Archaeological sites Restricted assets geolocate Bronze Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic Neolithic Rock shelters

Castle shelter

Description

Castle shelter

The shelter, a simple projection of the rocky wall, came to light by breaking through the path of the "serpentine", the road that leads from the Castle to the port. The depot turned out to be a "workshop station" due to the unusual number of stone tools and processing splinters. Numerous excavations by local scholars have dismantled much of the ancient deposit, dispersing most of the finds. In 1925 the Director of the National Museum, Ettore Gabrici, adhering to the local request to clarify a series of doubts, carried out a large "stratigraphic excavation" specifying "It preceded horizontal cuts by removing layers almost always of 20 centimeters for almost the entire width of the cable ". The conclusions were not different from the previous ones, the difference is that the copious material was not lost: it is kept, unpublished, in the “A. Salinas ". The last excavation in the shelter dates back to 1998, was directed by Sebastiano Tusa, and this too is unpublished. The deposit on discovery was not supposed to be intact. From the finds of the Gabrici excavation it is possible to reconstruct: an upset surface layer of about 50 cm with Middle Neolithic ceramics (three-color) and
one below, not to exceed 150 cm, containing faunas and industries of the upper Paleolithic. Giorgio La Place, who studied part of the finds from the Gabrici excavation, places the industry of the Castle at the end of the Sicilian tardogravetto. He worked on materials of a sorting probably made during the excavation at Termini Imerese. The mass of the finds was placed in wooden boxes each weighing about 25 kg. and thus transported to Palermo; in 1966 after forty-one years they were opened by myself.
Il Riparo reached an unimaginable notoriety, crossed national borders, thanks to the utterances of Giuseppe Patiri who claimed for about three decades, until his death, that a part of the industry and the processing splinters of the Castle represented "prehistoric jewels of the Paleolithic age" . In
this thesis was supported by the palethnologist G. Schwenfurth of Berlin. (Text source: Giovanni Mannino: Guide to the Prehistory of Palermo - List of prehistoric sites in the province of Palermo - Sicilian Institute for Political and Economic Studies) (Text source: Giovanni Mannino: Guide to the Prehistory of Palermo - List of prehistoric sites in the province of Palermo - Sicilian Institute for Political and Economic Studies)

Bibliography and in-depth documents:

100) FIRST SICILY - AT THE ORIGINS OF SICILIAN SOCIETY - volume first edited by Sebastiano Tusa Palermo 1997.

198) D. Petruso - V. Forgia - L. Sineo: The human population of Sicily: an interdisciplinary review in the Archive for Anthropology and Ethnology - Vol. CXLIV (2014) Download file: SINEO et al

201) Ignazio Messana: When elephants lived in Sicily. Flag - Gulfs of Castellammare and Carini - 2019

Ignazio Caloggero:

History of Sicily - 1.2. Paleolithic and Mesolithic:

History of Sicily - 1.2.1: Religious sentiments and burials in the Paleolithic and Mesolithic

History of Sicily - 1.2.2: Art in the Paleolithic and Mesolithic

History of Sicily - 1.2.3: Archaeological sites of the Sicilian Paleolithic and Mesolithic