Sicily before the Muslims. The Transformation of the Roman Villas between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, Fourth to Eighth Centuries CE

Abstract This article treats the issue of transformation in the Sicilian countryside between Late Antiquity and the Byzantine period by analyzing the fate of the Roman villas. A brief synthesis of the European debate over the end of the Roman villas helps to find new interpretative keys for the Sicilian contexts within the changes of the settlement dynamics among the last centuries of the Roman Empire and the Muslim conquest of the island. Descriptions of the primary characteristics of the Late Antique villas in Sicily can be divided into two main phases: between the third and the fifth centuries, the villas were ‘monumentalized’ as a sign of the wealth of the owners and the reorganization of the Late Roman agrarian system; from the fourth/fifth to the eighth century, some villas were reoccupied and reused in different ways (burials, new settlements, productive activities, places of worship). The study also performs some statistical analysis about chronological trends to track long-term transformations of the villas. The article concludes with some reflections and questions for future research on the complexity of rural Sicilian society during Late Antiquity and the Byzantine period.