheeler’s most famous profile drawings (like fig. 7.5 above) were actually fudged a bit, with important features being “moved” horizontally so the profile could be shown running through them. That’s OK so long as everyone remembers that the profile is a schematic device to show the relationship between layers, not a naturalistic representation of reality, but in fact we all tend to mistake the representation for reality. In the early 1970s, Ed Harris, excavating at the complex site of Winchester in England, added a valuable refinement that sidesteps most of these problems. The point of a profile drawing in the logic of an excavation, he reasoned, is to tell the reader where a layer came in the sequence. There are three possible ways to express the relationship between two layers: we can say that layer ← has no relationship to layer ↑; that layer ← is earlier than layer ↑; that layer ← is later than layer ↑; or that layer ← is the same as layer ↑. Harris reasoned that you don’t need a profile drawing to express this: you can do it with a simple diagram, like fig. 7.23a (labeled fig. 11 below—don’t ask why). So long as you’re digging accurately, you don’t actually need permanent balks. You can cut a small profile through two or more problematic layers to make it easier to see their stratigraphic relationship, but then that mini-balk can be excavated away. Every single layer in the site can then be positioned in a single matrix showing its stratigraphic relationships to everything else. In any matrix (you can find the matrices for the areas around buildings A1 and A5 in section 14 below), the layers form stratigraphic chains, but as you can see, a lot of these chains don’t intersect. Walls, erosion, or—as in the case of the matrices for A1 and A5— cuttings into the bedrock interrupt the overlapping and cutting of the layers. We therefore “phase” the matrix, using finds from the layers to work out equivalences between layers that don’t have direct links between them. In theory, we could do away with profile drawings altogether and simply express all stratigraphic information through Harris matrices (particularly if we use the widely accepted conventions shown in fig. 7.23b (labeled fig. 12), so that floors, occupation debris, and

Fig. 7.23a: basic types of stratigraphic relationships 7.23b: a Harris matrix adapted to express types of deposits and the passage of time.

construction debris can be distinguished, or if we “stretch” the matrix to represent the amount of time that each deposit represents). But in practice, we don’t, for two reasons. First, the matrix still conveys less information than a profile drawing: it’s much more abstract than a profile, which actually shows you graphically what the stratigraphy looks like. An experienced archaeologist can reconstruct more of the history of a site from a matrix than from profiles, but there are kinds of information that are much easier to grasp from the profiles. And second, a good profile drawing has an aesthetic power that no matrix can match: to someone who knows how to read it, it’s an unmatchable vehicle for communicating the character of the deposits. As GIS applications get easier to use, the Harris matrix and conventional profile and plan drawing may all be replaced: all use low-tech methods to convert a 3-D reality to a 2-D representation, whereas computer reconstructions create a stronger impression of three dimensions. But for the time being profile drawings and the Harris matrix are the basis of understanding chronology.

Fig. 7.24 Alternative, digital methods to avoid reducing 3-D realities to 2-D representations: a team of computer scientists from Columbia University came to Monte Polizzo in 2003 to test new technologies for doing this

If you’ve never used a Harris matrix before it sounds very abstract and difficult, but it’s not. You’ll get plenty of help learning how to do this. 7.3.9 Working with Total Stations The laser technology in the Total Stations is almost error-free. However, it’s only as good as the guidance humans give it. When you ask the Total Station crew to give you an elevation, make sure that they’re measuring to the point you want. Work with them to ensure this is the case. If you ask them to record a wall or other feature, check that the points they’re entering are the ones that you think are the most important ones. Garbage in, garbage out applies very strongly here. Constantly check that the elevations they give you make sense: if they tell you a small find is at 722.34 m but you’ve written down on the context sheet that the highest point in this layer is 722.25 m, something’s gone wrong, and we need to figure out what. Most often the errors come from misunderstandings about which spot is being recorded. We’ll probably have two Total Stations for all our recording needs. They work very hard indeed, frequently coming back up to the site in the evenings, and spending their afternoons entering and cleaning up data. Sometimes they can’t get to your trench as quickly as you’d like. Sometimes you just have to stop work and wait; other times, you can mark the spot of a small find, leave a small area around it intact, and continue excavating in another part of the trench. If in doubt, consult with the assistant director or director.

7.3.10 Photography Photography is an important way to communicate what happened on a site to people who weren’t there, and also to document an excavation so that we avoid mistakes. Your trench needs to be spotless whenever it’s photographed (look at the site photos in section 6 above). All balks must be absolutely vertical and straight; all loose dirt must be swept up; all little roots, which have a way of looking huge in photographs, must be cut off; nails should be straightened; ratty old pieces of string should be replaced with fresh string; and the area around the trench should be swept. All tools must be carried away out of the camera’s sight. For examples of the standards we’re aiming for, look at figs. 14 and 15 in Wheeler’s book. You’ll need to spend a lot of time—sometimes hours—preparing the trench for a photograph. You need to get information about every photograph that’s taken of your trench, and enter it on the context sheet and notebook. As mentioned earlier, here are two types of photos—color slide (CS) and digital (D). The conventional slide photos will come with two numbers—a Roman numeral, which is the roll number, then Arabic numerals, for the numbers of the frames in that roll. Write them both down, separated by a dot (e.g., | CS IX. 12-13| ), and always put the number in a rectangle for easy visibility. Also write down a brief note of what the photo is of, and the direction it’s facing. Digital photos are filed by the date they’re taken. Record them just like the slides, but simply write | D.21-23 |. The information about which date they were taken on is already on the context sheet.

7.4 On-site finds handling This season we’ll find hundreds of thousands of artifacts, mostly broken pottery. When you start digging each morning, the trench supervisor needs to make one person in the team responsible for setting out finds buckets. Take turns at this job. Each finds bucket should have a strip of tape on it labeling it by trench number, trial trench (if relevant), layer number, the day’s date, and the category of finds. Use the following categories: fine ware, coarse ware, pithos, bone/shell, and small finds. You’ll normally need at least one bucket per layer and trial trench for each category. Depending on the nature of the deposit, you may need other buckets. If you’re working in medieval layers, you’ll need a tile bucket too. You need a complete set of buckets for each layer that you’re working in, and for each trial trench that’s operating. Ideally, each trench will only be working in one layer at a time. The more layers you work in, and the more buckets are going at once, the higher the likelihood of mixing things up. As you finish each layer, bag the finds from each bucket separately. Put all the finds in a plastic bag, then put that bag inside a second bag. Fill out two finds labels (there are pre- printed labels, on which you enter the same data as on the context sheet). You put the first label between the two plastic bags, and pass the string that you use to tie the necks of the bags through the hole in the second label. The double-bagging is because thin plastic breaks down over 20 or 30 years in the storerooms (particularly with help from rats and mice), and the finds will get mixed. In Greece people have been using plastic rather than cloth bags since the 1960s, and in my experience double-bagged finds from 35-40 years ago are still fine. Double-tagging is for similar reasons; a single tag can easily get separated from the bag. Make sure that you put the first tag (between the bags) with the written part facing out. When you’re washing the pottery (see section 8.1 below) make sure that you protect the labels by wrapping them carefully inside the plastic bags. If they get wet they disintegrate, and you’re gong to have to write them out again. When you close up a layer, bag the finds and put them in a shady place. Don’t tie the tops of the bags till you leave the site at the end of the day, because sherds sealed in plastic in hot weather “sweat,” releasing the moisture they’ve soaked up while they were underground. If there’s nowhere for this to go it creates an atmosphere inside the bag like a sauna, which does a lot of damage. Small finds require different treatment. As soon as they’re removed from the ground, fill out labels and bag them. It’s easy to lose small finds because (a) they’re small and (b) they tend to weigh very little, so the wind can pick up a bag containing a bead or a single sherd. You should either put the small finds immediately into someone’s back pack (remember whose!) or weight the finds down with a rock. Use judgment: don’t put a big rock on a fragile bone ornament. Finally, make sure that the director or assistant director takes a look through the fine ware and small finds from every layer (and ideally the other finds too) before you close the bags. Enter the information to enter in the “finds” section on the context sheet, and use these reviews as a chance to get familiar with the material culture yourself. Even if you’re confident in your skills at dating the finds, make sure someone else looks over them too.

7.5 Schedule 7.5.1 Calendar Trinity Jackman is teaching the course “Archaeological fieldwork in the Mediterranean” (Classics 150/250/Arch 113) in spring quarter 2004. To participate in the dig Stanford students must take and pass this course with a B or better. The excavation runs from July 12th until August 24th. If you’re coming directly from the US to Sicily, you need to leave America on Sunday July 11th, to arrive in Palermo on Monday July 12th. Everyone will leave on Wednesday August 25th. There are six weeks of digging. In the first week we’ll work Saturday (July 17th), to get things off to a good start, and in the last week we’ll work Saturday (August 21st) because we’ll be panicking over time. The other weeks we’ll work 5 days, Monday through Friday. Every season some people express a preference for having Friday and Saturday off rather than Saturday and Sunday. We’ll look into this again in 2004, but in the past it’s presented some serious logistical difficulties, so don’t hold your breath. We’ll do our best to make transport available on weekends so that people can make trips to visit other parts of Sicily, though we can’t guarantee that cars will always be available. There are a lot of good places to visit near Salemi, with beaches at Selinunte and Castellamare del Golfo (both half an hour’s drive) and Zingaro (45 minutes or so). Selinunte has a lot of good fish restaurants, and Scopello, a little town near Zingaro, is also excellent. Zingaro is a large nature preserve—a rare thing on Sicily—with miles of hiking through woods and hills. If you want a hard-core tourist town, carry on past Zingaro to San Vito lo Capo and the extreme north tip of the peninsula. Erice, about an hour away, is mainly medieval and has good restaurants, though some people find the drive up there hair-raising. There are great archaeological sites to visit at Selinunte, Segesta (twenty minutes away), and Mozia (45 minutes). Palermo has many things to see, and so too Trapani and Marsala (all about an hour). Gibellina (both Nuova and Ruderi) and Corleone are also worth visiting; and a couple of hours away there are amazing Greek temples at Agrigento. If you want to go further afield, you can get to the east coast by car in about 4 hours to visit Siracusa, or 5-6 hours to Taormina. If you have the energy and leave right after digging on Friday, you could get there in time for dinner. Gas is expensive in Europe, and we can’t pay for non-business travel. If you go anywhere in dig vehicles, you’re responsible for replacing the gas you use. The best thing is just to bring the car back with the same amount of gas as when you took it. If you can’t do that, then give Brien Garnand money to get more gas. He’ll give you a receipt. Two important points if you want to make a trip that involves staying away from Salemi overnight. First, book hotels ahead. Things get very busy in the summer. Take guidebooks, and visit the Tourist Agency in town, which mostly worked out well last year (be warned: they speak little or no English). Most hotels demand fax reservations. The Tourist Agency can do this for you, or you can send faxes from the stationery store in the old town. Second, anytime you’re away from the dig house, leave full details with Brien Garnand: who’s in your party, which car you’re in, where you’re staying, a phone number at the hotel, and, if anyone in your group has a cell phone, its number. We have to have this information, in case any emergencies come up while you’re away The last day of digging is Saturday August 21st. A few of us will spend that weekend taking the final-state photographs of the site, but we need everyone back for Monday-Tuesday August 23rd-24th, so please don’t make any plans that might interfere with that. On Monday 23rd we’ll be doing two things. The first is backfilling, covering the excavated parts of the site with plastic and earth to protect them from rain over the winter. The second is transporting the finds from the dig house lab to the museum in Salemi. Neither of these is much fun, but we need all hands to do them.

