# Simon Keay Award in Mediterranean Archaeology: Pottery in rural Roman Sicily: imported and locally produced wares at Campanaio (AG)

Fabrizio Ducati

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Fabrizio Ducati. Simon Keay Award in Mediterranean Archaeology: Pottery in rural Roman Sicily: imported and locally produced wares at Campanaio (AG). Papers of the British School at Rome, 2024, 92, pp.362 - 363. 10.1017/s0068246224000308. hal-04911677

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https://hal.science/hal-04911677v1

Submitted on 29 Jan 2025

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Sigurd Lewerentz dealt with these fundamental questions of construction, but they are not derivative, nor are they whimsical. They work with a skilled play of volumes, of light and shadow, of material surfaces and junctions. Most importantly to me, though, the resulting buildings speak to me emotionally.

Through studying their travel sketches and photographs I hoped to understand how an architect's formal language can develop through their emotional reading of buildings. Louis Kahn spent a year in residence at the American Academy from 1950-1. He drew the medieval squares of northern Italy in soft chalk pastels, reducing them to their essential volumes. I sat in the Campo in Siena and drew for a long October afternoon, in the same spot where Kahn had drawn 70 years prior. I had brought with me those same soft pastels, and I tried to capture both what I saw and what I felt.

Sigurd Lewerentz travelled to Italy in 1922 and took a series of esoteric black and white photographs that focused on small details: bits of broken stones and sagging mosaic floors. These photographs inspired me to visit the medieval churches of Rome, such as the Basilica of San Clemente. Here a stream runs through the Roman dwellings, two floors below ground, beside a flowing brick floor and below massive supporting piers that crash through the vaulted and plastered ceilings overhead. I tried to capture the layered potential of these spaces in both their original form and in reuse and stabilization.

In the studio I made models from found and recycled materials, roughly sawing and carving them, with the direction of cuts made intentionally, in the same way one would make directional marks for effect when drawing. I also created facsimiles of spolia, in soft clay, and arranged them to imply pediments or column capitals. In Rome, I understood that so much of our human culture is about recycling: forms, ideas, matter itself. Reuse is not simply pragmatic, especially if we consider the ancient column capitals that were reused in medieval churches, irrespective of size or order. My aim was to find a way to work with the forms of the past in a way that was not derivative, but instead translated them, to engage those forms in the conversations of the present. Architecture is an important part of our human culture and its formal elements, even down to the simplest architraves and lintels, give an important sense of familiarity to buildings. That is not to say, however, that we must use architraves and lintels in the way they have always been used. I believe we ought to acknowledge their presence in the history of architecture and decide what we want to say about them when we are making holes in the walls of the present.

DOMINIC WALKER

(Bartlett School of Architecture)

domwalker9@hotmail.com

SIMON KEAY AWARD IN MEDITERRANEAN ARCHAEOLOGY

doi: 10.1017/S0068246224000308

*Pottery in rural Roman Sicily: imported and locally produced wares at Campanaio (AG)*

This project analyzed a substantial series of pottery deposits from the Hellenistic and Roman rural site of Campanaio, near Agrigento. Nestled on a gently sloping hill 5 km from the coast, the site was discovered in 1978 during systematic archaeological survey in the hinterland of the Greek colony of Heraclea Minoa (sixth-first century BC). Between
1994 and 1998, the University of Nottingham investigated eight different areas under Professor Roger Wilson's direction, with the financial assistance of several UK bodies.

Campanaio covered an area of about three hectares and had a very long life, from the mid-Hellenistic until the late-Roman period. The quality and quantity of ceramic finds are impressive, and the project saw the involvement of many leading Roman pottery specialists, including the late John Hayes and the late Roberta Tomber. However, their studies did not reach final publication stage for various reasons. Preliminary post-excavation study seasons in 2000 and 2001 gathered a vast amount of information, part of the whole archive that Professor Wilson kindly shared with me.

During my stay at the BSR as Simon Keay awardee in Mediterranean Archaeology, I focused on this dataset that included over 3,000 drawings, preliminary catalogues, handwritten notes and Excel spreadsheets, trying to make sense of a heterogeneous mass of information. Most of the effort was focused on sorting and arranging this into a single database. More than 690 pottery drawings have been reviewed and connected to their respective entries in the catalogues, new observations were made and typologies and chronologies were updated as appropriate. As a result, we took a small step forward in our current knowledge of daily life in a Roman rural settlement of southern Sicily and of the ceramic wares, local and imported, circulating there.

Among the novelties are ceramic spacer-pins, the first known in Sicily, which, together with vaulting tubes, hint at the presence of a bath suite whose location is still unknown. The evidence for marble slabs already mentioned in one preliminary report leans towards the same conclusion. Another new discovery concerns the abandonment of the settlement, whose occupation lasted at least a century and a half after the violent destruction that affected at least three different areas – including two amphora warehouses – during the fifth century. A Vandal raid remains one possible explanation but deserves further investigation. Like most rural sites in southern Sicily, Campanaio maintained close links with Africa, notably with Cape Bon, throughout the fifth century, as frequent amphorae from Nabeul and its hinterland testify. There is also evidence of contemporary imports of eastern Mediterranean amphorae, while other late-Roman eastern wares are currently absent. The number of African amphorae drastically decreased during the sixth century, while African Red Slip is still quite common at the end of the sixth. At the moment, we lack clear evidence suggesting continuity of occupation beyond the early seventh century, despite three Muslim burials of early medieval date which cut through late Roman levels.

Most cooking wares come from the island of Pantelleria, halfway between Cape Bon and Sicily. The most common shapes are lids and shallow, thick-rimmed casseroles with flaring walls. An interesting aspect is a pierced hole (D. 1 cm) either at the bottom of some casseroles or at the centre of lids. Its purpose requires explanation; Professor Wilson suggested a connection with weaving or specific cooking practices.

Finally, reviewing finds from the fill of a late-Roman kiln yielded evidence of local manufacture, which included flat-bottomed amphorae with everted rims and round-section handles, plain-ware jugs, bowls, mortaria, jars and basins. Wasters and blistered sherds prove onsite production of such wares, whose common feature is a whitish surface.

FABRIZIO DUCATI

(Aix Marseille University, CCJ, Aix-en-Provence, France; British Columbia University, AMNE, Vancouver, Canada)
fabrizio-ducati@univ-amu.fr