Le recenti indagini archeologiche a Santa Maria D’Anglona e il rinvenimento di una pallina fittile con iscrizione tardo-arcaica in alfabeto acheo

The post graduate School in Archaeological Heritage of the University of Basilicata (SSBA-Unibas, Matera), starting in 2016, has carried out a new archaeological excavation project on the Anglona hill, as part of a landscape archaeology project that has been taking place in recent years in the chora of Heraclea between the Agri and Sinni rivers. In this contribution, after a summary of the data from previous research carried out during the last century, new results are presented from the most recent excavation campaigns on the western tip of the Anglona hill. In the second part of the text, a new epigraphic document uncovered by the excavations is presented, an earthenware little sphere on which a male name was engraved before firing. The inscription, which features characters typical of the Archaic alphabet of the Achaean cities of Magna Graecia, can be dated to the first half of the 5th century a.C. and finds several comparisons in other inscriptions of the same period found in the Policoro area. As such it contributes to testifying to the historical phase in which the Siritis, after the fall of Sybaris, continued to be part of the Achaean world, probably now under the control of Metapontion. Moreover, the name inscribed on the little sphere, Nikokrates, well attested in Attica and elsewhere from the late 5th century B.C., finds here its oldest occurrence, and the only western one before the Hellenistic period, when in Southern Italy it occurs only at Policoro-Herakleia (and at Taras, Herakleia’s mother-city), so it probably contributes also to testifying an interesting onomastic continuity in the area of the ancient Siritis, possibly from the Archaic Ionian settlement onwards.