Lunch Club provides affiliates of the Stanford Archaeology Center with a community-oriented forum for engagement with current issues in archaeology. On May 6, 2026,  we will host Dr.Alex Walthall from the University of Texas at Austin.

Abstract:

In 211 BCE, Roman soldiers captured Morgantina, one of the last Greek poleis to fall in Rome's conquest of Sicily during the Second Punic War. What happened in the urban center over the next two centuries remains poorly understood. Long considered a watershed moment that set the city on a trajectory of inexorable decline, the Roman conquest has tended to mark the beginning-of-the-end for Morgantina's story rather than the opening of a new chapter of urban activity. Recent excavations in the city's lower agora, however, tell a more complicated story. Since 2023, work in the Southwest Temenos has uncovered large portions of a monumental complex constructed after the conquest of 211 BCE, bringing to light the remains of a small temple (possibly two!), a pair of monumental water basins, banqueting rooms, and a host of stone sculpture. This paper presents findings from the recent fieldwork campaigns and uses the Southwest Temenos as a point of departure for rethinking urban life at Morgantina during the second and first centuries BCE, a period of profound transformation that deserves far more attention than archaeologists and historians have typically afforded it.