The Sicilians (), or Sicilian people, are a Romance-speaking ethnic group who are indigenous to the island of Sicily, the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, as well as the largest and most populous of the autonomous regions of Italy.
History
The Sicilian people are indigenous to the island of Sicily, which was first populated beginning in the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods. According to the famous Italian historian Carlo Denina, the origin of the first inhabitants of Sicily is no less obscure than that of the first Italians; however, there is no doubt that a large part of these early individuals traveled to Sicily from Southern Italy—others from the Islands of Greece, the coasts of West Asia, Iberia and West Europe.
Prehistory
The aboriginal inhabitants of Sicily, long absorbed into the population, were tribes known to the ancient Greek writers as the Elymians, the Sicanians, and the Sicels, the last being an Indo-European-speaking people of possible Italic affiliation, who migrated from the Italian mainland (likely from the Amalfi Coast or Calabria via the Strait of Messina) during the second millennium BC, after whom the island was named. The Elymian tribes have been speculated to be a Indo-European people who migrated to Sicily from either Central Anatolia, Southern-Coastal Anatolia, Calabria, or one of the Aegean Islands, or perhaps were a collection of native migratory maritime-based tribes from all previously mentioned regions, and formed a common "Elymian" tribal identity/basis after settling down in Sicily. When the Elymians migrated to Sicily is unknown, however scholars of antiquity considered them to be the second oldest inhabitants, while the Sicanians, thought to be the oldest inhabitants of Sicily by scholars of antiquity, were speculated to also be a pre-Indo-European tribe, who migrated via boat from the Xúquer river basin in Castellón, Cuenca, Valencia and Alicante. Before the Sicanians lived in the easternmost part of the Iberian peninsula. The name 'Sicanus' has been asserted to have a possible link to the modern river known in Valencian as the Xúquer and in Castilian as the Júcar. The Beaker was introduced in Sicily from Sardinia and spread mainly in the north-west and south-west of the island. In the northwest and in the Palermo kept almost intact its cultural and social characteristics, while in the south-west there was a strong integration with local cultures. The only known single bell-shaped glass in eastern Sicily was found in Syracuse.