Interazione culturale e «entangled artifacts»: il caso delle tombe a tholos siciliane scavate nella roccia,

from calaforno to calicantone: transmarine relations in the hyblaean area between the iii and ii millennium bc - The paper addresses the question of the transmarine relations of the southern part of the Hyblean area (SE Sicily) in Sicilian protohistory, on the basis of new data from the excavations carried out by the University of Catania and the Superintendency of Ragusa in the Hypogeum of Calaforno (Giarratana) and in the site of Calicantone (Modica). These explorations defined the chronology of the Hypogeum, identified new similar underground structures in the area of Giarratana and found a Maltese juglet, belonging to the Tarxien Cemetery phase, in the destruction layer of the Calicantone Hut dating to the 16th century. These data allow us to affirm that the Giarratana hypogea are not imitations of the Ħal Saflieni or Brochtorff Circle hypogea but rather the result of a local tradition developing in line with a social structure and religious beliefs shared with Malta, and that contacts between Malta and the southern Hyblean area developed between the 18th and the 16th century BC before the development of the relation with the eastern coast of the Hyblean area. Introduzione Nella ampia letteratura sulle relazioni transmarine della Sicilia in età pre e protostorica (La Rosa 1993-94; Id. 2004; Bietti Sestieri 2014), la Sicilia orientale ha avuto un ruolo di primo piano per quanto riguarda l’area etnea e siracusana, con i siti di Castelluccio, Ognina e Thapsos in primis (La Rosa 2004; Guzzardi 2008; Palio 2008). Un ruolo molto più marginale ha svolto invece l’area degli Iblei meridionali, a Sud del massiccio della vetta di Monte Lauro (fig. 1), caratterizzata sino dall’età classica dall’assenza di evidenze macroscopiche di contatti transmarini, non da ultimo per il carattere sabbioso delle coste (Lena- Basile- Di Stefano 1988; Manenti 2015). Di fatto, nell’area