Samantha Stout is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of California, San Diego. She is in the Materials Science and Engineering program and conducts research on scientific methods for cultural heritage analysis, both in San Diego, and Florence, Italy. Lately, she has been a contributor to this blog and I have been discussing with her for a while the possibility that she would consider to undertake part of her PhD research in my country, Sicily. Indeed, since the first training I gave, I figured out that inviting scholars here would be a great opportunity to explore the use of scientific methods which I don’t have normally access to. It is also a great opportunity to have scholars study Sicilian Art, Architecture and Archaeology. I’m proud to contribute a little to the dissemination of the history and the cultural richness of my homeland.
I discussed for a while some research topics with Samantha and eventually she found a spot in her busy schedule to take a flight from Florence to Catania, Sicily. I picked her up on the morning of the 15th at the airport in Catania and we drove straight to the archaeology site of Morgantina and its museum in Aidone.
This ancient Greek colony has been the principal site of American research on classical Sicily since the early 1950’s. This Greek colony has an intriguing history, since it was one of the colonies in Sicily settled far inside the territory of central Sicily, where the native Sicilian population, called Sikel, was pushed by the Greeks once they conquered the coast. Morgantina archaeology is of particular interest since the colony, being so close to the native population, developed a hybrid Sikel-Greek culture.
The Aidone museum director, Enrico Caruso, gave us permission to work on the material and Sandra Lucore, the director of the excavation project, welcomed our proposal to help them answer some questions with our little mobile laboratory; a portable energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence spectrometer, which Samantha contributed, (courtesy of her affiliation as a student at NSF supported CISA3); and my multispectral imaging equipment. The examinations were carried out on the North Baths complex, where excavation had been completed last year, and some pieces from there which are currently stored in the Aidone museum.
As for myself, I was performing some multispectral imaging to find out the areas of interest for the further examination with the XRF spectrometer and doing some 3D photomodeling of the pieces investigated.
