A lamp fragment excavated at Acre unveiling a new member of the Agyrios family, the only well-known family of sicilian lamp-makers?
A lamp fragment excavated at Acre unveiling a new member of the Agyrios family, the only well-known family of sicilian lamp-makers?

Summary/Abstract: The Catania-Based lamp-maker Proklos Agyrios, together with three members of his family (Gaios, Pouplios, Severos) are well-known in literature, but their capacity of production and the range of diffusion of their lamps seems to have been widely underestimated. The archaeological mission at Acrae, whose regional and local framework, aims and results are largely described in the first part of the text, unearthed a base fragment of a lamp. The surviving part bears on the second line of the incised signature, the Agyrios family acronym, while the first line corresponds to a previously unknown lamp-maker, bearing one of the common Greek first names linked to the divine world: Theo[?]. This find allowed us to come back to all the investigations led on the productions and finding spots of the whole family and to propose a series of hypothesis on a workshop which seems, discovery after discovery, to have been rather a huge industry with diverse workshops in Eastern Sicily that a simple "officina urbana". A complete map of the finding spots allows hence to start taking into account the existence of local branches as well as to consider the impact the lamp-type created and massively produced by the Argyrii had on local workshops in Eastern Sicily.

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