HELD ON TUESDAY 28 NOVEMBER 2017
AT THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF ANTIQUITIES IN LEIDEN, THE NETHERLANDS
Prof. Roger J. A. Wilson
DINING WITH THE DEAD IN EARLY BYZANTINE SICILY
EXCAVATIONS AT PUNTA SECCA NEAR RAGUSA
This talk described a more recent excavation which focused on one building, a house, which examined in detail its building phases and the commercial contacts that its inhabitants enjoyed with other parts of Sicily – and indeed with the wider Mediterranean world. Finds include the earliest well-dated example in Europe of a thimble, and what is arguably the earliest depiction anywhere of a backgammon board.
The biggest surprise was the discovery of a substantial, built tomb placed in what was probably the yard of the house in the second quarter of the seventh century AD, and of evidence for associated feasting in honor of the deceased. Who was inside the tomb, and why did that person deserve this level of respect? What evidence was there for feasts, and what did they eat? Was it a pagan or a Christian burial? And what was the tomb doing here, in a domestic setting, rather than in the village cemetery, or indeed, if the deceased was Christian, in or near the settlement’s church?
These and other intriguing questions were addressed in this lecture, and the discovery set in the context of what else is known about such practices in late Roman and early Byzantine funerary culture.
Roger J. A. Wilson is Director of the Centre for the Study of Ancient Sicily at the University of British Columbia. He has also been Professor of the Archaeology of the Roman Empire at the same university, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Nottingham, and Louis Claude Purser Associate Professor at the University of Dublin, where he was also a Fellow of Trinity College.
Recipient of the Killam Prize for Research in 2012 at UBC for his career-long contributions to scholarship, he has also been Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Bonn (1987/1989), Visiting Professor Classics at McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario) in 1998, Balsdon Senior Research Fellow at the British School of Rome (2001/2002), Charles Eliot Norton Lecturer for the Archaeological Institute of America (2007), and Guest Fellow at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2012). In 2017 he gave the Dalrymple Lectures in Archaeology at the University of Glasgow.
Wilson is a graduate of the University of Oxford, where he also studied for his DPhil. His research concerns mainly the Roman archaeology of the central Mediterranean, with a special emphasis on Sicily, but he has also written on Roman Britain and Roman Germany. Wilson has over 180 publications to his name, including the authorship or editorship of ten books, such as Guide to the Roman Remains in Britain (1975; 1980; 1988, 2002; fifth edition in preparation), Piazza Armerina (1983) and Sicily under the Roman Empire (1990). His most recent book is Caddeddi on the Tellaro: a late Roman villa and its mosaics, published as a BABESCH Supplementary Volume in 2016. Wilson is currently excavating a Roman villa at Gerace, near Enna in the heart of Sicily.
Dr. Eric Moormann (Radboud University) moderated the evening.