Satyrion, a Greek toponym preserved in the modern one of "Saturo", is a settlement located about 12 km from Taranto. The site, quoted in ancient literary sources relating to the oracles foundation of the Spartan colony of Taras, presents a multistratified human occupation, from the Neolithic through Bronze and Iron Age, with significant Mycenaean trading contacts. Inhabited by a native group of Japigi, at the end of the VIIIth century BC Saturo is involved in the process of Greek colonization and becomes one of the settlements that dot the territory of the polis of Taranto.
In continuation with the archaeological excavations carried out at the site since 2007, the Saturo project for 2017 intends to continue the activities on the Acropolis hill already funded thanks to Sapienza Grandi Scavi program. Sapienza researches 2011-2016 have contributed to enhance knowledge of Recent and Final Bronze Age Saturo, through the discovery, inter alia, of an extraordinary monumental dry-stone structure with a rectangular plan and other stretches of the massive defensive wall (so-called "ad aggere"). Bronze village life, that in its impressive structures reveals its social complexity, seems to be interrupted after Recent and Final Bronze Age. Ruins of the protohistorical settlement became the ideal focus for later occupation of Japigian and Greek Age. After a decisive break, the Iron Age settlement is replaced by the colonial occupation: the sanctuary of Athena becomes the expression of a fully greek cultural horizon.
Thanks to its strategic geographical position, looking towards the sea and the hinterland, Saturo is a key-site to test the validity of current historical and archaeological approaches on issues such as mobility, migration, circulation of goods, men, cultures and settlement organization. The field activities, and the subsequent data processing, will try to answer these questions in a diachronic perspective, analyzing Satyrion as a node of the Mediterranean networks.
The archaeological excavation that will be carried out in 2017 is part of a long term research project on Saturo that lasts since ten years, coordinated by the Proponent with the involvement of collaborators internal and external to Sapienza University. New excavation campaign and related data to be acquired will be useful to improve and complete the overall knowledge of Saturo, both as a local, independent, community and as a part of a more complex, regional, settlement pattern, which diachronically changes throughout different historical phases. The multi-stratified human occupation provides a great opportunity for understanding how the landscape, according to the needs of the communities that inhabit it, transforms itself over the centuries. Following scientific guidelines of contemporary landscape archaeology, Saturo represents an exemplary case to analyze settlement developments in Taranto area, especially in the light of Greek colonization, and a privileged point of observation about "before" and "after" the foundation of Taranto apoikia. As to scientific impact, it is necessary to premise that Saturo, despite being known since the early XXth c. and repeatedly mentioned in historical, archaeological, epigraphical literature, is not yet known as it deserves. Scientific publications have indeed had a very discontinuous nature and, for the Acropolis, they came to a halt to 1964 edition by F.G. Lo Porto in "Notizie degli Scavi di Antichità". The systematic publication of artifacts, structures and context, already in progress, is therefore a key element for advancing and sharing of knowledge in the academic community. Regarding material culture, Saturo represents a unique opportunity to study production and circulation of goods in Mediterranean from Bronze Age to Greek and Roman phases. The study of the mobility of objects brings with it the analysis of the movement of people, ideas, social behaviours and cultures. As a result of the process of decolonization, archaeology began to thinking differently the concept of culture and ethnicity, overcoming the idea of bounded societies and replacing it with a more fluid, permeable and complex perception of identities. In this perspective, it is crucial to look at the Mediterranean as the global space of Prehistoric and Historic connectivity, not only as the horizon for Greek and Roman colonization. Satyrion gives the opportunity to overcome hyper-specialized approaches limited to a single chronological and cultural phase. For example, as to Recent and Finale Bronze Age, pottery reveals a settlement that is dynamic and engaging in trade, an image which accords well with the process of enlargement identified in this period in other centers in Apulia and with the postulated expansion of the site of Saturo-Porto Perone (M. Bettelli). For the Iron Age, Saturo matt-painted pottery has been a key indicator for the pioneering article by D. Yntema (2000) to postulate that the Greek firmly established occupation of the Acropolis was later than indicated in literary sources and in Lo Porto excavations report. Analysis of new Japigian pottery sherds can therefore contribute to better understand the early stage of colonization and verify the alleged coexistence between Greeks and Indigenous groups. According Greek Age, the research offers the concrete possibility of a great progress beyond the state of the art, thanks to the comprehensive analysis of two sanctuaries, mostly unpublished, placed in the chora of Taranto. Spring Sanctuary, dedicated to Aphrodite, is remarkable for the quantity and quality of the findings, for structural remains, perhaps identifiable with hestiatoria, and for the continuity of cult (second half of VII-end of III c. B.C.). The sanctuary is linked to the performance of rites of passage before marriage, significant not only at a local level, but for the polis of Taranto as a whole. The sanctuary of Athena on the Acropolis began to take shape during the VIIth c. BC, simultaneously to the first generations of settlers. Orientalizing materials are evidence of a significant Greek presence of a ritual and cultual kind, directly linked to the arrival of the Spartan colonists, in an area probably in contact with Greek world already before colonization. Together with pottery, imported and locally producted (Corinthian, Achaean, East-Greek), coroplastic is especially valuable because documenting the coexistence of local hand-modeled figurines, pinakes with Cretan subject (Theseus and Ariadne) and molded statuettes that confirms the high quality of Tarantine daedalic coroplastic (A. Bencze). The possibility to implement data from new archaeological excavations and to analyze the previous documentation with the approaches offered by the most recent theoretical frameworks of the discipline thus represents a concrete way to make a progress for the knowledge of a so crucial district of Southern Italy.