ARCHAELOGY OF THE MEDITERRANEAN IN MIDDLE AGES

According to the Dublin descriptors, at the end of the course students will demonstrate:

1) The course aims to deal with the themes of the transformation between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages in the specific context of the Southern Mediterranean; the presence and the close confrontation between the two powers with universal claim, the Byzantine and Islamic empires, implies the need to specifically interpret this process in the transformation from Byzantium to Islam. Specifically, the course aims to provide an overview of the archaeological debate on Byzantine and Islamic archaeology by introducing the key concepts for understanding the urban, rural and material culture frameworks between the 6^th/7^th and 10^th centuries.

2) Within this approach, a specific reading of the early Middle Ages in Sicily is proposed, whose settlement dynamics are strongly conditioned by the ideological, symbolic and strategic role played by the island between the 8^th and 10^th centuries. The third module will be devoted to Byzantine and Islamic Sicily with particular reference to the diversification of territorial frameworks and the formation of the frontier, as well as to the role of cities and material culture.

3) During workshop activities, the knowledge thus acquired will be applied to unpublished case studies and archaeological contexts in order to implement autonomous judgement and the ability to apply the skills independently

4) During the lessons, students will be invited to explore, in groups or individually, one of the topics covered in the course according to an additional bibliography that will be provided in class and to present the results of their in-depth study, orally and with the support of a ppt, during the classroom lectures.

5) The debate following the individual presentations will be aimed at implementing the critical spirit towards the interpretative hypotheses presented and at measuring the ability to go deeper through the reading and analysis of scientific articles preparatory to the thesis work.

A. The Early Medieval Mediterranean: Ports, Trade Networks and transport containers between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages

1.Late Antique High Middle Ages: chronological and cultural coordinates.

2. Late antique society and economic transformations: towards a new idea of statehood

3. Geographical and economic space: ports, emporia, wiks

4. Transport containers: the new forms of late antique trade

B. Byzantium and the Mediterranean dimension of the empire

5. Cities between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: social transformations and urban impact; Constantinople the image of an imperial city

6. Rural worlds in the Byzantine Empire: territorial defence and castration

The themata

C. The Islamic world: the construction of a new society

7. Islamic cities: patterns of development and archaeological problems

8. The countryside in the Islamic age

D. Sicily between Byzantium and Islam. For an archaeology of the frontier

9. Sicily: the settlement framework between Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages

10. The formation of the frontier. The Kassar of Castronovo

11. Kastra and madina: the new role of urban centres

12. Material culture in Middle Byzantine and Islamic Sicily: archaeological markers and main ceramic classes; recognition, cataloguing, design of archaeological contexts from urban excavations in Catania.