This sixth title in The chora of Metaponto series publishes the results of excavations at a Greek settlement in the countryside of the ancient city of Metaponto, southern Italy. As with earlier volumes detailing the results of pedestrian field survey and the excavation of Greek necropoleis and farmhouses in the region, this report marks a major investment in fieldwork, analysis and publication by the staff of the Institute of Classical Archaeology at The University of Texas and their collaborators in Italy. This collective research has made the territory of Metaponto one of the best-investigated regions in the Western Mediterranean.
The site of Sant'Angelo Vecchio is located 8km west of Metaponto. Named after a twelfth-century chapel devoted to Michael the archangel, it has been occupied in recent times by a sizable farmstead. The cutting of a new road in 1979 revealed deposits of ceramic plaques and terracotta figurines that led to two brief seasons of salvage—albeit stratigraphic—excavations. An unpublished two-volume report by Ingrid Edlund-Berry in 1982 described the results of these investigations including the discovery of parts of a sanctuary and farmhouse of archaic date, tombs of the classical period, ceramic workshops of the Early Hellenistic age, a workshop and kiln complex of the Late Republican to Early Imperial periods, and a few fragments of prehistoric, later Roman and Early Modern date. In 2007, a generous grant from the Packard Humanities Institute funded further study, research and excavation of two tombs by Italian archaeologists under the direction of Francesca Silvestrelli.
The volume resulting from this collective work is massive. Three dozen authors contributed 37 chapters and three appendices that comprise over 600 pages of glorious archaeological description and analysis. The book is divided into three parts of unequal length. The first part (150 pages) devotes three chapters to a succinct overview of the history of the site, archaeological investigations, phasing and stratigraphy, and architecture, plus three chapters on regional ceramic production, the classical and Hellenistic tombs, and the post-antique period. Part II (50 plus pages) considers environmental topics such as geology, sediment stratigraphy, plant and animal remains, mollusc shells and landscape transformations. The bulky final section (350 pages) dedicates 25 chapters to the description of the artefact classes—mostly ceramic—catalogued and presented in a fairly standardised manner. The three appendices include tables that: quantify artefact assemblages from the excavated pottery deposits, tile concentrations and kiln complexes; enumerate ceramic-production sites in the region; and tabulate microscopic analyses of pollen and non-pollen palynomorphs. The volume is rich in illustrations, including 50 plans, maps and aerial photographs; more than 100 tables, charts and Harris matrices; over 300 colour and black and white photographs; and more than 500 illustrations of ceramic vessels, profiles and objects.
This book will prove most valuable for archaeologists working on ancient rural environments and especially ceramicists of southern Italy. Ceramic objects dominate the volume for good reason. The workshops and kilns unearthed at the site produced much of the pottery under consideration and supplied the local population with ceramic objects from the classical to Early Imperial periods. As Silvestrelli's important synthesis (Chapter 5) of ceramic production in the Metapontine region notes, the workshops found at Sant'Angelo Vecchio and other regional sites belonged to a “wider network of production” (p. 141). It should be no surprise, then, that apart from some imported amphorae and tablewares, most of the objects under study reflect the potting traditions of the Metapontine region or southern Italy. In this respect, the fulsome descriptions, catalogues and occasional quantification of black-gloss ware and lamps, grey wares, banded ware, plain and coarse wares, roof tiles and bricks, and cooking wares make real contributions to ceramic studies in Magna Graecia. Similarly, the chapters on architectural terracottas (Chapter 29), antefix moulds (Chapter 30) and kiln furniture (Chapter 33) shed light on the vestiges of regional ceramic production that are often underexplored in modern scholarship. Experts should also consult the shorter chapters as they sometimes include valuable observations. The small number of Late Hellenistic Red Wares, for example, seem to have been imported from the Greek East, but the authors could find no clear parallels among the sigillata types of the Eastern Mediterranean. The concentration of antefix moulds discovered at the site is also unusual in the ancient world (Chapters 29 and 30).
The valuable insights on architecture, artefact assemblages and environmental data within this volume are regrettably not integrated into a coherent picture of the ‘Greek settlement’ noted in the title. Poor archaeological preservation caused by intensive agriculture and erosion, as well as limited excavation (712m2), clearly posed problems for interpretation, but some attempt to draw together the pieces could have offered a more compelling occupational biography of the site that considered matters such as the size and boundaries of the settlement, and the relationships over time between workshops, habitations, sanctuary, natural springs, clay sources, communication routes and the shrubby pastureland documented in the pollen sequences. The authors usually show expert attention to formation processes, and are careful to add appropriate qualifications when discussing the settlement history, but the use of categorical terms such as ‘abandonment’ and ‘reoccupation’ to describe gaps in the archaeological record (e.g. later third to early second centuries BC) downplays the complex relationship between past population levels, depositional processes and the archaeological record, as well as the limits of investigation and contingencies of archaeological discovery. One only has to consider that the excavations turned up no objects of medieval date and only a single artefact of recent times (Chapter 37), despite the site's proximity to a chapel in use from at least the twelfth century and to a large farmstead occupied since the nineteenth century.
These concerns aside, this is an important volume for its rich and thorough archaeological detail of environments and assemblages, which, as Joseph Carter notes in the preface, contribute an additional “tessera in the mosaic of the ancient countryside that is slowly, piece by piece, coming into view at Metaponto” (p. xviii).
