The Chora of Metaponto 5: A Greek Farmhouse at Ponte Fabrizio is the fifth volume in the Institute
of Classical Archaeology’s series on rural settlements in the countryside (chora) of Metaponto. The book is a study of the 4th-century BC farmhouse known as Fattoria Fabrizio, located in the heart of the surveyed chora in the Venella valley (at Ponte Fabrizio). This simple structure richly illustrates the life of 4th-century BC Metapontine farmers of modest means.

To examine the ARK database of records from Fattoria Fabrizio, click here.

Thorough interpretations of the farmhouse structure in its wider historical and socioeconomic contexts are accompanied by comprehensive analyses of the archaeological finds. Among them is detailed evidence for the family cult, a rare archaeological contribution to the study of Greek religion in Magna Grecia. The entire range of local Greek ceramics has been studied, along with a limited number of imports. Together they reveal networks within the chora and trade beyond it, involving indigenous peoples of southern Italy, mainland Greeks, and the wider Mediterranean world. Along with the studies of traditional archaeological finds, archaeobotanical analyses have illuminated the rural economy of the farmhouse and the environment of the adjacent chora. Abundant Archaic pottery also documents an important occupation, during the first great flowering of the chora in the sixth century BC. This study provides an ideal complement to the four volumes of The Chora of Metaponto 3: Archaeological Field Survey—Bradano to Basento and an eloquent example of hundreds of farmhouses of this date identified throughout the chora by their surface remains alone.

The Chora of Metaponto 6: A Greek Settlement at Sant’Angelo Vecchio is the sixth title in the Institute of Classical Archaeology’s series on the rural countryside (chora) of Metaponto. Located on a slope overlooking the Basento River, the site has borne witness to the various lives and transformations of a central part of the Metapontino from prehistory through the current day. Its evidence recounts and illustrates the extraordinary variety of settlements and uses of the territory commonly encountered throughout the landscape’s history.

The excavations, held between 1979 and 1981, brought to light a Late Archaic farmhouse, evidence for the presence of a sanctuary near a spring, and a cluster of eight burials of the mid-5th century BC, but the most impressive remains belong to a production area with kilns. Active in the Hellenistic, Late Republican, and Early Roman periods, these kilns illuminate important and lesser-known features of production in the chora of a Greek city, and also allow us to trace the occupation of the territory in the Late Republican and Early Imperial periods.

The thorough, diachronic presentation of the evidence is complemented by specialist studies on the environment, the landscape, and the artifacts (including ceramics, architectural terracottas, kiln and workshop furniture, tiles, and metals), which range in date from Prehistory to the Post-Medieval period. Significantly, the majority of the evidence from Sant’Angelo Vecchio spans the range of Greek site types (farmhouse, necropolis, sanctuary, and production center) as well as the Greek dates (from the Archaic to Early Imperial periods) highlighted during ICA’s survey of the Metapontine chora. In this regard, the study enhances the four volumes of The Chora of Metaponto 3: Archaeological Field Survey—Bradano to Basento (University of Texas Press, 2011) and provides further insight on the ways in which sites in the chora interacted throughout its history.

Like its neighbor Sant’Angelo Vecchio, Pantanello was not only the site of a Greek sanctuary, but also a center of ceramic production. When Pantanello revived in the 2nd century BC under new management, and for the next three centuries, it was exclusively a factory, a major producer of amphorae and the grey ware pottery that replaced black gloss as the fine pottery of this world.

The structure and its kilns rank as one of the largest and best-preserved ceramic production centers in the south of Italy, and its enormous deposit of “wasters” and other discards documents as no other site the evolution of pottery production from the Late Hellenistic to the Early Imperial period. Mixed with the pottery were the bones of some of the largest horses and cattle in the Greek and Roman world. The chora was, as Pindar knew it, truly hippótrophos, nourisher of horses.