Morgantina's Lost Port: Geoarchaeological Insights into the Paleohydrology of Central Sicily

Summary

This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The ancient city of Morgantina is today located deep in the dry Sicilian interior, more than 50 km from the sea’s edge and the expansive maritime networks of the Mediterranean. Yet, despite the site’s remote inland location, there is ample archaeological evidence that in antiquity Morgantina enjoyed the status of an important regional economic center, evidence ranging from large quantities of imported pottery that arrived at the Archaic settlement to the city’s sizable Hellenistic agora and eventual construction of a Roman macellum. This apparent divorce between geographic isolation and commercial integration led some scholars to hypothesize Morgantina’s hydrologic connectivity must have been better in the past. To explore this idea, the authors collected geophysical, geospatial, and geochemical data that confirm sweeping changes in the river systems that once fanned across central Sicily. This paper highlights the dynamism of the human-hydrologic relationship in central-eastern Sicily between the Iron Age and present day. By combining drone survey, sedimentary lithofacies analysis, descriptive fluvial geomorphology, and 14C dating on cutbank sequences, our team has begun to document pre-Iron Age fluvial conditions and subsequent erosional/depositional episodes that followed the expansion of both Greek and indigenous settlements into the central watersheds of the territory surrounding Morgantina.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• 2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part II   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37069.0