Fig. 7.25 Backfilling zone A, 2003

On Tuesday August 5th we’ll clean the dig house. Also no fun, but we’re the city’s guests while we’re in Salemi, and the least we can do is return their property in good condition. Everyone should leave on Wednesday August 25th. All the rented vehicles are due back that day or on the 24th. If you want to stay in Sicily beyond the 25th you’ll need to take care of your own accommodation and transport. Arranging to get everyone back to the airport for their flights, or to other points of departure, is very complicated. Brien Garnand will collect information from you when you’re in Salemi. It’s your responsibility to give him accurate information and to cooperate with the schedule. If you don’t, you’ll have to find your own way back to the airport. Some of you will also be spending periods working with the Total Stations, flotation, or lab teams. You may have a slightly different schedule because of this.

7.5.2 Daily schedule We’ll normally leave the dig house at 6.30 a.m., and work on site till about 2.30 p.m. (depending on the temperature). If it gets really hot, we’ll leave at 6 a.m. and stop earlier. On site we’ll normally take a ten-minute mid-morning break at 9 a.m. and a thirty-minute lunch break at 11.00 a.m., but our schedule has to be flexible, and we may need to vary this routine. On Fridays there’ll be a site tour, so you can keep up-to-date on what’s going on, and see where your own bit of the puzzle fits in. The best part of the day for temperature and visibility on-site is the first few hours, so it’s very important that we leave the dig house promptly. That means getting your breakfast and preparing some lunch by 6.20, and leaving as soon as the drivers are ready. When we arrive at site you’ll climb up a path from the parking area to the acropolis. Again, it’s important that we get started as soon as we can once we’re on site. We aim to start work by 7 a.m. The afternoons are free. Dinner is served at the dig house around 8 p.m. Depending on the volume of finds, each team will need to spend an hour or so each day cleaning the finds they’ve made. It’s up to each trench team whether you want to do this as soon as you get back to the dig house or in the hour before dinner, so long as it gets done. If you’re organized about it, there should be time for you to make afternoon trips to the nearest beaches. However, it’s not OK to miss pot washing. Nor is it OK to miss dinner, unless you’ve told Brien Garnand at least a day in advance, so he can tell the cooks. The cooks work very hard preparing the food, and are understandably upset if people don’t show up. Some days your trench won’t generate many finds. When that happens, you should expect to be asked by your zone supervisor to help other teams that do have a lot of material. Most evenings are free, but may be some lectures about the progress of the dig and specific skills. There’ll also be regular announcements after dinner.

7.6 Project staff The Stanford team will include about thirty undergraduates, graduates, postdocs, and faculty from Stanford, and a larger number of members from other institutions. The main groups joining us in 2004 come from the University of British Columbia, the University of Michigan, the University of Rome “La Sapienza,” and the American Academy in Rome. Other teams, from Gothenburg and Northern Illinois Universities, will be working at Monte Polizzo before we get there, but will have gone by July 12th. A small team from Gothenburg may overlap with our season. There may also be volunteers from Salemi and other local towns, some of whom might be staying in the dig house. The Stanford team has the following staff:

Ian Morris, Director ([email protected]) Trinity Jackman, Assistant Director ([email protected]) Emma Blake, Assistant Director, Director of Finds ([email protected]) Brien Garnand, Assistant Director ([email protected]) Rob Schon, Survey ([email protected]) Bengt Westergaard, Digital Recording ([email protected]) Chris Sevara, Digital Recording ([email protected]) Anne Haabu, Conservation ([email protected]) Karin Olsson, Lab Assistant Director ([email protected]) Hans Peter Stika, Botanical Analysis ([email protected]) Tara Hnatiuk, Animal Bones ([email protected])

We depend heavily on support from the Mayor’s Office and particularly the Tourist Office in Salemi, run by Dr. Niccolò Spagnolo. Dr Spagnolo doesn’t speak English, but is the best source of information for most things in Salemi, and knows an enormous amount about local archaeology. 7.7 Organizational structure Most people on this project are volunteers, donating their time, but we still have to have an organizational structure and chain of command.

On site: If there’s any confusion, you should normally do what your trench supervisor says, or what the Total Station staff say. Trinity Jackman is the assistant director responsible for the site; she can overrule the trench supervisors. The nature of excavation means that sometimes there are disagreements over stratigraphy or strategy that can’t be resolved. When this happens, it’s not obvious who’s right and who’s wrong, but the project has to move ahead, so the assistant director makes the call. If you don’t like what the assistant director says, we need you to do it anyway, then take it up later with the director.

In the lab: Emma Blake is the assistant director responsible for the lab. Most people in the lab work directly with her, but some will be working on other projects (e.g., conservation, with Anne Haabu). Dr Blake oversees all projects in the lab, so her word is final. Again, if you don’t like what the assistant director says, we need you to do it anyway, then take it up later with the director.

In the dig house: Brien Garnand is the assistant director responsible for project management. He oversees all logistical aspects of the project. He arranges schedules for cleaning, table- setting, buying food and other supplies, use of cars, and arrangement of rooms. His word is final in all these areas. As usual, if you don’t like what the assistant director says, we need you to do it anyway, then take it up later with the director.

The assistant directors are responsible not only for the smooth functioning of the project but also for everyone’s safety, so if you don’t cooperate with them, you’ll have to leave the project. So far this has never happened. If you’re unhappy with the way any or all of the assistant directors are doing things, talk to the director. The director may overrule decisions made by the assistant director(s), but if this doesn’t lead to a satisfactory resolution, you have the options of doing what the director and assistant director(s) anyway, or leaving the project. If you’re unhappy with the director, you can pursue the matter back at Stanford after the excavation. Since Ian Morris is Director of the Stanford Archaeology Center as well as the Monte Polizzo excavation, there’s no point talking to him, but you can discuss the issues with Richard Martin, Chair of the Classics department ([email protected]), Karen Cook, the Archaeology Center’s Dean ([email protected]), Arnold Rampersad, the Classics Department’s Dean ([email protected]), or John Bravman, Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education ([email protected]). You have the right to be treated in a professional and courteous manner at all times by all members of the project, whether they’re from Stanford or not. If that doesn’t happen, come to the director about it. If this doesn’t lead to a satisfactory resolution, you should file a complaint with one of the people at Stanford listed in the previous paragraph.

8 The lab

8.1 Finds processing The finds from the excavations at all parts of the site are brought down at the end of the day to the lab in the dig house. Emma Blake oversees the processing. Monte Polizzo produces several tons of pottery each year, so there’s a lot of material to sort through and record. The vast majority of the finds are pieces of pottery (potsherds). Occasionally whole pots turn up, and other finds include bones and shells, stone tools, ivory, bronze, iron, amber, building material, and beads. The ceramics, bones, and shells need to be cleaned before they can be studied, but the metal is set aside for later study. Do not wash metal. Emma Blake will give some instruction at the beginning of the season on how to wash potsherds, and Tara Hnatiuk will do the same for bones and shell. If in doubt, consult one of them. As explained in section 7.5.2 above, the diggers wash that day’s sherds in the afternoon after they get back from the site, or in the evening before dinner. The amount of finds of course varies from day to day but with everyone washing it should take no more than an hour to do. This is a good way to see what you dug up during the day: often, interesting decoration will be hidden under the grime of a couple of millennia. Washing potsherds involves scrubbing them in water gently with an old toothbrush or nail brush (you don’t have to use your own, we’ll supply them). After you’ve washed a bag of sherds, you spread them out in a yellow plastic tray (a cassetta) to dry. You should put a label on the outside of each cassetta , copying out with details of trench number, layer, contents, date, etc., from the labels filled out onsite. Put the plastic bags that the potsherds came in (with the labels carefully wrapped inside, so that they don’t get wet) inside the cassetta, weighted down so that they don’t blow away. Then set them aside (grouped with the other sherds from the same layer) in a special area for drying. Never, ever, mix finds from different layers. Drying takes several hours or overnight depending on the weather. Once dry, the sherds are rebagged and are ready for cataloging.

Fig. 8.1 Stanford student Gautam Raghavan washing pottery, 2001

As so much of what we find is pottery, pottery recording occupies most of our time. We sort all the sherds from the same layer into categories based on fabric type, i.e., groupings according to similarities in such features as clay color, clay composition, and sherd thickness. We then count and weigh sherds of each fabric type. We normally put the plain body sherds— those coming from the body of the vessel—back in their bag to be stored. There’s little more we can do with them for the moment. But the whole or almost whole pots, and the interesting sherds, those ones with decoration or with a handle or rim (called “diagnostic”), are studied more closely. It’s from the differences in decoration, or rim or handle shape, that we can, for example, attribute the pot to a particular time period, or determine that it was made by a particular group of people (local or imported, for example). In the case of complete vessels, we can tell what the pot was used for (such as perfume container, cooking pot, water jug, and so on). In this second stage of recording, we describe the decoration or the shape of the handle or rim, and any other pertinent information, and record this in the database. These diagnostic sherds will be photographed and drawn as well.

Fig. 8.2 Assistant Director Dr. Emma Blake (University of Michigan) in the lab, 2002

The trench supervisors have several responsibilities in the lab. They should always know where all the finds from their trenches are. They also need to record in their context sheets under the appropriate day and layer the numbers of any photographs of finds from their trenches, and to prepare drawings of selected finds. After the experts in the lab have reviewed the finds, some of them will be tagged for drawing and photography, and the conservator may begin working on restoring some of the pots. Most objects, though, will be put back in their bags to be stored in the museum. But this isn’t the end of the process, even for the humblest coarseware bodysherd. Over the next few years every object you find will be repeatedly re-examined by a series of specialists. Each of them brings special skills to the analysis of finds, and they also cross-check each other’s interpretations. This will culminate in the publication of a series of final site reports, which go into the world’s major research libraries, and the web-based digital publication. Even after this, the finds will continue to be studied by archaeologists working at other sites or doing research on western Sicily. Restored pots and other significant objects will go on display in the museum in Salemi, along with photographs of the dig and perhaps reconstructions of one or more buildings, as has been done with Mokarta. We can’t take any of the finds (except soil samples) out of the country, so we do all recording and basic analysis in Salemi. Later, with the information in the database, we can do more advanced analysis back in California, asking what the finds tell us about life at Monte Polizzo, about who lived there, what they were doing, when they were doing it, and why. The patterns in the distribution of pottery and other objects can tell us a surprising amount. You’re welcome to come by any time and ask questions about the finds and how we classify and analyze them, and just generally see what’s going on. You’ll be given updates of the lab’s doings and more detailed information on this recording system during the field season.

