Abstract
The archaeological excavations at Villa San Pancrazio (Taormina, Italy) are bringing to light a vast Roman-Imperial residential quarter featuring luxurious dwellings decorated with wall paintings and mosaic floors, pointing it out as one of the most significant archaeological sites of the city. The polychrome and black and white mosaics recovered date back to the middle Imperial period, during the 2nd century AD. This work deals with the first archaeometric investigations of the materials employed for the tesserae production with the aim of elucidating the mineralogical composition and obtaining analytical evidence that can contribute to extracting information related to their production technology. For that purpose, a non-invasive methodology, based on micro energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence (μ-EDXRF) spectrometry and Raman spectroscopy, was used to characterize a wide selection of stone, ceramic and glass tesserae. Chemometric tools were exploited to manage the large set of elemental data collected on black and white lithic samples, providing essential clues for the subsequent investigations. The results evidenced the employment of natural lithotypes (calcareous sedimentary, dolomitic and volcanic) local and imported, and also artificial materials, such as ceramic made firing magnesium-rich clays, soda-lime-silica glasses made with different opacifying and coloring agents (such as calcium antimoniate, cobalt and copper).
Highlights
In recent decades, research on Roman architecture and architectural decoration has broadened its horizons to the study of production processes, in particular in the fields of stone and stucco decoration and wall painting; it has offered important contributions to the reconstruction of social and economic dynamics in both public and private building activities
The enormous potential of Sicily has been only minimally exploited to date [4,5], despite the fact that the island boasts a rich corpus of mosaics from the Roman age [6], belonging above all to rich urban domus and extra-urban villas, within which mosaics, as well as wall paintings, are a fundamental indicator of the owner’s economic, social and ideological status
Roman houses being excavated at Villa San Pancrazio in Taormina has been carried out
Summary
Research on Roman architecture and architectural decoration has broadened its horizons to the study of production processes, in particular in the fields of stone and stucco decoration and wall painting; it has offered important contributions to the reconstruction of social and economic dynamics in both public and private building activities. Even in the field of mosaics, the traditional iconographic and stylistic approach has been recently supported by multidisciplinary investigations on the origin of raw materials, as well as on the techniques of execution, division of labor and costs [1]. Literature on these aspects is more consistent for some areas of the Roman world, in the provinces of north-western Europe [2,3]. From the perspective of acquiring useful data for this area of research on mosaics, the case study of the Hellenistic-Roman residential area of Villa San
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