Pantalica: Recenti ricerche sulla topografia e cronologia delle tombe e delle abitazioni rupestri

This article provides a synopsis of the topographical setting and chronology of the rock-cut chamber tombs and habitation chambers at Pantalica. Although Orsi’s work remains fundamental to our understanding of the site and was advanced for its time, recent survey work by the author has shed new light on the distribution, form and numbers of these monuments at the site. The dating of the prehistoric phases is reviewed, drawing attention to the evidence for continuing occupation of Pantalica in the early colonial period, or second Iron Age, as well as later. While a dating of the so-called anaktoron, at least in its surviving form, to the Byzantine period seems more likely to this author than the theory of a Bronze Age date, a revision to the conventional chronology of the rock-cut habitation chambers (the “cameroni bizantini”) is also suggested, which would assign some of them to the Hellenistic period or earlier.