8.2 Finds from Monte Polizzo All the portable objects found while excavating may be divided into two broad categories, artifacts and ecofacts. Ecofacts are organic and environmental remains whose presence may be a byproduct, sometimes an unintentional one, of human activity: animal bones, seeds, pollen are examples. Artifacts, objects that have been intentionally produced or altered by humans, fall into several main categories based on material. Metal artifacts: bronze, iron, and silver have been found on the site. Metal objects may take the form of jewelry (chains, brooches, beads); tools (such as an iron cleaver from zone A) and weapons (such as arrowheads or spears). Coins are also found (see fig. 6.7).

Fig. 8.3 Bronze fibula (safety pin), early 6th century BC, from zone E

Worked bone: when bone is carved it becomes an artifact. Bone beads, gaming pins, and worked antlers have been found on site.

Figure 8.4 Bone ring or bracelet from building A1. Restoration and photo Anne Haabu

Worked stone: stone artifacts at Monte Polizzo range from big slabs used as grindstones, to polished stone axes, to weights, to dice (see fig. 6.7), to a 4-century-BC religious stele of Carthaginian type.

Figure 8.5 Punic stele, c. 350-300 BC, found in 2001 built into the wall of shelter A4

POTTERY: pieces of pottery (sherds) make up the overwhelming majority of the artifacts from the site. Fired clay was easily obtained and durable, and thus used widely in antiquity. Clay objects at Monte Polizzo have included a figurine and a fragment of a larger frieze or mask, as well as loomweights and spindlewhorls used in processing wool, but for the most part pottery is the material for containers of all types. At Monte Polizzo we find the following forms, which we divide into Coarse, Medium and Fine wares based on the quality of the clay:

I Coarseware forms a. Storage vessels. Thick (c. 3cm) reddish brown or gray sherds, with rough surfaces, are pieces of large storage jars that would have held surplus foodstuffs, and would have been moved only rarely. These are made locally for many centuries, and are found in all contexts on the site. Often referred to as pithos (plural pithoi) after the Greek word for them (see fig. 6.6).

b. Transport amphoras. These are tall closed vessels of dense, high-fired clay in a range of colors and textures, with walls of perhaps 1 cm thick. They were used for transporting liquids, usually wine or olive oil, around the Mediterranean in antiquity and in the Middle Ages. All major production areas produced their own containers, and the origins and ages of these containers can be recognized by the appearance of the clay and by details in the shape of the vessel. At Monte Polizzo we have found Etruscan, Phoenician, western Greek, and Eastern Greek amphoras.

c. Cooking pots. Rough handmade pots, made of crumbly clay blackened from direct exposure to flames, were used for cooking. They were made locally and are found in the 6th c BC levels at the site.

d. Roof tiles. these are curved rectangular slabs of pottery, whose shape closely resembles modern-day roof tiles. These are several centimeters thick and have rough surfaces, but differ from the storage vessel clay in color and density. The most common roof tiles are light colored: pink/buff/peach. These date to the 10th – 12th c AD and are typically known as Norman roof tiles. There are a few examples of roof tiles from the 4th c BC contexts as well, though they differ in fabric from the Norman examples.

II Mediumware forms This pottery is usually undecorated, but generally thinner walled and with a smoother surface than the coarsewares. There are locally made and imported mediumwares. Mediumware vessels were often used in food preparation and serving: jugs, large serving and mixing bowls, and water pitchers are typical forms. The locally made mediumware vessels have a wide range of color and texture, though many are in the same polychrome gray and red clay of which the storage vessels are made. A common imported mediumware in the 6th c BC and 4thc BC phases of the site is Greek buffware. The clay is a pale yellow or buff color, undecorated, and the forms are often jugs or jars.

III Fineware forms Finewares have had the impurities removed from the clay, and the clay is often decorated with paint or incisions.

a. Local finewares. At Monte Polizzo these are most frequently gray colored, and decorated with incisions and impressions in the clay (see figs. 6.3, 6.4). The graywares date from 8th through the early 5th c BC. There are also local vessels covered with a diluted white paint or slip, with designs in black, red and orange paint. These date from the 7th and 6th c BC.

b. Greek finewares. These date from the 7th-4th centuries on the site and may be imported from the Aegean (Corinth, Attica, Ionia), or from Greek colonies in southern Italy and Sicily. These sherds are quickly identifiable. The clay is generally a shade of buff and has been decorated in a thick shiny black paint or, more rarely at our site, red paint. The vessels with the glossiest paint are generally Attic in origin and the paint is referred to as Black Glaze, (though the treatment is not technically a glaze). The Greek finewares can be dated quite closely because of the number of stylistic changes they underwent in short periods of time. The vessels are often drinking cups though other forms such as perfume bottles and oil lamps are also known from the site.

Fig. 8.6 Artifact 2441: East Greek B2 cup from the A5 terrace, c. 550 BC

c. Etruscan bucchero. We have found two sherds belonging two vessels from Etruria, made of the black shiny clay known as bucchero. Bucchero sherds date to the 7th-6th c BC.

d. Medieval finewares. Bowls dating from the 10th to 12th centuries AD have been found on site, decorated in green, brown, blue and white glazes, that is, coatings of glass. This decorative style originated in North Africa and is known as Arab or Arab-Norman (see fig. 6.8).

10 Practical matters

This is an important section. Make sure your family has copies of the contact information given on p. 1 above and in this section.

