Archaeobotanical and Historical Insights on Some Steps of Forest Cover Disruption at Ustica Island (Sicily, Italy) from Prehistory Until Present day

ABSTRACT

This paper interprets the first archaeobotanical data to emerge from the island of Ustica (north-western Sicily, Italy). The excavation of the Neolithic site of Piano dei Cardoni (4600-4200 cal BC) and the Middle Bronze Age site of Faraglioni Village (1500-1250 cal BC), has made it possible to analyse plant macro-remains and compare them with data on local vegetation obtained from both historical literary sources and recent field surveys. The onset of agro-pastoral practices in the mid-5th millennium BC brought about significant changes to the local pristine plant communities. Indeed, the presence of holm oaks and pine trees in that period was recently detected for the first time. The evolution of the local vegetation following the first human settlement in the Neolithic has some crucial parallels with what happened following the recolonisation of the mid-eighteenth century. The massive presence of olive trees during the Middle Bronze Age suggests the deliberate introduction of this crop species on the island and attests to olives’ paramount importance for the local economy at that time. The disappearance of some woody species shows that human occupation has had a powerful impact on the island’s forest resources, which partially recovered during the repeated long phases of land abandonment.

KEYWORDS:

• Neolithic
• Middle Bronze Age
• vegetation history
• historical maps
• Mediterranean island
• human impact
• forest disruption

Acknowledgments

We are indebted with Prof. Rita Accogli, University of Salento, for facilitating microscopy observations, with Phyllida Bailey and Dylan Bergersen, volunteer archaeologists who gave their precious contribution in floating the soils and selecting the archaeobotanical remains during the 2019 field campaign. We are also grateful to Leonardo Scuderi and Corrado Marcenò for their support during the field surveys of current vegetation patterns between 2007 and 2008, and to the two anonymous reviewers, whose critical and fruitful comments helped us to significantly improve the overall quality of the manuscript.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Brains2Islands, Fondazione CON IL SUD.

Notes on contributors

Claudia Speciale

Claudia Speciale, PhD. is an Italian archaebotanist. She recently succeeded for a temporary position as archaeobotanist for the project IsoCAN, funded by the European Research Council in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Canary Islands, Spain). She was formerly a Post-Doc Researcher at the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (Naples, Italy), for the multidisciplinary project Brains2islands. Her Ph.D. thesis (University of Salento, Italy) was on palaeodemographic dynamics and the use of vegetal resources on the Aeolian archipelago. She is particularly interested in the interaction of humans with the insular landscape.

Nunzia Larosa

Nunzia Larosa (BA, MA, PG) is a specialist in three-dimensional survey techniques and digital documentation of multi-layered pre-protohistoric contexts. In the last 10 years she has collaborated in several Archaeological Research Projects in Oman, Egypt, Turkey and Italy as supervisor archaeologist and GIS expert. In July 2021, she started a PhD at University of New England (Australia) with a research project investigating the Cultural and Socioeconomic Significance of Personal Ornamentation in Late Prehistoric Southeastern Arabia.

Francesca Spatafora

Francesca Spatafora has been Director of the Archaeological Museum ‘Antonino Salinas' in Palermo and of Polo museale Archeologico di Palermo. In the past, she directed the Archaeological Section of the Soprintendenza ai Beni Culturali di Palermo and the Archaeological Park of Himera. She is specialist of protohistory and anhellenic civilizations of Sicily. She has directed excavations in different Sicilian sites and organized exhibitions in Sicily and abroad (Zurich, Marseille, Beijing). She is member of Italian and foreign institutions and she is Research Associate at the University of Bern - Institut für Archaologische Wissenschaften. She is author and editor of a lot of monographs, editions of excavations, exhibitions’ catalogs, papers in scientific journals and conference proceedings, both scientific and educational.

Alba Maria Gabriella Calascibetta

Alba Maria Gabriella Calascibetta held the role of archaeologist officer at the Superintendence for Cultural and Environmental Heritage of Palermo until 2017. She carried out several activities of excavation and study of materials from indigenous and Punic sites of western Sicily. Author of several contributions in scientific journals, national and international Conference Proceedings and printed volumes, her research interests have mainly focused on issues relating to Greek epigraphy, funerary archeology, the study of clay oil lamps. In Ustica, she worked in the field at the Village of the Faraglioni and lead the permanent setting up of the two locations of the Archeological Museum.

Gian Pietro Di Sansebastiano

Gian-Pietro Di Sansebastiano is associate professor of General Botany and Professor of Bioproduction at the Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences and Technologies (DiSTeBA) of the University of Salento. He graduated with honours in Biological Sciences at the University of Pavia in 1993 and obtained a PhD in plant biochemistry from the University of Neuchatel (CH) in 1999. He gained experience in CIBA-Geigy (Basel, CH) and Imperial College (Wye, London, UK) and developed numerous collaborations. He is today Vice-President of the University course in Biotechnology. Main topics of his research are: cell biology, plants adaptation to stress, plant cells and tissue microscopy.

Giuseppina Battaglia

Giuseppina Battaglia, after studying Archaeology at the University ‘La Sapienza' in Rome, began to collaborate with some Italian Archaeological Assets Bureaus (Soprintendenza Speciale del Museo Pigorini e del Museo d'Arte Orientale di Roma, Soprintendenza Archeologica di Roma, Soprintendenza Archeologica della Lombardia). Since 2005 she works in Palermo, first at the Museo Archeologico Regionale ‘A. Salinas’, and since 2011 at the Soprintendenza BB.CC.AA. in Palermo. She has directed several archaeological investigations in the area of Palermo (from Prehistoric to Modern Ages) and edited their scientific publications. Her main interests are Prehistoric Sicily, Prehistoric demography, use of caves during the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic, History of Ancient Sicily.

Salvatore Pasta

Salvatore Pasta has a Ph.D. in Plant Ecology and Systematic. Currently, he is employed as a researcher at the Institute of Biosciences and BioResources (IBBR) of the Italian National Research Council (CNR) of Palermo, Italy. Since 2016, he is associate researcher of the Unit of Ecology and Evolution of the Department of Biology of the University of Fribourg (Switzerland), vice-chair of the Mediterranean Plant Specialists Group of the IUCN and member of the scientific committee of the PIM (Petites Iles de la Méditerranée) Project. Plant systematics, vegetation survey, forest ecology, insular biogeography, nature conservation and ethnobotany have been among the topics of his research activities for 25 years.