Economia, alimentazione e cultura tra Tardoantico e Medioevo nella Villa del Casale di Piazza Armerina. Il contributo dell'archeozoologia

The current archaeological and historical research stressed, on one hand, the impossibility to investigate the transformations existed between Late Antiquity and Middle Ages just on the base of written sources, on the other hand, the necessity to confide into a systematic and global archaeological research that includes reconnaissance and excavations, as well as zooarchaeological, anthropological and botanical analysis, very important in the reconstruction of economic activities and several aspects of the material and cultural life. In the latest decades, some archaeological researches in Italy have been conducted following the principle of the earlier premise. In some Italian regions, as in Sicily, this kind of research is still stationary and incomplete. Exemplary is the story of the “Villa del Casale” in Piazza Armerina, that was evaluated exclusively for its mosaics until the fifties of the last century. Only in the last time, researchers started to considerate the Villa like the expression of the ancient population modus vivendi and culture. This is the perspective of this current investigation, that concerns the study of the animal ‘s bones, never been analysed, coming from the “Villa del Casale” and from the medieval settlement in the area of the Villa (2004-2013 excavation). The aim of the current research project was to get information about the animal species that used to live in the site, the reasons of their livestock, the economic activities, the people’s diet, cooking and the waste disposal. And because of food is also expression of values and cultural choices, another purpose was to observe the economic and food changes further than their reasons, during the century in which the Villa was occupied. I used specific zooarchaeological methodologies, osteological atlas and my personal comparison collections to acquire the data. During the data elaboration, I took into consideration the results of the researches made on other material’s classes. Creating charts and diagrams was fundamental to manage the data. These records were divided into historical period they belong to and diachronically confronted. Then I compared these results both with historical and zooarchaeological literatures to find out similarities and differences with the previous and assimilated data. The analysis of the animal‘s bones completes the historical-archaeological research. It has allowed to know and examine in depth various aspects of economy and diet in the several periods of the Villa’s life, to individuate how it has gradually changed itself and to rough out an hypothesis about the status and religion of its inhabitants too. What has come out is the history of a site: a rural villa wherein it was practised the tiny livestock; then a magnificent late ancient villa that produced wheat and grains to provide the Urbe and later focused on breeding; a wealthy and self-sufficient Islamic village that finally changed its status, maybe, because of the incoming conquerors. The acquired data supply a different and innovative tile to reconstruct the peculiar history of the Roman Villa and of the medieval site. Moreover, because of the examined site represents a privileged point of view to observe a cross-section of Sicilian history between the Imperial Age and the Middle Ages, the same data increase the knowledge about life and society in Sicily in the aforementioned period.