Panarea. The village of Punta Milazzese.
The promontory of Milazzese with the village of the middle Bronze AgeThe excavation of the prehistoric village of Milazzese on the island of Panarea was the first to be conducted by Luigi Bernabò Brea in the Aeolian Islands, in 1947.
The village is situated on the rocky promontory of Punta Milazzese, formed by three successive rocky summits with a flat surface and almost vertical walls. Stretching into the sea in a crescent shape, and joined to the island only by a narrow isthmus, the promontory is a real natural fortress. It would have been easy to defend, simply by a barrier built across the isthmus; and it is just for this reason that it was chosen as the site of the middle Bronze Age village.
Communication between the three summits of the promontory, now impossible, cannot have been so in antiquity, since the rock has since then been heavily eroded.
On the first summit, which is the largest, apart from traces of the barrier across the isthmus, the excavation revealed a complex of 21 huts delimited by drystone walls. A further two huts were excavated at the far end of the last summit.
The village of Punta Milazzese. In the foreground one of the circular huts with quadrangular enclosureThe fact that pots and other objects were found in situ in many of the huts shows that the village suffered the same violent destruction that has been ascertained for all the Aeolian settlements during this period.
The material recovered characterises one of the phases of the Aeolian Bronze Age (Milazzese phase), which is dated by its many imported Mycenaean objects to between the 14th and early 13th century BC.
Bibliography:
- L. Bernabò Brea M. Cavalier, Meligunìs Lipàra III. Stazioni preistoriche delle isole Eolie. Panarea, Salina Stromboli, Palermo 1968, 1-132.
