The settlement of contrada castro (Corleone, Palermo) between the Byzantine and Islamic Periods (7th-11th c. AD)

Abstract

Since 2015, a fruitful collaboration between a private bio-farm, Bona Furtuna LLC, the University of Palermo and the ‘Soprintendenza BB.CC.AA.’ has been established within the ‘Harvesting Memories’ project, which is focused on the study of long-term landscape transformations as a result of the diachronic interaction between human socio-economic patterns and environmental and ecological trends. The investigation of the site of Contrada Castro reveals new insights into the settlement dynamics before and after the first stage of the Aghlabid conquest of western Sicily, a real ‘dark age’ from the perspective of archaeological knowledge, especially in a rural area. The material culture, archaeozoological and archaeobotanical data have also indicated the high potential of the site for the reconstruction of economic and human-environment interaction trends of an early medieval community during the complex transition from the Byzantine to Islamic period.