Archaeological sites are like crime scenes frozen in time as they preserve evidence of the activities carried out by humans in the past.

Dr Gianmarco Alberti, resident academic lecturer at the Department of Criminology (Faculty for Social Wellbeing), has been member of an international team of scholars (led by Prof. Davide Tanasi, University of South Florida) that has carried out research in an archaeological site in central-southern Sicily (San Ippolito Hill-Caltagirone). The international team has recently published an article centred on the chronology of the human activities on the site.

Dr Alberti has taken care of the statistical analysis of a number of radiocarbon dates available from the site. While the pottery repertoire found on the San Ippolito Hill was clearly the one in use during the Sicilian Middle Bronze Age, it was not known in which specific time window the site was occupied and for how long.

To simplify a more complex picture, the findings indicate that the site started to be occupied somewhere between 1450 and 1306 BC, and that the human activities ended somewhere between 1299 and 1126 BC. The analysis also allowed to measure the overall time span of human occupation during the Middle Bronze Age, which is likely to have lasted around 100 years. Overall, the study is particularly important because it is the first time that radiocarbon evidence from mainland Sicily dating to the Middle Bronze Age has been acquired and statistically analysed.

The article 'Bayesian radiocarbon modeling and the absolute chronology of the Middle Bronze Age Thapsos facies in mainland Sicily: a view from St. Ippolito (Caltagirone)' published in Anthropologica et Præhistorica, a diamond open access peer-reviewed journal, and is freely available at this link.