Smelting, smelted and smelling sulphur: resource landscapes, identities
and social relations in Early Bronze Age Sicily (ca
Abstract
In the prehistoric Mediterranean, it seems plausible that sulphur was
incorporated into society not only for economic reasons but also as a
cultural resource that transformed and was transformed by local ways of
living and identities. Processual theoretical approaches have
highlighted how human collectives economically benefit from resources,
however, recent anthropological research has illuminated how the threads
of human cultures, identities, perceptions, experiences and the
landscape become interwoven. Drawing upon the latter, contemporary
archaeological theory is becoming increasingly concerned with
understanding how to incorporate natural resources in this entanglement
of cultural, sensorial and natural dimensions as an active force.
Within this framework, this paper tackles the appropriation of sulphur
in Early Bronze Age Sicily (EBA, ca. 2300-1500 BC), ultimately focusing
on identities that might have emerged through engaging with this mineral
within a natural and built landscape for cooperative/competitive
relations. Therefore, it addresses life worlds in resource landscapes by
drawing upon the archaeological evidence of sulphur extraction in the
case-study region of Palma di Montechiaro, in Agrigento, Sicily. It
suggests that the transformation of sulphur into a cultural resource was
related to the identities of dwellers, miners and non-kin that emerged
as a result of shared experiences within wider social arenas of
interaction. It will propose that the sensory experience of the smell of
sulphur played a role in this process by combining a phenomenological
approach to raw materials with ethnographic and archaeometric evidence
of sulphur’s extraction process. To discuss this, I will review data
regarding traditional technologies of extraction in the case study area,
complemented by a re-assessment of the social and cultural practices in
the excavated EBA settlement of Monte Grande, which comprises a thick
description of the archaeological evidence for the smelting and
extraction of sulphur. Finally, I propose an interpretation of how the
relations that bound the local community together emerged from these
interwoven engagements with, and responses to, the smells of the
smelting process. In contrast to current interpretations, such an
approach demonstrates how sulphur was more than just a commodity to
exchange.