Safety: This is our top priority. If at any time anything that’s going on makes you feel uncomfortable or in danger, tell the director or one of the assistant directors immediately. If any of them give you instructions that they say are relevant to your or someone else’s safety, you must follow these instructions. If your actions are endangering yourself or anyone else (whether they’re members of the Stanford team or not) we reserve the right to remove you from the team and send you back to the US. Salemi is a quiet town and very safe. Nearly everyone is friendly, and we have some very important friends in town. We’ve had no serious incidents so far, although sometimes groups of male teenagers may pay female students more attention than they want. So long as everyone behaves in appropriate ways, we should continue to have a safe and friendly environment. But if a member of the excavation staff tells you that your behavior is inappropriate, you must follow their advice. If you don’t, you’ll be sent home immediately, for your own safety and everyone else’s. Behavior: You may be surprised at how similar Sicily seems to the US, but remember that even though it has internet hook-ups and supermarkets, it’s still a foreign country. In the course Classics 150/250/Arch 113 we’ll talk about some of the do’s and don’t’s of being in Sicily. If you behave in inappropriate ways you may create unacceptable situations for yourself or for other people, and we reserve the right to remove you from the team and send you back to the US. In particular, if you have any involvement at all with illegal substances, or fail to report the use of illegal substances by any member of the team or by anyone else on site or at the dig house, you’ll be sent home immediately. Emergencies: For police, ambulance, or fire engines, dial 113. For minor problems/injuries, there are first aid kits at the dig house and on site. Brien Garnand will give instructions about these at the start of the season. If someone gets injured more seriously at the dig house, take them to the emergency room at the Salemi hospital: turn right out of the dig house’s driveway, as if you were going to Monte Polizzo, but instead of taking the left fork in the road toward the site, carry on curving down the hill to the right on the main road. The hospital’s on the left, and has a red cross outside. Try to take someone with you who speaks Italian, since the doctors generally don’t speak much English. You may be asked to pay in advance for services. If none of the assistant directors or the director are at the dig house when the incident happens, you must call one of us as soon as possible. If there’s a serious injury on site, we’ll drive you to the hospital. There’s nothing funny about getting injured on an excavation; please don’t make practical jokes about it. Finally, we strongly advise that you buy health insurance that covers the cost of emergency evacuation to the mainland, other countries, or back to the US. The nearest US consulate is in Palermo at Via Vaccarini 1. Tel 0-11-39 091 305 857; fax 0-11-39 091 625 6026. Health: Bring any prescription medicines with you, but first check with the Italian consulate in San Francisco that your drugs are also legal in Italy. Make sure to bring enough with you for the whole season, and to bring a copy of the prescription in case you’re stopped at customs or by police. Make sure you have health insurance, and check with the Italian Consulate on what kind of inoculations they recommend. There are a couple of pharmacies in town, which have all the basic, and give very helpful advices. The Salemi hospital doesn’t have a pharmacy, but Mr. Baldassare Terranova can help us get medical supplies and pharmaceuticals. Doctors and hospitals usually expect cash payment at the time of service from non-Italian citizens. The water is Salemi is perfectly drinkable, though we have no idea what kind of treatment it gets. A lot of people prefer bottled water. So far we’ve very few cases of stomach trouble, but we strongly recommend that you don’t share water bottles with other people, because this is the fastest way to spread stomach bugs. Sun: Sunstroke is more of a problem. You can get sunblock and sunscreen in Salemi, but if there are particular brands that you prefer it’s probably good to take some with you to be safe. Heatstroke and sunstroke can be serious problems, so drink lots of water. Always carry plenty of water up to the site each day: for most people, that should mean two 1.5 liter bottles. It’s up to you to make sure that you have enough water and to drink regularly. The first symptom of sunstroke is usually a headache. Drinking water usually clears it up. If you start feeling dizzy, dehydration is setting in. Sit in the shade and drink plenty of water, or, better still, Gatorade. If the symptoms persist, you need to see a doctor. Heatstroke and sunstroke can kill. Bugs: There are mosquitoes. If you’re very sensitive, you might want to take a mosquito net. You can get mosquito repellant in Salemi, but if you want all-natural repellants you should take them with you. You can also buy electric fans in Salemi, and these help keep the mosquitoes off. Travel: Make sure your passport is valid; check the expiration date. Make a xerox of the important pages in case of loss, and carry it separately. Keep all tickets safe, and keep xeroxes of these too. Check that your health insurance will cover you in Sicily. Let Brien Garnand know as soon as you’ve made your travel arrangements, so we can organize meetings at the Palermo airport. Be warned—many flights run late. Allow plenty of time for connections. Also bags coming in from Rome and Milan often miss the connection. They’re getting a lot better about this, and each year more bags make it first time, but be warned: it may be a couple of days before your bags reach you (though no one has yet lost anything). There have also been a few incidents of things being stolen out of checked luggage. So if there’s anything you really need, bring it in your hand luggage. If you miss a connection, call Brien Garnand as quickly as possible so that we don’t send drivers on unnecessary trips to the airport (a 40-minute drive each way). As soon as you have a new arrival time, call again. If you arrive in Palermo and no one’s there to meet you, call one of us right away. Make sure to bring the dig handbook with you so you have the phone numbers. If we lose you and don’t hear anything we will immediately contact your family. This will make them very sad if it’s the middle of the night—so bring the contact information with you. Phones: US cell phones don’t normally work in Europe, but there are cheap cell phones on sale everywhere. You buy time in advance at any TIM outlet. There are also pay phones, mostly taking phone cards. You can buy a card (carta telefonica) at any tabacchi (little stores selling cigarettes, candy, newspapers, and, of course, phone cards). You have to snap the corner off the phone card before sticking it in the slot in the phone. No one knows why—that’s just how it works. Arrival: You fly into Palermo (the airport has two names: the old name is Punta Raisi, and the new one is Falcone-Borsellino). Many flights are delayed. If there’s a problem, call one of us right away. You’ll be met at the airport and brought by car to the dig house in Salemi. Be prepared to have your checked baggage arrive a day or two after you do: bring your toiletries and at least a change of underwear in your carry-on bag. Your checked bags are supposed to come into the special room at Palermo airport for international arrivals, so walk past the main luggage carousel toward the exit to the main terminal. Just before you get to the sliding doors you’ll see a glass door on your left, which is the room for international luggage. Occasionally your bag will be put on the regular luggage carousel, but normally it ends up in here. Go into this room and look for your bag. If you still can’t find it, go to the lost luggage office and give them Brien Garnand’s cell phone number (make sure you have this dig handbook in your carry-on luggage). Make sure that the people understand that they’re to phone when your bag arrives, rather than try to deliver it in Salemi. When you check your bags at the airport in the US, write Brien Garnand’s cell phone number on the tags, so that if it goes astray in Milan or Rome we should still hear about it. You might also want to insure your bags. Money: Remember that the project doesn’t cover spending money. Weekend trips can get expensive. For most people, €70-80 per week is plenty, though if you go on a lot of trips, you can spend way more. At the moment, a Euro is worth about $1.20 US. If there’s an emergency it’s very bad to be stuck without money. It’s usually easiest to bring your bank card and use an ATM, so long as it has a 4-digit PIN code. 5-digit codes won’t work in Europe. There are plenty of ATMs which should take your bank card or a credit card, including half a dozen in Salemi, but some ATMs are only accessible during regular banking hours. Don’t bring Travelers’ Checks; no banks, hotels, or stores in Sicily will honor them. Nor even the American Express office in Palermo can change them for you. You can also change cash at Palermo airport unless you arrive late at night, and at some of the banks in Salemi, though they’re not very keen on doing this. Clothes: Conventional digging attire is shorts, T-shirts, sneakers or sandals, and often a hat. Some people prefer long pants and long sleeves, particularly if they’re sensitive to the sun. Heavy work boots aren’t normally necessary, though there’s a small risk of injury to your feet. Sometimes it’s cold on site, and a sweatshirt can come in handy. Once in a while it even rains, though that’s unusual. Be ready to get very dirty. Bring sturdy footwear. Many people wear gloves; digging is hard on the hands. Expect blisters, cuts, and sometimes minor wrist strains. If you get anything more serious than this, let us know right away. A small backpack to carry water and food is essential. The weather in Sicily is quite like California, and it can get very hot indeed in the summer. It can cool off in the evenings, though, so bring sweaters, sweatshirts, jeans, etc. Also swimming gear. Bear in mind that you’ll either be washing your own laundry or paying quite high prices to have it cleaned for you (there’s no self-service laundromat in Salemi). If you wash your own clothes, bring plenty. Unlike some places in the Mediterranean, people in Salemi aren’t particularly puritanical about how you dress (though Salemi isn’t Times Square either). However, the younger folks in Salemi take great pride in their appearance, so if you plan to be in town much, you might want to bring something a bit smarter than your digging outfits. Books, music: Bring what you need. There’s not much to buy in Salemi. Some of the cars will have CD players. Not even Palermo airport has much English-language reading material, though there is some available there, in the departures lounge on the third floor. Language: Not many people in western Sicily speak English. Take a phrase book and dictionary. Communication: There’s no phone at the dig house, but there are public phones in town. Cell phones are very cheap in Europe, and there’s a good phone store (TIM) in Salemi, so you may want to look into that. It makes a big difference. There’s also a Punto Internet, so you can check e-mail. So far this has been very inexpensive. You can get regular mail sent to:

Ufficio Turistico Piazza Libertà 9 91018 Salemi Trapani Sicilia Italia

It can take a while for the mail to work it’s way through to the dig house, but so far as I know no one’s had anything lost.

General good sense: There can be petty theft in Italy, and the dig house is not very secure. So be careful. And generally, remember that: • This is a professional field expedition, not a vacation. We expect professional standards of behavior, and anyone who doesn’t meet these standards will be sent home. • Archaeological work is physically demanding. Monte Polizzo is a hill, and everything has to be carried to the top. Sicily can get very hot, and you’ll be working outdoors for extended periods (be aware of the dangers of dehydration and heat/sunstroke). Never go to the site without adequate water. • While excavation isn’t an Olympic sport, it’s important to be aware of your limits. Let us know if you’re having any difficulties. • No use of intoxicants on site. This kind of activity is a serious hazard to everyone, and won’t be tolerated. • The dig house is not a hotel. Conditions are good but basic, and you’ll need to take your turn helping to maintain the facilities. This can involve some unpleasant duties, such as toilet-cleaning, but the alternatives are much worse. No one will be amused if you don’t do your share. It’s also an insult to the people of Salemi, who’ve provided our facilities at their own expense, if you treat them disrespectfully. If we fail to maintain the dig house, we may be asked to leave. • You’ll be working in close quarters with people you don’t know well, from all around the world. So show some consideration for other people’s privacy and feelings. The Project Manager will help you work out the logistics of this. He’s the final authority on dig house matters. • We’ll cover travel, accommodation, and subsistence for Stanford students, but you need to supply your own spending money. • You MUST have health insurance and a valid passport. US citizens don’t need visas for Italy, but if you have any questions, get in touch with the Italian Consulate in San Francisco. • IMPORTANT: Do not bring anything illegal through Italian or US customs. And do not use any illegal drugs or engage in any illegal activity at any time. For obvious reasons, the police in western Sicily are particularly vigilant about drugs. Last summer there was a major bust in Salemi. There are sniffer dogs and drug police at all airports and sea ports, and at most train and bus stations.There are also many undercover drug police, so don’t even think about buying, selling, or using illegal substances. If you break the law you’re on your own. If you have any connection whatsoever with illegal substances we’ll put you on the next plane back to the US if we find out about it before the police do. This is for your own safety and for that of everyone on the project. • Alcohol is more easily available in Sicily than in the US, and there doesn’t seem to be a concept of drinking under age. But Italians rarely get drunk, and won’t be impressed if you drink more than you can handle. Neither will we. If you abuse alcohol you’ll be asked to leave, just as with any other drug. • Your participation is entirely at your own risk.

Useful phone numbers:

Ian Morris 333-324 5369 Brien Garnand 333-676 1620 Trinity Jackman 333-361 3151 Emma Blake 339-824 8921 Bengt Westergaard 333-440 4214 Chris Sevara 339-224-2282

11 Glossary of archaeological terms

Here we give brief definitions of key terms used in the handbook. When a definition includes another word listed in the glossary, we italicize that word.

