Gianpiero Caso’s research while affiliated with University of South Florida and other places

This study presents an in-depth archaeometric investigation of Iron Age ceramic assemblage dating from 950 to 750 BCE from the sanctuary at Polizzello Mountain, Sicily. The site, a key sanctuary utilized by indigenous communities for ritual activities, is examined for its strategic location, structural developments, pottery assemblages, and evidence of communal activities. The study employs petrographic analysis on thin sections, integrated with other analytical methods, to explore the technology behind pottery production. It investigates whether such production reflects a common technological knowledge shared by a broader community or if they represent a blend of different manufacturing traditions. The findings highlight that the pottery from Polizzello Mountain aligns with the well-established Sicilian tradition of combining calcareous components and grog, indicating a local tradition of pottery production with no significant compositional differences suggesting specialized production at the workshop level.

One of the most debated and explored period of the prehistory of Sicily is the Middle Bronze Age (15th-13th century BCE), which is considered as a crucial moment for the development of local prehistoric social, economic, and cross-cultural dynamics. The local Thapsos culture is what best represents this chronological period and is characterized at some sites by theoccurrence of datable ceramic imports from the Aegean alongside their local replicas. These have helped researchers with estab-lishing a local relative chronology based indirect beacons with eastern Mediterranean contexts. However, when it comes to an independent absolute chronology for MBA context in mainland Sicily, no recent program of radiocarbon dating has been carried out so far. In this contribution, the authors devise a Bayesian model based on evidence from a stratified MBA context at St. Ippolito (Caltagirone, central-eastern Sicily) where a set of seven samples have been radiocarbon dated. The study aims to assess which part of the overall development of the MBA the analyzed context corresponds to, to absolute date the activities represented by the deposit’s layers, and to lay the basis to tentatively bracket in time the use of some associated ceramic materials.

With this study we provide the compositional characterization of archaeological ceramics from the earliest phases of the indigenous sanctuary located on top of Polizzello Mountain, in Central Sicily (Italy). The site represents a remarkable evidence of the Late Bronze Age (LBA) - Early Iron Age (EIA) transition on the island, and it is characterized by the striking occurrence of material offerings in the form of ritually fragmented and highly standardized objects. The presence of multiple structures and the frequent evidence of dining activities, has led to the idea that the hilltop represented an important landmark for local indigenous communities across the landscape of Central Sicily. To test such hypothesis, bulk compositional analysis was used for the ceramics from the EIA levels of the sanctuary at Polizzello Mountain. Sixty-eight diagnostic specimens were analyzed via Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis (INAA) to discriminate among distinct pottery groups according to the composition of their paste. The outcomes show little but clear compositional variations between three main pottery groups, which likely reflect the geographic background of the communities gathering at the sanctuary.

The Middle Bronze Age in Sicily (fifteenth–thirteenth century BC) represents a crucial moment in the evolution of Prehistoric pottery production. However, the scarcity of specific petrographic and chemical studies has represented until now a serious interpretative handicap for archeologists. The recent study of two important Middle Bronze Age pottery complexes from the Etnean area (Grotte di Marineo di Licodia Eubea and Monte San Paolillo di Catania) has offered the possibility to add new significant data to characterize the manufacturing practices behind such production. A new assemblage of Thapsos pottery from the Middle Bronze Age site of St. Ippolito hill at Caltagirone can shed new light on the features of such Etnean production. This paper highlights the potential of the application of an array of techniques such as petrographic analysis of thin sections and chemical analyses via X-ray fluorescence spectrometry and electron microprobe analysis to better investigate production technology of Middle Bronze Age Sicilian pottery.