Tre “pezzi in cerca di contesto” e un impossibile calcolo delle probabilità per ricostruire un frammento della tarda antichità nel territorio di Populonia

Between 1968 and 2014, in the territory of ancient Populonia, three extraordinary archaeological pieces were discovered: a very famous Late Antique silver amphora, a treasure of late-Roman silver coins and an eni­ gmatic floor mosaic with different phases of life, ranging from the Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages. Each of them tells us a fragment of the complicated history of that human landscape in Late Antiquity. Another common character of these three pieces is being (almost) completely de-contextualized from the archaeological point of view: the first of them was recovered after a sort of “miraculous fishing”; the second was occasionally retrieved occasional along a beach; the third was the product of a somewhat daring affair held between ‘800 and ‘900. A series of thin wires could tie these three pieces, two by two, and could therefore contribute to weaving a new plot to read a part of the history of this territory. It goes without saying that we have – at the moment – no evidence about the realty of these connections; but, on a closer examination, such hypothetical links appear not much more improbable than the absolute absence of ties.