The Agora Valley Project

The American Excavations at Morgantina: Agora Valley Project (AVP) is an ongoing, multiyear research and excavation project launched in 2022 to investigate developments taking place in the urban center of Morgantina between the third and first centuries BCE. The project includes members from a large number of universities spread across the United States.

AVP excavations are carried out under the auspices of the American Excavations at Morgantina (AEM) and in cooperation with the Parco archeologico di Morgantina e della Villa Romana del Casale di Piazza Armerina and the Assessorato regionale dei beni culturali e dell'identità siciliana. AVP directors and staff collaborate with a team of graduate and undergraduate volunteers who apply and are accepted to the project, contributing their time, intellect, and energy.

The site of Morgantina has provided valuable information concerning the Hellenistic west as well as Roman military and political expansion across the Mediterranean. Our project explores transitions in the urban center, with a particular focus on identifying points of continuity and transformation in the city’s social and economic fabric during the first two centuries of Roman rule in Sicily.

Plan of the agora at Morgantina, with the second-century Macellum in the center of the upper agora (northern half) and the Southwest Temenos in the lower agora (southern half) shaded in red.

Once a loyal part of Hieron II’s Syracusan kingdom and therefore amenable to Roman interests at the start of the Second Punic War (218–202 BCE), Morgantina switched allegiance to the Carthaginians in 214 only to be recaptured a few years later by the Roman praetor Marcus Cornelius Cethegus in 211. Cethegus went even further and, by decree of the Roman senate, handed possession of the city to a group of Iberian mercenaries who had delivered Syracuse into Roman hands in 212. The year 211 thus marked a major turning point (but certainly not a complete rupture) in the city’s history, as it went from a semiautonomous Sicilian Greek polis under the influence of Syracuse to a semiautonomous community of uncertain composition but led by Iberian mercenaries under the influence of Rome. Morgantina appears in literary sources as an important regional city both during the first Sicilian slave revolt of 141–132 BCE and in the oppressive praetorship of Gaius Verres from 73–71.

While large portions of Morgantina’s urban center were abandoned in the years immediately following the Second Punic War, especially in the residential districts that once formed the eastern and western limits of the settlement, in the agora, the existing structures like the stoas, granaries, and sanctuaries continued to see activity and reuse with architectural adaptation. Notably, a large market building (macellum) of Italian design was constructed in the middle of the agora on its own axis around 190 BCE. It is clear that the agora of Classical and Hellenistic Morgantina remained the commercial and political center throughout the period of Roman rule, and consequently, the agora valley offers the best opportunity to capture a high-resolution account of life in the city during the last two and a half centuries of its existence.