Ancient Lucania

The research team was created in 2012 thanks to a generous grant of the Research Council of the City of Paris. Our project is to study pre-Roman Lucania, an ancient region of the Italian peninsula, which corresponds to modern Basilicata and parts of Campania and Calabria. The region was inhabited by various populations throughout the first millennium BC before the Roman conquest. The region has been extensively explored by travelers since the end of the 18th c., and then by archaeologists, especially since the creation of the local Soprintendenza della Basilicata in 1964. Since then, French archaeologists have had a special relationship with ancient Lucania, with a series of excavations across the region, from the Tyrrhenian Cost to the Gulf of Tarento, including our own excavation at Pietragalla. The aims of the project are twofold: creating a Gazetteer of Lucanian archaeological sites, gathering the material for a complete reappraisal of the pre-Roman period in matter of settlement patterns, cult places and necropoleis developing an Inventory of Lucanian antiquities across the world, by listing all objects with a known provenance from Lucania in museums and collections, in order to trace the trade of antiquities since the early 19th c. One of the major achievement of the project team is the organisation of the international congress “La Lucanie entre deux mers: Archéologie et patrimoine”, held in Paris in November 2015, whose proceedings are now published (Naples, 2019)