Pratiche cultuali all’interno dei sacelli domestici di Finziade

The complex panorama concerning cultic practices carried inside the Sicilian houses of the Hellenistic-Roman period has never been addressed through a detailed investigation. Finziade is one of the few Sicilian cities of the Hellenistic period that has given a complete picture of the cults celebrated within the domestic sacella; it is a city on the southern coast of Sicily identified with the archaeological site of Monte Sant’Angelo di Licata (AG). The excavations carried out by the University of Messina have made it possible to investigate 11 houses, each of these containing a room used as sacellum. In these rooms, in addition to a molded altar in the center, a series of ceramic finds have been discovered (black painted cups, kraters, skyphoi, miniaturistic ceramics, oil lamps, unguentaries, phialai, arulae-thymiateria and arulae) which have made it possible to reconstruct the cultic practices carried out within those rooms. The presence of altars and other arrangements inside a room does not limit the function of the room itself to an exclusively cultic use. In fact, the pottery provides documentary evidence of how inside the rooms, in addition to the cultic functions, activities related to daily life were also carried out. The presence of common pottery, kitchen pottery and other “profane” objects raises an important problem relating to the difficulty of exclusively assigning the pottery to the ritual activity.