Monte Polizzo, near the town of Salemi in Sicily, is the object of an international archaeological project. It was a hilltop settlement dating from the first millennium BC, a time of the meeting of several cultures, local, Greek, Phoenician and, later, Roman. The archaeology of the site has been seen as a story of these meetings - friendly, violent, colonial, imperialist - a story of the formation of different cultural and ethnic identities.
I joined this international project in 1998, returning to excavation and fieldwork with great colleagues Kristian Kristiansen and Sebastiano Tusa. I was to oversee the material culture finds. I planned a close contextual study of Greek imported pottery at this ‘indigenous’ site. This interest arose directly out of my long-term study of Greek ceramic production. (See the notes on my work on The early Greek city state.)
I formally left the project two years later when it became clear that I would not be able to meet any of my primary research aims (well, yes, because some of my colleagues were patently fruitcakes and aggressively opposed to anything I wanted to do).
Ian Morris took up excavation with the Stanford team.
My involvement in Monte Polizzo was also, from the start, the subject of The Three Landscapes Project. Monte Polizzo was one of the three landscapes brought together in a critical investigation of the ideology of landscape.
An objective was, and still is, to model the site report – in answer to the question of how to represent a place. Here a translation is made from site to project.
So Monte Polizzo is as much, for me, a story of a reception of the Sicilian landscape itself, a focus of ideas of the rural and pastoral in contrast to urban, visited as exemplar of a classical landscape since the eighteenth century grand tours of Europe, now carrying the hopes of a Sicilian community to find its roots, the plans of a team of archaeologists to make a mark on their field.
Publication
Sicily: 35 archaeological moments A performed lecture - Stanford Archaeology Center, April 2001
Three landscapes: a report on a year of experimental research at Stanford 2000/2001. With Clifford McLucas and Dorian Llywelyn - forthcoming.
