The Parochial City at Hellenistic Monte Iato

Around 200 BCE, Monte Iato, a hilltop settlement in western Sicily, after a habitation period of already four centuries had finally achieved the urban shape of a Hellenistic polis with an agora (marketplace), stoai (oblong halls), bouleuterion (political meeting hall), theatre and peristyle houses (luxury residential and meeting buildings). But this development was a long process it took the entire 3rd century BCE for Monte Iato to become a place increasingly involved in the international affairs of the time. This interaction with the wider Mediterranean world was exploited by local people seeking to gain social power and popularity by appropriating elements of Hellenistic culture, which promised a more cosmopolitan lifestyle. In the course of these transformations and achievements, however, old traditions were not eliminated. On the contrary: the settlement continued to be shaped by traditional features, reaching back to the local history of the 6th-5th century BCE (the so-called archaic period). Fashionable peristyle houses were built over the ruins of the scattered nuclei of the archaic village, and the Hellenistic roads still followed ancient paths. Furthermore, one of the most significant sacred buildings, the Aphrodite Temple, retained its rustic archaic appearance until Roman times, although Peristyle House 1, situated in its immediate vicinity, represented a monumental manifesto of state-of-the-art cosmopolitan architecture. At Monte Iato, traditional social structures interacted with the current material traits of a Hellenistic way of life, giving the polis a distinct local look compared to the other cities with orthogonal street grids of Hellenistic Sicily, like Solunto or Lilybaeum. Precisely these apparent contradictions between cosmopolitanism and traditionalism are the focus of the project. They are the subject of the apparent paradox in the project title "The Parochial City at Hellenistic Monte Iato", resulting from the combination of the noun city with the attribute parochial. Parochial here means far more than just the rural location of the settlement at Monte Iato or the fact that western Sicily had been established as Rome`s first province after 241 BCE. Parochial here rather denotes the traditional and traditionalistic, which was still constitutive of community life at Hellenistic Monte Iato, even under the umbrella of the Hellenistic polis. This life on the threshold between tradition and cosmopolitanism, between archaising cults and sophisticated architecture, between old-established authorities and modern forms of administration, between traditional and `global` ways of consumption, is at the center of the research project. Epigraphic texts and material expressions, ranging from architectural structures to artefacts and biofacts (organic materials such as animal bones and botanical residues) will be analysed as local witnesses of the transformation of Monte Iato into a parochial city.