Abandonment deposit. Layer formed immediately above a floor when an area goes out of use: may represent artifacts left on the floor, or artifacts that fell onto the floor. Amphora. A pottery closed shape, usually with two handles and a narrow neck, for transporting wine, olive oil, or water. Angevin period. Royal dynasty from Anjou in France, ruling Sicily 1265-1288. Arab period. Arab conquest began in 827 and was completed with the fall of the last Byzantine fortress in 902. The Arab rulers were replaced by Normans between 1061 and 1093. Aragonese period. Royal dynasty from Aragon in Spain, ruling Sicily 1288-1377. Archaic period. Greek chronological term; 734-480 BC. Area. A space smaller than a structure; a room, a courtyard, etc. Artifact. Any man-made object recovered by excavation. Ashlar. Dressed sandstone masonry. Assemblage. Group of artifacts found together. Balk. The earth left in place between two trenches. Black Glaze. A Greek ware, mostly made in Athens, between about 570 and 300 BC. Black Glaze in fact isn’t a glaze at all, but a slip made from very refined clay, that fires black in the kiln in a reducing atmosphere. Bourbon period. Royal dynasty with links in Austria and Spain, ruling Sicily 1735-1859. Bronze Age. Archaeological period, 2500-900 BC. Byzantine period. Rule of Sicily from Constantinople (Istanbul). Begins in 533; replaced by Arab rulers between 827 and 902. Cassetta. Italian word for yellow plastic box for storing artifacts. Classical period. Greek chronological term; 480-323 BC. Closed (or sealed) deposit (or context). Cultural layer largely undisturbed since it initially formed. Closed shape. Pot with a narrow mouth, usually for storing or pouring. Colluvium. Soft, degraded bedrock, often mixed with cultural materials. Context. The matrix relevant to interpreting an artifact or feature: in ascending order of generality, the context may be a layer, a feature, a trench, a structure, a zone, or a site. Context sheet. Recording tool for documenting each layer. Corinthian pottery. A pottery ware made in Corinth in Greece; as used here, refers to the period c. 625-500 BC. Characterized by pale buff fabric. Normally used for small closed shapes. Dente di lupo. “Wolf’s tooth”: incised triangular design on local “Elymian” ware. Deposit. Group of artifacts associated within a single layer/context. Diagnostic. Sherd that can easily be identified and dated; usually a rim, lip, handle, base, or decorated bodysherd. East Greek. Pottery ware made by Greeks on what’s now the west coast of Turkey. As used here, refers to the period c. 625-525 BC. Commonest shape is the kylix. Elevation. Height above sea level. Elymian. Name given by Greeks to the native population of NW Sicily in the sixth-fifth century BC. Elymian ware. Pottery ware (dente di lupo, gray ware) common in seventh- and sixth-century west Sicily. There’s no good reason to think that “Elymian ware” was actually associated in any way with an Elymian ethnic group. Episode. A distinct period identifiable within a broader chronological phase. In the area around B1/2 we have identified 4 episodes within phase II (the building of wall h; the dumping of an earth fill behind it and the construction of a drain on top of the fill; the dumping of a huge mound of ash on top of the drain; and the construction of B1/2 over the ash mound) and 3 more within phase IV (rebuilding of B1/2, and construction of B1/1; the digging of a big pit; rebuilding of B1 and construction of walls j and cc). Fabric. The clay that a pot is made of. Experts can often identify where a particular ware comes from by studying the fabric. Faunal analysis. Study of the remains of animals—for us, mostly bones. Feature. Any humanly modified component of a site—e.g., hearths, postholes, pits, walls. Floor. Surface on which people walked, worked, etc. Lies underneath the abandonment deposits. Floral analysis. Study of the remains of plants—for us, mostly seeds and pollen. Flotation. Water-sieving technique for recovering tiny seed and bone remains. Foundation trench. A slot dug into the earth to build the foundation for a wall. Often provides very important stratigraphic evidence. Glaze. A glassy surface finish applied to pottery. Invented in Roman times, but only introduced into Sicily in the 9th century AD by the Arabs. Gray ware. Local pottery ware of the 6th century BC. Plates with incised bands are a very common form. Grid square. 5 x 5 m. square with letter/number code. Harris matrix. Framework for ordering stratigraphic sequences. Hellenistic period. Greek chronological term; in Sicily, 323-241 BC. Iron Age. Archaeological period, 900-734 BC Krater. Open shape vase, used for mixing wine and water. Kylix. Open shape cup for wine drinking. Layer. Basic unit of stratigraphic analysis; distinct and homogeneous area of soil, whether formed by natural or cultural means, or a combination. “Layer” is the established term in English, although it’s actually misleading, since it implies a smooth, even deposit across the whole trench. Most layers are irregular, and not what we’d normally think of as some kind of layer (e.g., tree trenches, pits, walls). Italian archaeologists actually speak of unità stratigrafiche (US) instead of layers. Just think of “layer” as a synonym for “stratigraphic unit.” Line level. Tool for finding out whether a line is horizontal. Macrofossils. Tiny bone or seed remains recovered by flotation/wet sieving. Micromorphology. Microscopic analysis of layers that are invisible to the naked eye. Matrix. Short for Harris matrix. “Matrix” can also be used as a word for the make-up of the soil within a specific layer. Mudbrick. Building material made of mud, dried in the sun into bricks. Norman period. Royal dynasty from Normandy in France, ruling Sicily 1061-1194. Oinochoe. Greek word for a jug for pouring wine or water. Open deposit. Archaeological layer that is still in the process of formation, constantly open to the entry of new material. Open shape. Wide-mouthed vessel, such as a cup, bowl, or plate. Palynology. The study of ancient pollen remains. Period. A chronological unit applying to the whole site. At Monte Polizzo, period I = prehistoric; period II = 7th-6th century BC; period III = late 4th century BC; period IV = medieval; period V = modern. Phase. An episode in the history of a particular building or space. Thus Monte Polizzo A1 goes through six architectural phases, spread across period II, III, and V in the site’s history. Phoenician. People and objects coming from the area of the modern Lebanon. Used as a period designation, it normally means c. 800-500 BC. Pithos. Large clay storage vessel, usually handmade. Plan. Map-like representation of the excavation; a “bird’s eye” view. Plumb bob. Lead weight on a string, giving a perfectly vertical line. Profile. Drawing of a stratigraphic sequence, normally as seen in a balk. Punic. Derived from the Latin word Poenus for Phoenician; refers to Phoenician or Carthaginian material in the west Mediterranean. Used as a period designation, it normally means c. 500-146 BC. Roman Empire. 31 BC-AD 476. Roman Republic. In Sicily, 241-31 BC. Rubble. Layer of building stone from collapsed structures. Sherd. Fragment from a broken pot. Sican. Ethnic group in central Sicily. Sicel. Ethnic group in eastern Sicily. Site. Distinct concentration of archaeological materials in the landscape. Stele. Stone pillar, often decorated. Skyphos. Open shape cup for wine drinking. Spoil tip. Pile of earth that has been excavated from trenches. Stratigraphy. Sequence of layers. Structure. Building, platform, hearth, wall, or any other deliberately built construction. Sub-period: A sudivision of one of the periods into which the history of the whole site is divided. Period II, for example, is divided into sub-periods II.a (7th century BC), II.b (600-550 BC), II.c (550-525 BC), and II.d (525-500 BC). Superintendent. Archaeologist in charge of a particular area of Sicily. Swabian period. Royal dynasty from Swabia in Germany, ruling Sicily 1194-1265. Total Station. Digital device for recording three-dimensional position. Trench. Basic excavation unit. Trial trench. Subdivision of a trench. Triangulation. Manual technique for recording three-dimensional position. Ware. A style of pottery, defined by fabric, decoration, or both. Wet sieving. Water-sieving (flotation) technique for recovering tiny seed and bone remains. Zone. Group of contiguous trenches. As of 2003, the Monte Polizzo acropolis was divided into six zones (A-F).

12 Bibliography

Field methods Mortimer Wheeler, Archaeology From the Earth (1954). Classic exposition of stratigraphic excavation. Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn, Archaeology (3rd ed., 2001). By far the best introductory textbook in archaeology. Ch. 3 is good on field methods. Philip Barker, Techniques of Archaeological Excavation (1977). Champions open-area excavation. Ed Harris, Principles of Archaeological Stratigraphy (2nd ed., 1989). Explains the Harris matrix in full. Steve Roskams, Excavation (2001). Up-to-date review of excavation techniques. Final chapters have good suggestions on adapting the Harris matrix. Elizabeth Reitz and Elizabeth Wing, Zooarchaeology (1999). Excellent introduction to analytical methods. Clive Orton, Paul Tyers, and Alan Vince, Pottery in Archaeology (1993). Highly recommended for anyone interested in working in the lab. Clive Orton, Sampling in Archaeology (2000). Superb discussion of the statistical bases of moving from archaeological samples to statements about larger populations. Marie-Agnès Courty, Paul Goldberg, and Richard MacPhail, Soils and Micromorphology in Archaeology (1989). Now slightly out of date, but still the best general introduction to what micromorphology can do. Ian Hodder, The Archaeological Process (1999). Postmodern analysis of excavation. Gavin Lucas, Encountering Archaeology (2001). Another postmodern analysis, focusing more on forms of classification and analysis.

Sicily General Filippo Coarelli and Mario Torelli, Sicilia (5th ed., 2001). In Italian, but the best archaeological guide book. Prehistoric Robert Leighton, Sicily Before History (1999). The best introduction. The goal of presenting a comprehensive overview of all the archaeological evidence, means that inevitably it’s not very exciting reading, but it should be everyone’s starting point. Thorough, well organized. Robert Leighton, ed., Early Societies in Sicily (1996). Collection of essays, several on Iron Age Sicily. Sebastiano Tusa, La Sicilia nella preistoria (2nd ed., 1992). Very thorough text, in Italian. Rosa Maria Albanese Procelli, Siculi, Sicani, Elimi (2003). Up-to-date survey of indigenous material from Sicily in the 8th-5th centuries BC. Very useful book. Phoenicians Sabbatino Moscati, The Phoenicians (1988). Collection of short essays. Very well illustrated. Every aspect of Phoenician civilization. Gaia Servadio, Motya: Unearthing a Lost Civilization (2000). Journalistic account of Mozia, focusing as much on the excavators themselves as on the ancient site. A good read. Antonella Longo, Mozia: Crocevia di culture nel Mediterraneo (1999). More scholarly, emphasizing Mozia as a point of intersection of Mediterranean cultures. Maria Eugenia Aubet, The Phoenicians in the West (2nd ed., 2001). Excellent survey of Phoenician settlements in Sicily, Sardinia, Spain, and North Africa. Serge Lancel, Carthage (English translation, 1995). Useful survey of the history and archaeology of the great Phoenician colony in Tunisia. Glenn Markoe, The Phoenicians (2002). Good general survey. Greeks and Romans Moses Finley, Ancient Sicily (2nd ed., 1979). Rather old-fashioned, but still the only general survey. First published 1968. John Boardman, The Greeks Overseas (3rd ed., 1999). Standard survey of Greek colonization, well illustrated. Now rather out of date (first published in 1964). Franco De Angelis, Megara Hyblaia and Selinous: The Development of Two Greek City-States in Archaic Sicily (2003). Excellent comparative analysis of demography and economics of two Greek cities in Sicily, with a lot of discussion of archaeology and native populations. Carla Antonaccio, “Ethnicity and colonization,” in Irad Malkin, ed., Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity (2001) 113-57. Sophisticated discussion of the formation of ethnic identity among Greeks in Sicily, and of native identities. Franco De Angelis, “Archaeology in Sicily 1996-2000,” in Archaeological Reports for 2000-2001 (supplement to the Journal of Hellenic Studies 121 [2001]) 145-201. Thorough review of all archaeological activity in Sicily during these 5 years. Starting point for any serious archaeology of Sicily. R. Ross Holloway, The Archaeology of Ancient Sicily (1991). Reviews the Greek and Roman periods and sites, but much briefer on indigenous Sicily. Not very good, but widely available. Roger Wilson, The Archaeology of Roman Sicily (1992). Very thorough survey of all published (and much unpublished) evidence. Middle Ages Aziz Ahmad, A History of Islamic Sicily (1975). Straightforward political narrative. Fernando Maurici, Breve storia degli arabi in Sicilia (1995). Much better book, and very concise. Denis Mack Smith, Medieval Sicily (1968). The standard account, although he focuses almost exclusively on political narrative history. Covers period to 1713. John Julius Norwich, The Other Conquest (also published as The Normans in the South, 1016-1130) (1967). Very readable narrative of the establishment of the Norman kingdom. The Kingdom in the Sun, 1130-1194 (1970). Continues the story from the formal establishment of the kingdom through the Swabian takeover. Penguin recently reissued the two books as a single volume called The Normans in Sicily. Donald Matthew, The Norman Kingdom of Sicily (1992). More scholarly, but not very well organized or readable. Steven Runciman, The Sicilian Vespers (1958). Story of the 1282 uprising. Heavy on detail, but riveting in its own way, and puts the massacre into an international context. Modern Sicily Denis Mack Smith, Modern Sicily (1968). The standard account, although like his medieval volume, dwells on political narrative history. 1713 through 1967. Ilde Rizzo and Ruth Towse, eds., The Economics of Heritage (2002).14 essays on the organization of cultural heritage in Sicily. Explains how the Superintendency system works, and helps make sense of where foreign projects like ours fit into the system. Paul Ginsborg, Italy and its Discontents (2003). Thorough review of the social history of the last 20 years, though he sometimes loses the thread of the story in the details. David Forgacs and Robert Lumley, eds., Italian Cultural Studies (1996). Essays on different aspects of Italian culture, from politics through fashion to corruption. Anton Blok, The Mafia of a Sicilian Village (1974). Classic ethnographic analysis of rural Sicily. Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia (1993). Rational-choice approach to the Mafia. Very good analysis. Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard (1958). One of the great European novels of the twentieth century. Set in 1860; a must-read. Made into a classic movie with Burt Lancaster. If you read one book about Sicily, this should be it. Theresa Maggio, The Stone Boudoir: Travels through the Hidden Villages of Sicily (2002). Nice account of the stone villages of the interior. She based herself in Santa Margherita di Belice, near Salemi. Leoluca Orlando, Fighting the Mafia and Renewing Sicilian Culture (1999). Somewhat self-serving account by the Mayor of Palermo, but very interesting, and has some great photos from the 1980s. Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work. Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (1993). The best study of the complicated world of Italian politics. Peter Robb, Midnight in Sicily (1996). Journalistic account of Sicilian culture. Highly opinionated and poorly written, but still entertaining and often informative. Alexander Stille, Excellent Cadavers. The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic (1995). Chilling analysis of the 1980s Mafia war. Robb made a lot of use of this book for the factual parts of Midnight in Sicily. Frank Viviano, Blood Washes Blood (2002). A journalist’s story of how he tracked down his nineteenth- century Sicilian ancestors. Based in Terrasini, near the Palermo airport. The book’s not all that good, but it’s kind of entertaining. The Elymians Giuseppe Nenci, Sebastiano Tusa, and Vincenzo Tusa, eds., Gli elimi e l’area elima (Archivio Storico Siciliano ser. 4, vol. 14-15, 1988/89) Giuseppe Nenci, ed., Giornate internazionali di studi sull’area elima (2 vols., 1992) Stefania de Vido, ed., Seconde giornate internazionali di studi sull’area elima (3 vols., 1997) Stefania de Vido, ed., Terze giornate internazionali di studi sull’area elima (2 vols., 2000) Stefania de Vido, ed., Quarte giornate internazionali di studi sull’area elima (3 vols., 2003) These publications of congress proceedings are fundamental to all scholarly work on sixth-century Sicily. Nearly all in Italian (some French, no German or English). They summarize excavations and surveys, and present historical interpretations. All volumes are in Green Library. The journals Kokalos and Sicilia Archeologica carry annual excavation reports, in Italian

