The Archaeology of Medieval Sicily

Broadly, this volume seeks to reconstruct, primarily using archaeological sources (buried, built, material cultural), a social and economic history of Sicily across seven centuries. The key components within this reconstruction being institutions, culture, religions, exchange systems, production and consumption patterns, coinage, social structures, urban and rural housing. Some comparative assessment draws on other Italian zones (chiefly south Italian), Visigothic and Islamic Spain, and Byzantine and Arab North Africa. No extended synthesis of this type is available for Sicily either in Italian or in English and therefore volume makes a notable contribution by examining the extensive archaeological record to tackle to island’s significant and challenging multicultural history.

A particular aim is to bring to the fore how research on material sources, especially in the last two decades, has helped to substantially modify the perception of the economic and cultural role played by Sicily in the Mediterranean space, which has too often been viewed as marginal. It also demonstrates the constant tension which archaeology is able to highlight between the changes of power/authority in the island and the forms of social, cultural and religious ‘resistance’ of local/indigenous communities. This tension and the growing role of archaeology are best explored across the wide timespan of the 6th to 13th centuries A.D., from Byzantine to Swabian domination.

In order to illustrate all this a wide spectrum of material sources is deployed. First, the volume explores the types and distribution of the diverse kinds of settlement – from city to open villages, defended villages, military fortresses, scattered settlement (this weakly understood), religious foci, amassing evidence such as the typologies of houses, material culture (with ceramics prominent in discussion), funerary practices, religious buildings, and communications. There is also be reference to monetary circulation and to specific object types like Byzantine- and Arab-period lead seals.

The book also examines the what physical and visible evidence exists for the so-called "Islamic agricultural revolution" as part of one of the other core themes of the book, which is to provide a survey of landscape and settlement.