Apaturie e gamelia a Himera? L’amore al tempo delle fratrie

The objects found within a single house from the plateau of Himera allow us to put forward some suggestive hypotheses in relation to the final use-destination of this area: in fact, within these rooms it is possible to record an anomalous concentration of red figure pottery made by a single workshop. Besides that, we can appreciate the presence of numerous fragments of terracotta female statuettes and arulae, and large numbers of loom-weights, arrowheads and astragaloi/knucklebones. The selection of some particular and unusual iconographic themes, with their semantic and symbolic dimension, would seem to refer – to different degrees – to the nuptial world and to the passages of status of both the female and male component. The combination of the information coming from the reappraisal of the archaeological context and from the iconographic analysis of the scenes depicted on the red figure Sicilian vases allow us to suggest the existence of some very peculiar ritual activities (probably, a local Apatouria) within one of the most interesting examples in an ancient Greek city of a sacred oikos belonging to a phratry.