Monte Polizzo Older excavations Vincenzo Tusa, “Monte Polizzo—scavi 1970,” Sicilia Archeologica 5 (1972) 119-121 Vincenzo Tusa, “L’attività archeologica della Soprintendenza alle antichità della Sicilia occidentale nel quadrennio 1968-1971,” Kokalos 18/19 (1972/1973) 405 Brief comments on Tusa’s 1970 excavation, with some details on the Tusa House. Survey Michael Kolb and Sebastiano Tusa, “The Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age landscape of interior western Sicily,” Antiquity 75 (2001) 503-504. Preliminary account of the NIU survey. House I Christopher Prescott, Christian Mühlenbock, and Eva Englund, eds., Sicilian-Scandinavian Archaeological Project: Annual Report 1998 (2001) Christian Mühlenbock and Christopher Prescott, Scandinavian-Sicilian Archaeological Project: House 1 Annual Report 1999-2000 (2001) (http://www.hf.uio.no/iakk.sicilia) Acropolis Ian Morris, Trinity Jackman, Emma Blake, and Sebastiano Tusa, “Stanford University excavations on the acropolis of Monte Polizzo, Sicily, I: preliminary report on the 2000 season,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 46 (2001) 153-172 Ian Morris, Trinity Jackman, Emma Blake, and Sebastiano Tusa, “Stanford University excavations on the acropolis of Monte Polizzo, Sicily, II: preliminary report on the 2001 season,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 47 (2002) 253-98 Ian Morris, Trinity Jackman, Emma Blake, Brien Garnand, and Sebastiano Tusa, with contributions from Tara Hnatiuk, Wendy Matthews, and Hans-Peter Stika, “Stanford University excavations on the acropolis of Monte Polizzo, Sicily, III: preliminary report on the 2002 season,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 48 (2003) 243-315 Ian Morris, Trinity Jackman, Emma Blake, Brien Garnand, and Sebastiano Tusa, with contributions from Tara Hnatiuk, Wendy Matthews, and Hans-Peter Stika, “Stanford University excavations on the acropolis of Monte Polizzo, Sicily, IV: preliminary report on the 2003 season,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 49 (2004)

Iron Age material culture Various authors, Di terra in terra (1991). Collection of essays summarizing 1980s excavations in Palermo province. Most of the sites are contemporary with Monte Polizzo. Various authors, Archeologia e territorio (1993). Another collection of essays on sites contemporary with Monte Polizzo but in Palermo province. Various authors, Palermo Punica (1998). Catalog of a museum exhibition; excellent collection of sixth- through fourth-century BC material, with many close parallels to Monte Polizzo. Stefano Vassallo, ed., Colle Madore (1999). Sixth-century site with a lot of similarities to Monte Polizzo. Marisa Famà, ed., Mozia: gli scavi della “Zona A” dell’ abitato (2002). Again, excellent sixth-/fifth-century comparisons for Monte Polizzo. Francesca Spatafora, ed., Monte Maranfusa (2003). This site is the most similar one to Monte Polizzo that’s so far been published. They concentrated on housing, but the finds are very similar to ours. The single most important site report. Roger Howland, The Athenian Agora IV: Greek Lamps and Their Survivals (1958). Based on the American School of Classical Studies’ excavation, that began in 1932. The standard typology for lamps, with chronology. Many parallels from Monte Polizzo Brian Sparkes and Lucy Talcott, The Athenian Agora XII: Black and Plain Pottery (2 vols., 1970). Massive collection of sixth to fourth century BC pottery, very important for dating purposes Christiane Dehl-von Kaenel, Die archaische Keramik aus dem Malophoros-Heiligtum in Selnunt (1995). Thorough publication of pottery from a peculiar sanctuary at Selinunte. Very good on Corinthian pottery Robert M. Cook and Pierre Dupont, East Greek Pottery (1999). Not as useful as Palermo punica or Agora XII, but still helpful for comparisons

Salemi Francesco Venezia and Mimmo Jodice, Salemi e il suo territorio (1984). Beautifully illustrated and lavishly produced collection of photos of the town and countryside Salvatore Riggio Scaduto, Salemi: Storia—Arte—Tradizioni (1998). Straightforward narrative, much better on the nineteenth and twentieth century than antiquity and the Middle Ages; some good photos from the 1930s Antonino Cusumano, Madre Pietra: Arte e tecnica del costruire a Salemi (1999). Nicely illustrated review of stone architecture and carvings in Salemi, including details from a house belonging to Nicola Spagnolo

Monte Polizzo Date, Zone Trench Checked, Acropolis 200 initials initials, date Starting sheet

Plan

Photos Monte Polizzo Date, Zone Trench Trial Layer Checked, Acropolis 200 initials Trench initials, date

I. DESCRIPTION 1. Color

2. Composition humus silt clay sand ash

3. Stones Pebbles Many Some Few >20 cm 10-20 cm <10 cm Slabs Many Some Few >20 cm 10-20 cm <10 cm Other 4. Compaction

5. Thickness

6. Shape in plan

7. Top elevation

8. Bottom elevation, today

9. Excavation method

10. Other comments

SIEVED: Y / N

II. STRATIGRAPHY

This is layer

III. INTERPRETATION Internal External Structural Other (explain) Interpretation:

Same as: IV. RECORDING Plan # Photographs BW Date CS D Profile # Date Notebook pp.: Filmed? Y / N

V. FINDS Fine Coarse Pithos Tile Bone/ Other ware ware shell Number of bags Diagnostics Black Cor. East Incised Gray Painted Norman Glazed Glaze Greek ware ware tile

Small finds # TS # Elevation Manual Artifact # Description

Samples TS # Flotation Charcoal Pollen Micromorph. C14 Other Provisional date:

VI. SKETCH PLAN

VII. SKETCH PROFILE

Monte Polizzo Zone Trench Trial Layer Checked, Acropolis 200 Trench initials, date Continuing sheet

Date Day __ of __ Elevations at start

Elevations at end

Photos D CS Notebook pp. Filmed? Y / N Fine Coarse Pithos Tile Bone/ Other ware ware shell Number of bags

Diagnostics Black Cor. East Incised Gray Painted Norman Glazed Glaze Greek ware ware tile

Small finds # TS # Elevation Manual Artifact # Description Samples TS # Type Date Day __ of __ Elevations at start

Elevations at end

Photos D CS Notebook pp. Filmed? Y / N Fine Coarse Pithos Tile Bone/ Other ware ware shell Number of bags

Diagnostics Black Cor. East Incised Gray Painted Norman Glazed Glaze Greek ware ware tile

Small finds # TS # Elevation Manual Artifact # Description Samples TS # Type Date Day __ of __ Elevations at start

Elevations at end

Photos D CS Notebook pp. Filmed? Y / N Fine Coarse Pithos Tile Bone/ Other ware ware shell Number of bags

Diagnostics Black Cor. East Incised Gray Painted Norman Glazed Glaze Greek ware ware tile

Small finds # TS # Elevation Manual Artifact # Description Samples TS # Type Date Day __ of __ Elevations at start

Elevations at end

Photos D CS Notebook pp. Filmed? Y / N Fine Coarse Pithos Tile Bone/ Other ware ware shell Number of bags

Diagnostics Black Cor. East Incised Gray Painted Norman Glazed Glaze Greek ware ware tile

Small finds # TS # Elevation Manual Artifact # Description Samples TS # Type Monte Polizzo Date, Zone Trench Trial Wall = Layer Checked, Acropolis 200 initials Trench initials, date Structural sheet

Have you attached a Total Station printout? Y / N

Elevations on top of wall

Elevations at bottom of wall

Number of preserved courses

Excavated length of wall

Dimensions of wall stones

Slabs / pebbles. Comments?

What layer does the wall rest on? Does the wall have a foundation trench? Y / N If yes, what layer was the trench dug from? Which layer(s) does the trench cut through? What is the first layer that postdates the wall? What is the first layer that covers the top of the wall? Which walls does this wall abut? With which walls does it bond?

