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Smelting, smelted and smelling sulphur: resource landscapes, identities and social relations in Early Bronze Age Sicily (ca. 2300-1500 BC)

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.