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Part 1: Ancient Sicily Monte Iato: Negotiating Indigeneity in an Archaic Contact Zone in the Interior of Western Sicily

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Part 1: Ancient Sicily Monte Iato: Negotiating Indigeneity in an Archaic Contact Zone in the Interior of Western Sicily Sicily as contact zone Part 1: Ancient Sicily By the early Iron Age the Mediterranean Sea was already a key player in an entangled pre-global world connecting various geographical regions and cultures.1 Within this mega-space of transcultural interactions and interconnections Sicily was one of the most important hubs Monte Iato: Negotiating due to its position at the centre of the Mediterranean Sea. With the newly founded Phoenician and Greek settlements Indigeneity in an Archaic along the coasts from the 8th century bc onwards, Sicily was becoming an integral part of this interconnected world. The Contact Zone in the hinterland of the island was also increasingly transformed into a zone of intercultural contacts and encounters with Interior of Western Sicily specific meeting places, where the ‘global’ interchanged with the ‘local’ and vice versa.2 During the 7th and 6th centuries bc such places and forms of cross-cultural communication Birgit Öhlinger, Erich Kistler, increased and affected more and more local traditions. While extended families or clans settled on hilltops in hamlet-like Benjamin Wimmer, Ruth Irovec and compounds had been the typical way of life since the Bronze Thomas Dauth Age, around the middle of the 6th century bc a change towards living in extra-familial neighbourhoods in Institute of Archaeologies, University conglomerates of rectangular houses comprising one or of Innsbruck several rooms is seen. In conjunction with this transformation the deceased were no longer buried in the traditional multi- burial chamber tomb of their family or descent group, but Gerald Weissengruber and Gerhard were laid in individual single graves ( fossa graves, a cappuccina Forstenpointner or sarcophagus burials, enchytrismoi).3 Ultimately, such local appropriations of foreign practices triggered a continuing Institute of Topographic Anatomy, process of eroding old social structures by negotiating and University of Veterinary Medicine creating new forms of sociality and power structures in the interior of Sicily.4 As a consequence, the self-localisation of of Vienna the local communities as autochthonous was dramatically challenged. Our argument is that one of the local responses to this new situation was to establish conscious references to an imagined pre-Greek or pre-colonial past and tradition. In an attempt to prove or disprove this argument, this paper will examine the role of ritual practice in the process of local self- positioning and the production of indigeneity in a cultural contact zone taking the archaic settlement on Monte Iato in the interior of western Sicily as a starting point. Religion, ritual and self-localisation in cultural contact situations From a religious perspective ritual activity serves to make faith or belief physically tangible. Cultic communication with the gods as well as with the cult participants is structured by symbolic, repetitive and stereotyped behaviour. On a sociological basis, rituals as an integral part of religious behaviour are collective representations constructing personal, social and cultural identities and affiliations.5 Following Arjun Appadurai, they are not simply mechanical techniques for social aggregation, but complex social techniques that are active, intentional and productive.6 He states that: ‘One of the most remarkable general features of the ritual process is its highly specific way of localizing duration and extension, of giving these categories names and properties, values and meanings, symptoms and legibility’.7 This process appears to be particularly significant when a specific group’s identity became destabilised by growing influence and pressure from outside: the performing of specific rituals served to Monte Iato: Negotiating Indigeneity in an Archaic Contact Zone in the Interior of Western Sicily | 7 create a feeling of local belonging. Remembrance politics Self-localisation on Monte Iato and cultural commemoration therefore play a major role in From the Bronze Age to the advanced Iron Age loci of self- forming a local identity and authenticity. Although localisation and ritual practice were mostly large round indigeneity is in some ways always constructed in relation buildings with central hearth places within the hamlet-like to the past, there is no obligatory need for traditions that compounds of the settlement, such as the ones discovered at truly reach far back in time. Since narratives of history are Montagnoli di Menfi, Monte Polizzello, Sabucina, flexible and transformable tools, invented traditions and Caltabellotta or Colle Madore (Fig. 1).9 As each compound related rituals can fulfil the same function: they anchor was inhabited by an extended family, the central round people in space and time. building was used as a family-internal cult area for social As social techniques, rituals of communal remembrance gatherings in honour of the ancestors and forebears.10 From interconnect people