Description of wall

Interpretation Monte Polizzo 200 Zone Trench Initials Small finds list

trial SF # layer trench TS # Date Photos Description trial SF # layer trench TS # Date Photos Description

Monte Polizzo 200 Zone Trench Initials Closing sheet Monte Polizzo 200 Zone Trench Initials Final Harris matrix

14 2003 Harris matrices, zone A

Fig. 14.1 A1 area Harris matrix

14.1.1 Key to 2003 Harris matrix, A1 area

Phase VI (modern) 1 O99.1 = 2002 spoil tip (A1/6) 2 M99.02.1; M99B.1 = soft fill inside A4 (A1/2) 3 M99.02.2 = pit in A4 (A1/2) 4 MN98 balk.12 = Structure A4 (1970s stone shelter) 5 44090.5; MN98.02.8; MN98 balk.11; M99.02.4; N99.01.8 = cutting for A4 6 L100.1, 19 = tree trench (A1/7, A2) 7 MN98.02.0; MN98.03.3; N99.11; N100.0; MN101.0 = tree trench (A1/6, A2) 8 N102.3 = tree trench (A2) 9 MN98.03.1; O99.3, 8, 17 = tree trench (A1/6, A2) 10 44090.10 = tree pit (A1/3) 11 See under phase I-VI below 12 44090.1; 41669.1, 3; MN98.01.1; MN98.02.1; MN98.03.2; MN98 balk.1; L99.01.1; L99.02.1; L99.03.2, 7; L100.02.2; M99.Int.01.2; M99.01.1; M99.02.11; M99B.2; M100.1; M100C, E.1; M100/101.1; N99.01.1; O99.2, 6, 12; MN101.1, 7, 9, 10; N102.1, 2a = topsoil, Surface VI 13 MN98 balk.2 = stony patch (A1/5) 14 MN98.03.4 = small stones (A1/5) 15 L99.03.3; M99.01.2 = compact soil (A1/4) 16 41669.2; 44090.4; L100.02.3 = loose rubble over A3 17 41669.4; L100.02.4; M100.2, 3, 4, 6; M100C, E.2, 3; M100/101.2; N99.18; N100.1a; O99.4, 5, 14 = rubble from A3 (A1/4, A1/7) 18 O99.7, 13 = eroded topsoil (A1/6)

Phase V.2 (late 4th century BC) 19 M99.01.Int.1, 3 = Floor V2 20 See under phase I-VI below

Phase V (mid-late 4th century BC) 21 M99.01.Int.4, 5 = ash, pottery (A1/2) 22 M99.02.7 = ash, pottery (A1/2) 23 MN98.01.2; MN98.02.2 = upper paving slabs (A1/5) 24 44090.2, 3, 11; M99.01.3, 4, 6, 8, 15; M99.02.5b, 6a, 6b; M99.01.Int.6; L99.02.2; L99.03.8, 9; N99.2, 3 = clay Floor V, with some paving stones (A1/1, A1/2, A1/4, A1/6) 25 M99.03.38; N99.16 = Structure A3 (late 4th century BC shelter) 26 M100.01.7 = pebbly deposit (A1/7) 27 N99.40; O99.9 = pebbly deposit (A1/6) 28 M100.03.4 = pebbly deposit (A1/7) 29 N99.12, 27 = small stones, clay (A1/1, A1/6) 30 N99.17 = small stones (A1/1, A1/6)

Phase IV (early 5th century BC) 31 M99.01.7, 9 = ash, rich finds (A1/4) 32 M99.01.10 = charcoal (A1/4) 33 M99.01.11 = ashy (A1/4) 34 L99.02.4 = ash (A1/4) 35 N99.5 = ash, bones, teeth, pottery (A1/1) 36 M99.03.39 = yellow/gray clay (A1/3) 37 M99.03.41 = red clay (A1/3) 38 N99.4 = small pebbles (A1/5, A1/6) 39 N99.19 = burning, bones (A1/1) 40 MN98.03.5 = clay (A1/5); probably same as layer 41 41 N99.7, 9 (A1/1); M99.02.3, 6, 6c, 9; M99.03.9, 15; M99B.3 (A1/2); L99.02.3, 7; M99.01.5, 13, 15; M99.02.12, 12b; M99.03.40, 42; MN98 balk.10 (A1/4, A1/5); N99.6, 15 (A1/6); L100.02.5, 6; M100.01.5, 8, 10, 11; M100C, E.4 (A1/7) = clay Floor IV, with some paving stones 42 M99.03.43; N99/100.1 = clay surface (A1/3); possibly same as layer 41 43 L100.02.8, 9 = clay surface (A1/7); possibly same as layer 41 44 N99.29, 32 = clay, pebbles (A1/6) 45 MN98 balk.16; M99.03.44, 45 = Structure A12 (walls A1a, A1b, A1c1; early 5th century BC building) 46 Structure A1j (early 5th century BC enclosure wall) 47 N99.6B, 28, 51 = robbers’ trench, removing parts of wall A1c1 (A1/1, A1/6) 48 M100.03.5 = small pebbles (A1/7)

Phase III or IV (late 6th or early 5th century BC) 49 MN98.02.6; MN98.03.9 = main level of paving slabs (A1/5) 50 See under phase I-IV below 51 See under phase I-IV below

Phase III (late 6th century BC) 52 M99.02.18 = clay sealing of pit (A1/2) 53 N99.14b = mix of clay and ash (A1/1) 54 N99.26 = mix of clay and ash (A1/1) 55 M99.02.20 = ash fill of pit (A1/2) 56 N99.50 = ash (A1/1) 57 N99.13 = ash (A1/1) 58 N99.14 = ash (A1/1) 59 N99.24 = ash (A1/1) 60 N99.49 = ash (A1/1) 61 N99.10 = red, charcoal (A1/1) 62 M99.03.16/17 = red burned area (A1/4) 63 M99.01.14 = ash (A1/4) 64 M99.01.16 = red burned area (A1/4) 65 M99.01.18 = red burned area (A1/4) 66 L99.02.8 = dark soil, bones (A1/4) 67 M100.01.9, 13 = red burned clay (A1/4, A1/7) 68 N99.54 = clay (A1/6) 69 N99.52, 57 = ash (A1/6) 70 N99.33 = ash (A1/1) 71 N99.45 = ash (A1/1) 72 M99.02.19 = clay lining of pit (A1/2) 73 L100.7 = Structure A1d (late 6th-century BC enclosure wall) 74 See under phase I-IV below 75 See under phase I-IV below 76 MN98.02.4; MN98.03.10, 12 = lower level of slabs (A1/5) 77 N99.58 = slabs, probably same as layers 78-80 (A1/6) 78 44090.6, 7, 8; M99.02.5b, 5c; M99.03.22 = clay surface, probably same as layers 77, 79, 80 (south part of A1/2) 79 L99.02.9; M99.02.13, 14; M99.03.13, 23, 33, 34; MN98 balk.14 = clay Floor III, with some paving stones (A1/4) 80 L100.02.10, 14, ?17; M100.01.14, 15 = clay Floor III, with some paving stones (A1/7) 81 N99.30, 31 = small stones (A1/6) 82 See under phase I-IV below 83 N99.21 = lower ash deposit (A1/1)

Phase II (mid 6th century BC) 84 N99.22 = clay hearth/basin (A1/1) 85 N99.25 = hard baked red clay (A1/1) 86 See under phase I-IV below 87 MN98.03.13, 14 = clay (A1/5) 88 MN98.02.3, 9 = clay (A1/5) 89 MN98.02.5 = clay, pottery (A1/5) 90 MN98 balk.15 = ash (A1/5) 91 N99.60 = ash (A1/6) 92 N99.35 = ash, possibly same as layer 91 (A1/5-6) 93 N99.55; O99.20 = ash, pithos, antler (A1/6) 94 L99.8 = dark clay, much bone (A1/4, N of A1f) 95 L99.02.13 = pebbles, bones, teeth (A1/4, N of A1f) 96 L99.02.11 = sandy strip (A1/4, S of A1f) 97 M100.01.18A = ash (A1/4, A1/7, S of A1f) 98 M100.16 = charcoal pocket (A1/4, S of A1f) 99 N99.41 = clay, antler (A1/6) 100 N99.36, 37; O99.10 = clay, pottery (A1/6) 101 See under phase I-IV below 102 Structure A11 (wall A1c1; original round building) 103 L99.6 = Structure A1f (mid 6th-century wall, built with A11; A1/4) 104 Stele (A1/6) 105 Structure A1e (wall/pavement; A1/4) 106 See under phase I-IV below 107 N99.59 = yellow/brown clay (A1/6) 108 N99.53 = hard pebbly patch, probably same as Floor II layers 109-112 (A1/6) 109 N99.47, 56, 61 = clay, probably same as Floor II layers 108, 110-112 (A1/1) 110 N99.34 = leveled bedrock, probably same as Floor II layers 109-109, 111-112 (A1/1) 111 L99.02.5, 15, 16; L100.02.18; M99.02.16/17; M99.03.27, 30; M100.01.12, 18; M100C.5 = clay Floor II, with large burned areas, probably same as layers 107-110, 112 112 L99.02.12 = burned red clay, very probably same as layers 107-111 113 N99.44; O99.11, 16 = foundation trench for A1e, layer 101 (A1/6)

Phase I (early 6th century BC) 114 L100.02.20 = sandy deposit (A1/7) 115 M99.03.29 = burning, ash (A1/4) 116 M99.03.31 = burned clay (A1/4) 117 M99.03.32 = ashy fill in pit (A1/4) 118 M99.03.36 = ashy fill in pit, bones (A1/4) 119 M99.03.35 = burned clay (A1/4) 120 See under phase I-VI below 121 N99.20 = sterile, very tiny pebbles, under A1b; unclear whether it’s natural (A1/1, A1/3) 122 M99.03.37; MN98 balk.13; N99.46 = white mudstone (A1/1, A1/4, A1/5, A1/6) 123 L99.02.14; L100.02.12, 13; M99.01.17; M99.02.8, 10, 21; M99.03.28; M99B.4; M100.01.19; M100E.5, 6; MN98.02.7; MN98 balk.17, 18; N99.23, 39, 42, 43, 64; N99/100.2; O99.12, 18, 19 = colluvium, often Floor I 124 44090.9; MN98 balk.19; M100.01.17,20; MN98.03.18; N99.38, 62; N99/100.3; O99.15, 21; MN101.19 = bedrock, sterile ************************************************************************ Phase I-VI (A1g, 6th century BC-20th century AD) 11 M99.03.24; M99B.5 = feature A1g cover slabs (A1/2, A1/4) 20 M99.03.25 = feature A1g fill (A1/2, A1/4) 120 M99.03.26 = feature A1g, clay, poss. natural (A1/2, A1/4) ************************************************************************ Phase I-IV (A2, early 6th century BC-early 5th century BC) 50 M100/101.3; MN101.2, 8, 11, 13, 14, 16, 18, 20; N100.3 = pithos and antler deposit, probably late sixth-early fifth century 51 N102.2 = rubble, probably from small collapsed structure 74 MN101.3; N100.Tte.3 = hard, pebbly, dark soil 75 MN101.4, 12 = pits 82 MN101.5, 15; N100.4, 5 = Hard, pebbly layer, burning, bone 86 Structure A22 (altar, 2nd phase; probably late 6th century BC) 101 MN101.6, 17 = burned sandstone 106 Structure A21 (altar, 1st phase; probably mid 6th century BC) 14.1.2 Reverse key to area A1-A4 Harris matrix, 2003

