My thesis in about colonisation and identity in 1st Millennium BC Sicily. If you are an Archaeologist then colonisation was a simple process. The Greeks arrived from the eighth century and by the fifth everyone was Native or Phoenician on the island. All the natives has become ‘Hellenised’. This is a problem if you’re an Ancient Historian. Ancient History records an uprising by the native peoples against the Greeks in the middle of the fifth century BC. There must have been a defined native identity, but so far archaeologists haven’t the tools to find it. (more…)