Gender and Burial in Early Colonial Sicily: The Case of Morgantina

Abstract

Sicily and South Italy, collectively known as Magna Graecia, were the destinations of one of the first great movements of colonization undertaken by mainland Greeks toward the end of the eighth century BC. Eastern Sicily, in particular, presented both an opportunity and a challenge to Greeks in search of land because of its fertile agricultural plains and abundant natural resources. It was inhabited during the Bronze and Iron Ages by indigenous peoples, whom I shall group under the short-hand term of Sikels. Archaeologically, this region can serve as a laboratory for the examination of exchanges between the colonists who established settlements on the coasts and the original Sikel inhabitants. The ensuing transformation of Sikel culture has usually been considered under the rubric of ‘hellenization’, a unilateral term that does not adequately take into account the complexity and nuances of inter-cultural contact.

I would like to thank the conference organizers, Moira Donald, Linda Hurcombe and Di Cooper for providing the original impetus for my reconsideration of the implications of gender in the Morgantina burials and for creating a stimulating context in which I was the beneficiary of much valuable feedback from colleagues working across disciplines. I am particularly grateful to Theresa Menard and Marianna Nikolaidou for reading and commenting on the final drafts, and to Diane Fane for bibliographic counsel. The inevitable subjectivities of the data and its interpretation remain my own.