Dinamiche di sussistenza e resilienza nelle isole minori della Sicilia: indagini isotopiche preliminari a confronto sulle faune domestiche di Pantelleria ed Ustica durante l’età del Bronzo

Subsistence and resilience dynamics on Sicily’s small islands: Preliminary isotopic analysis of the domestic fauna of Pantelleria and Ustica in the Bronze Age - The settlement of most Mediterranean islands began in the Neolithic (6th-4th millennium BC) and, more permanently, the Bronze Age (3rd-2nd millennium BC). On smaller islands, it was only with the introduction of agro-pastoralism that subsistence strategies were successfully developed that could ensure greater chances of survival for colonising communities. Our knowledge of the evolution of these adaptations is limited and for this reason we undertook an isotope study of two Bronze Age island settlements, Mursia (ca. 1750-1450 BC) on Pantelleria, and I Faraglioni (c. 1400-1200 BC) on Ustica. As part of this study, we sampled human and faunal skeletal remains in order to reconstruct the diet of these early islanders and the insular agro-pastoral ecosystems they established. Although the human remains did not yield extracts compatible with bone collagen, several dozens of bones of domestic fauna from both sites were found to be well preserved and usable for reconstructing the islands’ trophic networks, as well as obtaining data on aridity and fertility levels. In particular, the analyses of the stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen attest to a considerable isotopic variability in the bone collagen of the sampled cattle, sheep, and goats. Conversely, the pigs analysed so far have more uniform isotopic compositions. These data are compatible with various scenarios, which are not mutually exclusive and can be preliminarily interpreted as follows: 1) during the Bronze Age, the islands were subject to alternating environmental conditions and particularly phases of greater aridity; 2) ruminant breeding required specific foraging strategies, which periodically included the administration of plants with a higher isotopic composition than the so-called C3 photosynthetic cycle plants; 3) the settlements regularly received imported animals. Clarifying which of these rispethypotheses is the most plausible requires us still to refine the chronology of the sampled individuals, interpret the data in the light of other local archaeological evidence and ethnographic knowledge from Mediterranean contexts, although we can already safely conclude that keeping cattle on Pantelleria and Ustica in the Bronze Age required targeted strategies.