Marble and stone revetment and pavements: Context and provenance

Earlier excavations and survey at Vagnari furnished hardly any evidence for the use of marble at the site, and so the vicus was considered to be a low status settlement, with only a few rooms having been elegant enough to decorate them with marble floors or revetment. The fragments recovered were not analysed scientifically to determine the location of the quarries from which the marbles came. Of particular interest, however, were two small fragments of inscriptions on white marble retrieved from the rubble fill dumped in the 4th century AD in the reservoir. These originally may have been attached, when intact, to votive or funerary monuments, suggesting that the occasional commemorative mo…

Measuring the quality of a scientific public research institution in Italy (2000-2003)

SOLID LIPID NANOPARTICLES CONTAINING AN ANTIOXIDANT COMPOUND IN ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE

SOLID LIPID NANOPARTICLES (SLNs) CONTAINING FERULIC ACID AGAINST OXIDATIVE STRESS IN NEURODEGENERATIVE DISEASES

Measuring the quality of performance in CNR public research institutes: a comparison of methods

Building ceramics: Brick, tile, and clay

Tiles for use in construction were made in quantity at Vagnari, as Alastair Small’s investigations made clear. He uncovered one tile kiln in the vicus area north of the ravine and five south of the ravine that were producing tiles from the 1st to the 4th century AD, although not all at the same time (Small 2011b: 231–64). There may well have been more, as yet undiscovered, kilns in and around the settlement, together with the requisite tile-making provisions, such as drying sheds or yards and large ponds or basins for mixing clay and water. Archaeologically explored and well-preserved tile-making facilities of local and regional importance in northeast Spain give us an idea of the complex p…

La Conca d'Oro e la valle del Fiume Oreto

Il percorso si svolge in territori pianeggianti e collinari attraversando, da sud a nord, la Conca d’Oro e addentrandosi nella valle del Fiume Oreto. Sarà possibile osservare aspetti stratigrafici, tettonici e geomorfologici, rappresentativi delle aree costiere e montuose della Sicilia settentrionale, che raccontano un’evoluzione geologica di oltre duecento milioni di anni. All'interno della città di Palermo saranno inoltre illustrati aspetti che riguardano i geomateriali locali, impiegati sia nella pratica edile ordinaria come nella costruzione di beni storico-monumentali, e le opere antropiche legate allo sfruttamento del sottosuolo e delle risorse geologiche in genere, evidenziando il fo…

The Dolia Defossa and viticulture at Vagnari

At Vagnari, the fabric of the dolia defossa was distinctively different from that present in all the other ceramics from the site, as it was a distinctive orangey-red with black, glassy particles and reddish-brown grit fragments. The surviving lid fragment, on the other hand, is made of a fairly fine buff clay, suggesting it was made somewhere else. It is not unusual that dolia and lids might be made of different clays and in different workshops, as they are in Gallia Narbonensis, where some analysed lids were made in Rome, but the vessels were local. The recognition that it is important to conduct fabric analyses on dolia retrieved in archaeological excavations, whether on land or in the s…

The beginning of western greek amphorae production in western Sicily: archaeometric and archaeological studies on 6th–5th centuries BCE amphorae manufactured in Himera

About 560 western Greek amphorae (6th–5th centuries BCE) re-used in enchytrismos burials were unearthed in the necropolis of the Dorian-Chalcidian colony of Himera in northwestern Sicily. Among the most striking issues is the determination of their geographical provenance. For this purpose, ceramic samples chipped from freshly broken surfaces of all the amphorae were first subdivided into macrofabrics by the use of a hand lens. Thereon, the samples were studied in accordance with standardized methods by the use of reflected light microscopy. Due to the special focus of our project on the characterization of Sicilian productions, a selection of amphorae which showed visible, macroscopic affi…