a Multi-Sensor Remote Sensing Survey of a Punic City in Western Sicily
When Phoenician voyagers established a settlement on modern day Isola San Pantaleo in the 8th century BC, they were attracted by this island’s advantage of in a protected harbor where they could interact with the local people from a protected position. What was originally an unfortified trading post grew over the next two centuries to cover the entire 45 hectares of the island, which some think held as many as 1500 inhabitants at its height in the 6th and 5th centuries BC. This dense Punic urban center, known as the city of Motya, included residential houses, sanctuaries, public buildings, a market area and industrial workshops, possibly interspersed with open spaces that functioned as plazas and gardens, surrounded by a massive fortification that followed the contours of the coastline and was marked by four gates.
During some of the first intensive scientific archaeological investigations at Motya, the archaeologist BSJ Isserlin hypothesized that the urban layout of Motya was organized on a unified plan around a central road that linked the causeway to the mainland via a gate in the north (Porta Nord) with the Cothon, once considered a port and dry dock and now interpreted as a sacred pool at the south of the island. These investigations established a rough framework for the urban plan, but the layout of the city lacked much detail since excavations were mostly limited to monumental contexts.
We carried out a geophysical survey in 2017 and 2018 to verify Isserlin’s observation and to intensively map the arrangement of architecture at the site. Our results comprise the largest ‘exposure’ of domestic structures at Motya and provide a picture of the general urban plan and new dimensions to our picture of life during the 6th to 5th century BC. They show that buildings at Motya were set on a gridded plan oriented to major landscape features at the site. Consistency in the shapes, sizes, and orientations of structures demonstrate that there was a coordinated effort in arranging these 6th century BC spaces, similar to what has been called a ‘Hippodamian’ plan elsewhere in the Mediterranean basin. Such a gridded plan was once thought of as a Greek innovation, but is now better understood as evidence for top-down settlement planning shared by people across the Mediterranean during the first half of the first millennium BC, with roots in the second millennium BC Levant.
Left: orthomosaic of the NW quadrant of Isola San Pantaleo. Right: magnetic gradiometry results.
Looking more closely, the results of the geophysical survey seems to show that individual segments of the domestic complexes were constructed independently within lots of a standard size. This evidence, taken with parallel studies on ceramic forms, the diversity of ritual iconography, and ancient DNA samples from contemporary sites reinforces the idea that descendants of Levantine people lived side-by-side with the indigenous people at Motya and in similar Mediterranean cities.
The combination of an overarching residential system with foreign roots occupied by people using objects with local cultural affiliations has led us to hypothesize that this pattern of urban planning is part of a system by which local people are integrated into colonial Phoenician and Punic life. Could this be evidence for an allotment system for new urban settlers? Or perhaps a system to bring local people from the hinterland into Punic urban spaces? Planned research in this domestic quarter of the site will help us to test this idea by answering basic questions about the settlement such as: When and how was this neighborhood established and how were people organized within it? Who were the occupants? What role did these occupants play in Motyan society? The answers to these questions will not only tell us who was living in these quarters, but engage the wider conversation about the Phoenicio-Punic identities and colonialism.
At the core of our research is the question: What can the archaeological record tell us about how the use of space was negotiated between the settlement’s architects and its occupants? We hope understand how the built environment of settled spaces reflects the identities of urban residents in the Phoenician and Punic world, and help us to move beyond the dichotomy of colonizer and colonized.
Team
Dr. Jason T. Herrmann, Co-Principal Investigator. Kowalski Family Teaching Specialist for Digital Archaeology, Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials (CAAM), Penn Museum and Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
Dr. Paola Sconzo, Co-Principal Investigator. Professor of Near Eastern and Phoenician-Punic Archaeology, Department of Culture and Society, University of Palermo.
Prof. Gioacchino Falsone, Archaeologist. Retired Professor, Department of Culture and Society, University of Palermo
Prof. Aurelio Burgio, Archaeologist and Permit Holder. Associate Professor Department of Culture and Society, University of Palermo
Sponsors
Gerda Henkel Foundation (awards AZ 26/V/17 & AZ 19/V/20)
Whitaker Foundation
Soprintendenza di Trapani
Penn Museum
Partners and Collaborators
University of Palermo
University of Tübingen
Penn Museum
Jason T. Herrmann 