Sicily Cisterns

Sunday morning we woke up quite early (~4:30am) and packed up the apartment to jump on a ferry headed for Sicily along with Keith, a friend and colleague of Timmy Gambin's, who is studying archaeology for his PhD at the University of Malta. The ferry ride was an hour and a half long and rocked us all to sleep, well at least some of us. The ferry landed in Pozzallo and then we took a 4hr bus ride to Carini (in the province of Palermo, Sicily) on the north western side of the island where we are staying at a hotel.

Upon arriving to the site, we unpacked our luggage and then attended a lecture from Keith about water management in Malta and also how it compares to Sicily. This directly ties into our work with cistern mapping and visualization. After the lecture, we got dinner and then ran through a system check to verify all the equipment was working. We ran into some problems when verifying sonar operation; however, during deployment, the sonar decided to behave and provide beautiful sonar scans.

We are scheduled to visit several different cisterns here, which were setup through Timmy (our awesome Maltese contact). So far, we visited 2 cisterns. The location we visited today (Tuesday) is known as Case Cutietta and is located in Carini itself. The location was originally a basilica and is now privately owned. This site is of special interest because 5 years ago during excavation, a mosaicked floor was recovered from the original basilica. The archeologist suspect that the cistern we explored also contains a mosaicked floor as it probably was a Roman room. We deployed the robot and collected sonar scans, and video, but did not find any evidence of a mosaicked floor due to much dirt and debris. The shape of the cistern is rectangular as seen to the right.


Overall, our experience here in Sicily has been great. Besides all the great programming the team has been doing and the field work we experienced today, we still have been able to stroll along the beach and get a whiff of fresh air as well as experience a very evident Italian culture. Keith has been very gracious through providing extensive knowledge about Sicily and the different sites. We have also been relying on him for his translation abilities :)