Prospecting Boundaries: Archaeology along the Mazaro

Prospecting Boundaries seeks to apply an integrated archaeological prospection approach to a synchronic and diachronic exploration of human activity along the Mazaro River corridor. The River Mazaro connects both the coastal and interior zone of western Sicily and is understood from historical sources to have functioned as a border region during the Greek colonization period. A methodological combination of systematic integrated archaeological prospection techniques and historic landscape characterization will be the main means of the project. The project is therefore novel in two respects: First, although there has been much research conducted at sites along the coast and in the interior zones, the transition zone between the coast and interior of Western Sicily has not been well explored. Secondly, current and former survey projects in the region, though of high quality, have relied on largely traditional approaches to archaeological field survey which do not benefit from modern surface and subsurface prospection methods. Therefore, the applicability of these approaches in the region is not well understood. Furthermore, few projects in the region have employed a geoarchaeological perspective to their research questions. Thus, this project will be the first of its kind to apply a combination of prospection approaches in the region, including airborne laser scanning, geophysical prospection, field survey and geoarchaeological evaluation, to questions of occupation and land use in the largely unexplored zone between the interior and the coast. As a further component, an historic landscape characterisation of the project area and surrounding region will tie the project results together and provide a time depth perspective of land use and land change through the analysis of historic and archival materials together with project results. While this approach has been employed in other regions of the wider Mediterranean it too has yet to be used in a Sicilian context. The project seeks to apply these approaches to the investigation of the change through time of human occupation along the river Mazaro, as well as to the historical concept of the river as a border area during Greek Colonial period. All of the information collected during the project will be stored and analyzed in a GIS-based environment which will be made publically accessible through a novel WebGIS- based online portal. In this way, this project seeks to understand the river Mazaro as a focal point of anthropogenic land use throughout history while simultaneously establishing a new standard for the praxis of archaeological fieldwork and information dissemination in the region.

The Prospecting Boundaries project is an archaeological research project focused on understanding land use and social change in western Sicily. Centered on the Mazaro River corridor, the project has documented archaeological resources using modern, integrated archaeological prospection approaches. The project is concerned with human activity in the region during all periods, working backward from the present to document and deconstruct modern and historical land use in order to connect the existing relict fragments of prior human activity to continuity and change in the wider landscape. Of special interest is the concept of the Mazaro region as a zone of interaction and shifting sociocultural interests from the end of the second through the mid-first millennium BC. One of the main achievements of the project has been in the development of an integrated, area-based approach to examining the landscape of western Sicily. This means looking at the totality of land use, not just specific archaeological sites or areas of interest. Through such examination, we have made a number of significant discoveries. This includes a previously unknown settlement along the banks of the Mazaro River, which seems to have been occupied for a period of at least 1000 years between the mid-2nd and 1st millennium BC. Our characterization of the wider landscape in the project area has yielded traces of landscape infrastructure such as cart tracks made by animal-drawn vehicles. These extensive traces of the movement of people and goods through the landscape have historic and possibly prehistoric origins, and their extent was largely unknown prior to investigations conducted by our project. Similarly, the discovery of relict traces of farming and quarrying have given us indications of how people used to live in and utilize their environments, and how this has changed over time. A number of new methodological approaches have also been developed, including the use of historic photographs to reconstruct earlier versions of the terrain and land use, and specific data processing approaches focused on improving the extraction of archaeologically and environmentally relevant information from airborne laser scanning data. These have helped to both directly identify previously unknown archaeological resources, such as the abovementioned land use infrastructure and settlement activity, and to indirectly identify areas where we may no longer be able to see traces of earlier human activity due to extensive modification of the landscape. Overall, this research as heled to advance an understanding of land use and landscape transformation in the region through the identification of a wealth of new archaeological information. This has been particularly true of activities in the mid-1st millennium BC. Prior to our research, it was thought that there were no significant indigenous settlements in our project area, and that such groups had retreated inland as Greek and Phoenician colonists occupied more land and moved inland from the coasts. Our research has shown that this is not the case, and that land use, occupation and interaction between indigenous and colonial groups during the 1st millennium may have been more complicated than previously thought.