Scholars interested in Mediterranean prehistory share two expectations about the issue of Past: firstly that the accessible meanings reside not only in textual sources, and secondly that the study of world prehistory has acquired a privileged position in the current status of theoretical and methodological debates, adapting a wide range of scientific techniques to the resolution of cultural questions. It follows that in some important aspects, although the past must have changed through time, it must also share some common elements with our world and thus with our own experience. It should come as no real surprise that approaches to Prehistory itself change, not simply because we find more things but because the debate concerning the generalities upon which our interpretations are based remains one of active engagement. Prehistory becomes therefore a history of great long-time human conquests and a history of the debate about the paradigmatic changes that determine the human condition and its variability.
In the last decade the IBAM, in particular the Catania Office, has attempted to focus on the main aspects of cultural and socio-economic complexity which concern human societies in the Central Mediterranean from the Neolithic Age (Fifth millennium BC) to the later Bronze Age (end of the Second millennium BC). The interdisciplinary nature of the investigation comprises a wide spectrum of scientific approaches and of the diverse theoretical heuristic issues in the field of anthropological archaeology: social and political change, artefactual discontinuities and transitions, settlement and land use, technological innovations, and the development of social complexity.
Starting from the comparison with "island archaeology" which animates the recent scientific debate, a recurrent theme is to explore the long-range trade in Sicily and the Aegean during the Bronze Age. The use of an integrated approach, which involves traditional archaeology and the most innovative archaeometric methods (XRF, XRD analysis for defining the nature and provenance of raw material), is moving towards an understanding of artefact assemblages, the evidence for production itself, and patterns of food-production practices. Further elements of Bronze Age long-range trade are obsidian procurement and circulation originating in Pantelleria and the Aeolian Islands, the exploitation of metals in the Aegean and their circulation in the direction of Sicily and the Western Mediterranean. Finally, a specific project focuses on amber artefacts in preprotohistoric Sicily, exploring the local source of the so-called "Simetite" fossil resin and its archaeological context.
The theatre of operations of this maritime interaction, and the possible patterns of trading culture behind it, is represented by several Bronze Age sites in Sicily (the western slopes of Etna volcano; Casalicchio near Licata; Caldare near Agrigento; San Cono-Gela), as well as in the Aegean (Prinias and Ayia Triada on Crete; Poliochni on Lemnos). These sites, each of which has been selected for its extended stratigraphic sequence and its wide variety of imported items, offer the opportunity to reconstruct aspects of trade and human mobility in the wider archaeological context.
Another important strand of this research is to examine the link between diversity in organization and social structure, in particular models of hierarchy. Here one obvious problem, as the recent cognitive archaeology points out, is the interpretation of aspects of ritual practices and religion, a subject that has been the aim of an interdisciplinary project "Faceless Gods" (2007-2011) on the archaeology of cult in Sicily before the Greeks.
In working on these themes, the activity carried out by IBAM in the field of prehistoric research testifies to the opening-up and expansion of Mediterranean Prehistory in many directions, a creative tension that surely signals a healthy discipline which constitutes a springboard into the future.
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