North African pottery in Palermo: preliminary findings from the Montevergini excavations

Abstract

Palermo during late antiquity and the early Byzantine period is largely unknown. Many reasons contribute to this gap. What remains yet to be uncovered is continuity of life that has not seen any systematic investigation, hampered also by a critical delay in the publishing of previous excavations. Despite these issues, our knowledge of the town in the above period has improved slightly in recent years thanks to chance discoveries. Among them, the excavations conducted inside the former Montevergini monastery where archaeologists have found a complex sequence of archaeological levels from the 3rd century B.C. to the present day. This paper will focus on a single layer that has yielded a rich pottery assemblage comprising late African imports and other presumed locally manufactured objects. These findings enhance our knowledge of the local economy and daily life in one of the major port cities of western Sicily.

Keywords

• Late Antiquity
• Byzantine Sicily
• North African pottery
• Palermo
• trade routes
• urbanism