Landscape trajectories and an Early Medieval settlement in Central-Western Sicily: the case of Contrada Castro (Corleone, Palermo)

Since 2015 the ongoing 'Harvesting Memories' project (University of Palermo, 'Soprintendenza BB.CC.AA.' of Palermo, Bona Furtuna LLC) have investigated the long-term landscape trajectories and the settlement pattern in a small inland area of the Monti Sicani district (central-western Sicily). The Castro/ Giardinello Valley and the Mt. Barraù area (Corleone, Palermo) is a typical Mediterranean inland, a palimpsest for analyzing formative-processes and changes of a Sicilian rural landscape and the relationship with vegetation cover dynamics and land-use. The fieldwork confirmed the long occupation of this area characterized by archaeological evidences dating back to the Protohistory, Classical period, Middle Ages and Late Modern age. The detection of the high intensity of human presence across the time represents a fruitful point of start to understand the historical dimension of the human impact on this specific environment. In particular, this paper aims to present the result an excavation carried out in the most relevant site of the area: the hill-top plateau of Contrada Castro. This settlement, completely unknown in written sources, revealed an interesting sequence of re-occupation of a 6th-5th century BC site during the Early Middle Ages. The first evidence ¿ at current state of the research ¿ of a new occupation of the site dated back to the 7th-early 8th centuryAD when two peri-natal individuals were buried. In the second half of the 8th-9th centuryAD new buildings documented the development of the settlement before a reshaping ¿ over collapse layers ¿ of the settlement topography with a new orientation of the structures during the 10th11th centuryAD. The archaeological data of this excavation indicates the high potentiality 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