Heritage Washed Ashore: Underwater Archaeology and Regionalist Imaginaries in the Central Mediterranean

Abstract

The “Dancing Satyr” is a bronze statue that sunk to the 500 meter deep seabed of the Channel of Sicily between the fourth and second centuries bce and resurfaced towards the end of the twentieth century. In 1997, a Sicilian trawler returned to its homeport with the satyr’s left leg. A year later, the trawler reported recovery of the statue’s torso and head in the same fishing zone—in international waters between Pantelleria and the Tunisian coast. The satyr underwent restoration before embarking on a global tour of museums and exhibitions. It is now on display in a museum dedicated to it in Mazara, the trawler’s homeport. This chapter follows the satyr’s resurfacing in international waters as an emblem of Mediterraneanist heritage: regionalist, transnational, and sea-centered. The satyr’s voyage from the bottom of the sea to its home in Mazara depended on the interplay between forms of submarine contact with the past: motorized seabed trawling, archaeological and classicist scholarship, and Cold War underwater reconnaissance technologies. I argue that this interplay shaped the relationship between transnational connections and regionalist imaginaries. Objects such as the satyr decenter states’ national heritage projects, by pointing away from national territories and their consolidated histories and towards a potentially shared transnational past. At the same time, these objects enter the struggle over ownership and representation among various heritage projects, which attempt to harness the regionalist energies emanating from these objects to their national (Italian or Tunisian), subnational (Sicilian, Mazarese), or wider (European, North African, Mediterranean) projects.