Location information

Palma di Montechiaro

  In the vicinity of this small town between Licata and Agrigento, interesting archaeological discoveries have been made. At Tumazzo, ca. 1 km from the mouth of the river Palma, an important votive deposit was discovered near a sulphur spring. Besides the traditional female figurines, masks, and late Corinthian and Attic pottery, were found three rare wooden female statuettes, representative of Greek sculpture in the earliest archaic times (Syracuse Museum). About 5 km E of this spring, on the Castellazzo hill, a Greek archaic center has been discovered. This site too has recently yielded a votive deposit with terracotta figurines in Dedalic style, Corinthian pottery, and an unusual vase of Geloan manufacture with a highly naturalistic triskeles painted on its under side; this motif of the three legs was later to become the geographical symbol of Sicily. The finds from Castellazzo and the sulphur spring document the presence of the Rhodio-Cretan colonists from Gela who occupied this territory in the second half of the 7th c. B.C. during the march along the coast which ended with the foundation of Akragas. Another fortified center, probably a Greek phrourion, has been identified N of Palma at the site called Piano della cita. The archaeological finds from Palma are displayed in the Syracuse Museum and in the new Museum in Agrigento.

P. Orlandini, ed.
This text is from: The Princeton encyclopedia of classical sites, Princeton University Press 1976. Cited Nov 2002 from Perseus Project URL below, which contains bibliography & interesting hyperlinks.

• http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Per...