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Motya, a small island that covers an area of just under 100 acres (40 hectares), sits off the western coast of Sicily. Bronze and Iron Age populations thrived there due to the abundant supply of fish, salt, fresh water and its protected location within a lagoon, Nigro wrote in the study. In the eighth century B.C., Phoenicians began settling there and integrating with locals, bringing their distinctive West Phoenician culture to the island.Just 100 years later, the settlement had grown into a bustling port city with a trade network stretching across the central and western Mediterranean. This brought Motya into...

In general, historiography concerning ancient Sicily is overwhelmingly Greco-centric, i.e. focused on its Greek immigrants. Because the indigenous population’s architectonic remains are relatively invisible, whilst those of the Greek immigrants are monumental, the accepted historiography has been that the indigenous population had neither territory, power nor economic resources.It was instead accepted that as soon as the Greeks had established themselves on the island (on the western side in 628 BCE) they colonised and controlled the majority of the Sicilian lowlands, the economy and thus also the indigenous population.This outlook has contributed to an imbalance and a distorted picture of the...