Search results for "archaeological"

Le metope del Tempio C: dal Museo della Regia Università al Museo Nazionale di Palermo

2020

The story of the metopes of Temple C at Selinus, from the discovery by S. Angell and W. Harris in the spring of 1823 to their landing in the port of Palermo, is well known trough Marconi studies. The aim of this paper is to analyze the exhibition history of Selinus reliefs, from the first arrangement in the Museum of the ‘Regia Università’ to their placement in the National Museum of Palermo (‘Museo Archeologico Regionale A. Salinas’ since 1977).

Selinunt, Sizilien. Forschungen in Selinunt, Teil 1. Ein neues Modell für die Stadt Selinunt. Die Feldarbeiten des Jahres 2021

2022

Since 2021, the German Research Foundation has been funding a new interdisciplinary field project to investigate the urban fabric of the Greek colony of Selinous in a spatially comprehensive and diachronic perspective. The project aims at extending the existing model of the ideal Greek city by considering also the historically conditioned fractures in the urban development and the multiple transformations of the living space between the 7th and 3rd century BCE. This is to be pursued by large scale archaeological, geophysical and geoarchaeological prospections, small excavations in selected areas and the thorough study of the finds and archaeobiological remains. This is a report about the fi…

The recovery of the buhayra of the Favara in the Conca d'oro of Palermo and the vegetation in the area of Zeus's temple in the Valley of the Temples …

2009

Fungi in archaeological areas

2018

The most renowned examples of the prehistoric use of mushrooms are represented by the stone paintings from Saharan aboriginal tribes of North Africa (ca. 9000 BC.) and the rock paintings of religious rituals in Spain (ca. 6000 years ago). The symbols, statues and paintings created by the Mayas and the Aztecs indicate the consumption of psilocybin mushrooms, especially during religious rituals, as a way to communicate with deities. Other tribes originating in Central America were also involved in magic mushrooms use for similar reasons. In northeastern Greece, western Turkey, and Bulgaria, in the regions known in antiquity as Macedonia, Anatolia, and Thrace, numerous megalithic natural rock …

LiDAR-derived DTM for historical landscape evaluation: the case study of the “Harvesting Memories” project (Castro Valley and Mt. Barraù, Corleone – …

2016

The project “Harvesting Memories” is focused on the analysis of the long-term transformation of the cultural landscape in a rural area of Central-Western Sicily (Castro Valley and Mt. Barraù, Corleone – Palermo). In order to quickly outline the history of the territory with an acceptable precision, our survey aimed at covering and sampling as much surface as possible, according to time and human resources available. To reach this goal, in the research design we opted for qualitative surveys. The choice of the fields to be surveyed was based on GIS analysis — our predictive model took in consideration slope, water sources and presence of points with high visibility in the landscape —, that h…

The Impact of Climate, Resource Availability, Natural Disturbances and Human Subsistence Strategies on Sicilian Landscape Dynamics During the Holocene

2022

This paper presents a multidisciplinary summary of the most recent discoveries and hypotheses concerning factors driving the human subsistence economy and landscape shaping in Sicily during the Holocene. A number of scientific papers have recently pointed out the key role played by paleogeography, resource (water, food) availability and natural disturbances (volcanic eruptions, tsunamis) in local human activities. Modern anthropology and archaeology increasingly use biological remains (e.g. soils, bones, wood, plant macroremains, pollen) to better understand how human communities managed to survive and spread. Likewise, refined reconstructions of past human demographic fluxes and socio-econ…

MILLSTONES COASTAL QUARRIES AS INDICATOR OF RELATIVE SEA LEVEL CHANGES

2012

The Italian coasts shows numerous archaeological remains which reveals the activities that were carried out along the coast for thousands of years of history. In order to use archaeological structures for coastal studies, an accurate estimate of their relationship to the sea level at the time of construction is required (Lambeck et al 2004, Antonioli et al 2007, Auriemma & Solinas 2009). Millstone coastal quarries are only documented in southern Italy; they are carved on beachrock, calcarenites and other sedimentary rock easy to be exploited. Few archaeological information have been published about quarries for millstones extraction; they are documented since around 2500 yr BP (Amouretti, 1…

Innovative Applications and Experiments for the Protection of Archaeological Sites

2020

Nowadays, the protection in situ, the enhancement and the fruition of archaeological sites are issues that are even more relevant, if we take into account the effects caused, in recent decades, by climate change both on the conservation of the most fragile artefacts and on the well-being of visitors. New questions related to the ‘recover of identity’ are raised by the relationships that the protection interventions establish with the environmental context (external) and with the ancient ruins (internal), imposing an interpretation of the project as a union of landscape, morphological, climatic, technical, use and management aspects, or by requiring a holistic and integrated approach, from a…

A hypothesis for the redevelopment of the Archaeological Park of Agrigento

2023

The project here presented is developed at the Department of Architecture of the University of Palermo. It is an in-progress research project that combines two fields of knowledge: architectural design and architectural survey. These two branches are combined in a functional redevelopment project of the Valley of the Temples in Agrigento, one of the largest and extraordinary archaeological parks in the Mediterranean area. This interdisciplinary research is driven by three fundamental strategic actions: “survey”, “design” and “representation”. The intervention has four fundamental goals. The first goal is the survey - performed with laser scanning and photogrammetric techniques - of the gymn…

Comparative study between four consolidation systems suitable for archaeological bone artefacts

2015

This study started with the restoration of a 14th century Italian crosier during the final Master year project at the Institute National du Patrimone in Paris (Palazzo 2014). The characterization and consolidation of the bone materials constituting the crosier was needed due to its poor state of conservation. Several products, both organic polymers and inorganic consolidants applied on artificially altered bone material underwent scientific investigations consisting of several analyses and mechanical tests in order to choose the most suitable for the restoration intervention. The results thus obtained showed that both nanolime and a mix of Paraloid® and calcium phosphate seem to be adequate…