Excavated Matrix layer layer 41669 1 12 2 16 3 12 4 17

44090 1 12 2 24 3 24 4 16 5 5 6 78 7 78 8 78 9 124 10 10 11 24

MN98 01.1 12 01.2 23 02.0 7 02.1 12 02.2 23 02.3 88 02.4 76 02.5 89 02.6 49 02.7 123 02.8 5 02.9 88 03.1 9 03.2 12 03.3 7 03.4 14 03.5 40 03.9 49 03.10 76 03.12 76 03.13 87 03.14 87 03.18 124

MN98 balk 1 12 2 13 10 41 11 5 12 4 (A4) 13 122 14 79 15 90 16 45 (A1a) 17 123 18 123 19 124

L99 1 12 2 24 3 41 4 34 5 111 6 103 (A1f) 7 41 8 94 9 79 10 Number not used 11 96 12 112 13 95 14 123 15 111 16 111 03.2 12 03.3 15 03.7 12 03.8 24 03.9 24

M99 01.1 12 01.2 15 01.3 24 01.4 24 01.5 41 01.6 24 01.7 31 01.8 24 01.9 31 01.10 32 01.11 33 01.12 Number not used 01.13 41 01.14 63 01.15 41 01.16 64 01.17 123 01.18 65 02.1 2 02.2 3 02.3 41 02.4 5 02.5b 24 02.6 41 02.6a 24 02.6b 24 6c 41 02.7 22 02.8 123 02.9 41 02.10 123 02.11 12 02.12 41 02.12b 41 02.13 79 02.14 79 02.15 24 02.16/17 111 02.18 52 02.19 72 02.20 55 02.21 123 03.9 41 03.13 79 03.15 41 03.16/17 62 03.21 79 03.22 78 03.23 79 03.24 11 03.25 20 03.26 120 03.27 111 03.28 123 03.29 115 03.30 111 03.31 116 03.32 117 03.33 79 03.34 79 03.35 119 03.36 118 03.37 122 03.38 25 (A3) 03.39 36 03.40 41 03.41 37 03.42 41 03.43 42 03.44 45 03.45 45

M99B 1 2 2 12 3 41 4 123 5 11

M99.Int 1 19 2 12 3 19 4 21 5 21 6 24

N99 1 12 2 24 3 24 4 38 5 35 6 41 6B 47 7 41 8 5 9 41 10 61 11 7 12 29 13 57 14 58 14b 53 15 41 16 25 17 30 18 17 19 39 20 121 21 83 22 84 23 123 24 59 25 85 26 54 27 29 28 47 29 44 30 81 31 81 32 44 33 70 34 110 35 92 36 100 37 100 38 124 39 123 40 27 41 99 42 123 43 123 43 42 44 113 45 71 46 122 47 109 48 Number not used 49 60 50 56 51 47 52 69 53 108 54 68 55 93 56 109 57 69 58 77 59 107 60 91 61 109 62 124 63 See N99 2003 NB, p. 33 64 123

N99/100 1 42 2 123 3 124

O99 1 1 2 12 3 9 4 17 5 17 6 12 7 18 8 9 9 27 10 100 11 113 12 123 13 18 14 17 15 124 16 113 17 9 18 123 19 123 20 93

L100 1 6 2 12 3 16 4 17 5 41 6 41 7 73 (A1d) 8 43 9 43 10 80 11 See A5 matrix 12 123 13 123 14 80 15 See A5 matrix 16 See A5 matrix 17 ?80 18 111 19 6 20 114 21-25 See A5 matrix 03.1-12 See A5 matrix

M100 1 12 2 17 3 17 4 17 5 41 6 17 7 26 8 41 9 67 10 41 11 41 12 111 13 67 14 80 15 80 16 98 17 124 18 111 18A 97 19 123 20 124

M100C 1 12 2 17 3 17 4 41 5 111

M100E 1 12 2 17 3 17 4 41 5 123 6 123

M100/101 1 12 2 17 3 50 4 28 5 48

N100 0 7 1a 17 2 51 3 50 Tte.3 74 4 82 5 82

MN101 0 7 1 12 2 50 3 74 4 75 5 82 6 101 7 12 8 50 9 12 10 12 11 50 12 75 13 50 14 50 15 82 16 50 17 101 18 50 19 124 20 50

N102 1 12 2a 12 3 8

Fig. 14.2 A5 area matrix

14.2.1 Key to Harris matrix for building A5 April 5, 2004

Phase 7 (modern) 1 K100.1 = 2002 spoil tip 2 K100.2 = retaining wall for 2002 spoil tip 3 K99.2, L101.4 = 2002 path 4 L100.02.1, 19 = tree trench 5 L99.03.1 = tree trench 6 K100.3a = tree trench 7 K99.1; K100.3b = tree trench 8 K99.3; L101.2 = tree trench 9 L101.8 = tree pit 10 L99.03.4a, b = rubble pockets 11 K99.4; K100.4; L99.03.2, 7; L100.02.2; L101.1, 10 = top soil 12 L99.03.03 = compact top soil 13 L99.03.5, 6 = clayey pockets 14 L99.03.10 = eroded humus 15 L100.03.1, 10 = stony clay 16 L100.02.11 = stony clay 17 K99.6; L99.03.12 = rubble pockets

Phase 6 (probably medieval) 18 L101.7, 17, 18 = pit

Phase 5 (probably late 4th-3rd century BC) 19 K99.5, 9, 11; K100.5; L99.03.11 = clay layer with multicolored pebbles

Phase 4 (probably 550-500 BC) 20 K99.7; L99.03.13 = light clay, erosion? 21 L99.03.14 = rubble pockets 22 K100.14 = pit 23 K100.6, 10 = rubble pockets 24 L101.N balk.7 = rubble from A6 25 L101.5 = rubble from A6 26 K99.8 = flat paving slabs; possibly resurfacing of layer 30 27 L101.N balk.6 = pebbly soil, small rubble 28 L101.6, 11= pebbly soil, small rubble 29 L101.19 = A6b 30 K99.10; L99.03.15 = pebbly clay surface; Floor 2 over A5/1 31 K100.7 = orange clay; Floor over A5d 32 L101.9 = hard, pebbly; A6 Floor 2 (A6/1)

Phase 3 (probably c. 550 BC) 33 K99.14 = rubble 34 K99.13 = pit w charcoal and building material 35 K99.12; L99.03.16 = pale clay 36 L99.03.19 = pebbly clay 37 L99.03.21 = rubble 38 K99.18 = pit with ash 39 K99.19 = pit with dark fill 40 K99.20 = burned orange/red patch 41 K99.15, 17 = Floor 1 over A5/1 42 L101.12 = hard clay; A6 Floor 1 (A6/1) 43 L101.3 = A6a 44 A6c1 45 A6c2

Phase 2 (probably c. 600-550 BC) 46 L99.03.20 = decayed mudbrick? 47 L100.03.2 = rubble (East of A5) 48 L100.02.26 = clay over packed slabs (A5/5) 49 L100.02.25 = clay over packed slabs (A5/3) 50 K100.12 = orangey clay (A5/2) 51 K100.9 = white clay (A5/4) 52 L101.13 = decayed mudbrick? 53 L100.03.3 = orange clay (East of A5) 54 L100.02.24 = packed slabs (A5/5) 55 L100.02.23 = packed slabs (A5/3) 56 K100.13 = pebbly orange clay (A5/2) 57 K100.18 = white clay (A5/4) 58 L101.15 = brown clay (A5/6) 59 L101.14 = rubble blocking door in A5b (A5/6-South of A5) 60 K100.15 = sand, large pebbles (A5/4) 61 K100.20, 21 = orange clay, charcoal fragments; A5/4 Floor 2 (A5/4) 62 L101.21 = pit with ash (South of A5) 63 L100.02.22; L100.03.6 = clay spilled down bedrock (East of A5) 64 L100.02.21; L100.03.5, 7, 8, 11 = clay spilled down bedrock (East of A5) 65 K99.16 = orange clay; A5/2 Floor (A5/2) 66 K100.11 = paved floor; A5/4 Floor 1 (A5/4) 67 L101.16 = white clay; A5/6 Floor (A5/6) 68 L101.20, 22, 23 = light clay, pebbly; South of A5 Floor (South of A5) 69 L100.03.4 = clay and charcoal spilled down bedrock (East of A5) 70 K99.21 = A5e; K99.22 = A5g; K100.17 = A5h; L99.03.18 = A5a; A5 = walls b, c, d1, f

Phase I (pre-A5, probably 7th century) 71 L100.03.9 = rubble (East of A5) 72 L100.03.12 = in situ pithos (East of A5)

Natural 73 K100.16, 19 = colluvium 74 Bedrock 14.2.2 A5 zone, 2003, reverse key

K99 Excavated Matrix layer layer 1 7 2 3 3 8 4 11 5 19 6 17 7 20 8 26 9 19 10 30 11 19 12 35 13 34 14 33 15 41 16 65 17 41 18 38 19 39 20 40 21 70 22 70

K100 1 1 2 2 3a 6 3b 7 4 11 5 19 6 23 7 31 8 70 9 51 10 23 11 66 12 50 13 56 14 22 15 60 16 73 17 70 18 57 19 73 20 61 21 61

L99 03.1 5 03.2 11 03.3 12 03.4a, 4b 10 03.5 13 03.6 13 03.7 11 03.8 See A1-A2 matrix 03.9 See A1-A2 matrix 03.10 14 03.11 19 03.12 17 03.13 20 03.14 21 03.15 30 03.16 35 03.17 See A1-A2 matrix (A1f) 03.18 70 = A5a 03.19 36 03.20 46 03.21 37

L100 02.1 4 02.2 11 02.11 16 02.19 4 02.21 64 02.22 63 02.23 55 02.24 54 02.25 49 02.26 48 03.1 15 03.2 47 03.3 53 03.4 69 03.5 64 03.6 63 03.7 64 03.8 64 03.9 71 03.10 15 03.11 64 03.12 72

L101 1 11 2 8 3 43 4 3 5 25 6 28 7 18 8 9 9 32 10 11 11 28 12 42 13 52 14 59 15 58 16 67 17 18 18 18 19 29 20 68 21 62 22 68 23 68 N balk.6 27 N balk.7 24