Ricerc@Sapienza

The archaeological site of Satyrion, located about 12 km SE of Taras, is characterized by the extraordinary continuity of human occupation, attested almost without interruption from the Protohistoric to the Roman Age. On the so-called Acropolis, the extensive Bronze Age settlement, open to Aegean and Mycenaean trading contacts, was later replaced by a small Japigian village which, at the end of the 8th c. B.C., was involved in the Greek colonial process and became one of the settlements dotting the chora of the polis of Taras. In continuation with the excavations carried out with great scientific results between 2007 and 2017 under the direction of prof. Enzo Lippolis and annually funded by Sapienza "Grandi Scavi" program, Satyrion project for 2018 intends to continue the activities on the Acropolis, in order to complete and extend the historical and archaeological knowledge of cultural, landscape and settlement dynamics in this crucial region of ancient Southern Italy.
The creation of a multi-disciplinary team, which brings together scholars with different skills and specializations, both internal and external to Sapienza University, has been designed to ensure an integrated and flexible approach, adapt to a complex and multi-stratified site as Satyrion. Particular attention will be reserved to the contributions that a more specifically topographic strategy can give to the global knowledge of the archaeological context.
So, the research about structures and material culture, settlement and environmental patterns will allow to insert the results of the annual field excavation into a wider and more international framework. Satyrion, in fact, is a key-site to test the validity of issues central for the current scientific debate such as mobility, connectivity, identities and circulation of goods, men and cultures: the research team will try to answer these questions in a diachronic perspective, analyzing Satyrion as a node of the ancient Mediterranean network.