through the past by constructing a around the middle of the 6th century bc onwards, when the shared history. To make this localisation of duration and local communities had turned to settle and live in extension visible and tangible within the rituals, specific rectangular houses within clearly structured settlements, the items are often used: so-called Archaika.8 Such objects can former ritually used round buildings could serve equally on be real antiques that are already hundreds of years old at the an extra-familial basis as a place of commemoration of an time of their use, for example heirlooms, or they can be imagined past and therefore as loci of indigeneity. However, objects that were purposely made to look old in order to refer in some cases such loci of self-localisation are not only back to former times. Within communal social and religious evidenced in the context of the cult and feasting buildings in rituals they were used to embody a real or invented heritage the middle of compounds, but also as open feasting areas, from the world of the ancestors and to give those rituals a like the ritual places in front of the chamber tombs in sectors seemingly historic authenticity. In this process of creating a A and B at Monte Polizzello. specific version of history, rituals and the use of Archaika Such an open-air site of self-positioning, but within the can also function as tools of empowerment to legitimise settlement area, is also seen at Monte Iato. The archaic demands for supremacy by projecting these claims back to settlement is located in the upper Belice Valley around 30km the distant past. At any rate, from the point of view of the south-west of modern Palermo and occupies the slightly participants such religious rituals are experienced as real sloping plateau on the summit and the flanks of the hill (see and authentic and as being rooted in presumed old Fig. 1). The 6th-century bc settlement followed the local traditions, and are therefore particularly powerful as a habitation pattern for compounds that were loosely spread fundamental resource for producing a feeling of indigeneity. over the whole area, namely the Eastern Quarter,11 as well as This is especially true for intercultural settings and contact the area of the later agora12 and the Western Quarter (Fig. zones, such as those established within the interior of 2).13 Within the latter the space surrounding the so-called western Sicily during the 6th and 5th centuries bc. Aphrodite temple functioned as an extra-familial cult place Figure 1 Map with settlements mentioned in the text (© University of Innsbruck) 8 | Sicily: Heritage of the World Figure 2 Monte Iato: schematic settlement plan of the Western Quarter of the early archaic phase (© Züricher Iaitas Grabung) and developed into a central cult district in the course of the findings show. Maybe the packings were meant to compress 6th/beginning of the 5th century bc (Fig. 3).14 the clayey ground, so that feast participants from afar would be able to erect temporary dwellings. In line with this Spaces of self-localisation in the first half of the 6th interpretation the findings pressed into packings can be century BC addressed as waste from sacrificial meals. Just to the south, The first testified ritual activities within this area were those similar stone packings with ceramic and bone fragments of sacrificial meals. The communal meal was one of the were excavated and were formerly interpreted as remains of oldest and most frequently celebrated rituals within the local floors of a proto-historic dwelling (Fig. 5).18 As no communities of Bronze and Iron Age Sicily, archaeologically indications of associated architectural structures have been attested through hearth places and ritual deposits found to date, ephemeral buildings seem more likely. containing animal bones, ash and ceramics for the Although the three stone packings have so far been preparation and consumption of food and drink.15 At Monte excavated only in a small trench of 1.5 x 1.5m, the ceramics Polizzello, for example, traces of such ritual meals on the and animal bones give clear indications of local ritual hilltop plateau reach back to the second half of the 9th praxis as social technique. This becomes evident from a century bc and remained more or less unchanged well into closer look at the sacrificed animals.19 From a total of 434 the early 5th century bc.16 Because of its long-standing ritual excavated animal bones, 170 skeletal elements of cattle, red praxis the sacrificial meal was also one of the central events deer, pigs and sheep were reconstructed. Remarkably, all of that framed the retrospective creation of memory and past. the ruminant animals appeared to be female, while some On Monte Iato several archaeological layers consisting of male wild boars were found under the otherwise female small stones and beaten earth (stone packings), as well as local ceramics, ash remains and huge amounts of animal Figure 3 Monte Iato: central cult district of the late archaic phase bone fragments bearing chop and butchering marks, testify (© Züricher Iaitas Grabung) to such meals for the first half of the 6th century bc near and beneath the later built Aphrodite temple (Fig.
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