Back to CART RUTS AND A FEW TOO MANY PROJECTIONS

I will skip any preamble, referring to what has already been written regarding the presence of cart ruts in south-eastern Sicily.
The easy academic tendency has been, in most cases concerning cart ruts, to consider them in terms of the latomie, or quarries, with which very often (for example in the cases of the Targia or Pizzuta districts) they share the same territory.
According to this theory, the carraie would have been indirectly created due to the wear of the rock at each passage of carts or sleds loaded with extracted stone blocks. I will not repeat the arguments presented so far in order to demonstrate that this is a theory that has little solid foundations on an in-depth analysis of the cart ruts. However, I will add a piece by demonstrating the implausibility of a connection between them in both chronological and functional terms.

The first obvious observation is that latomie and cart ruts use the same material: rock. Therefore, where there are outcropping rock banks it is easy to find both structures.
In both cases, these are theoretically only functional structures, with very little, if any, aesthetic value, so one would expect a similar level of smoothing (with regard to some details of the cart ruts that should not have been influenced by the potential sliding of wheels). However, in the case of the cart ruts, the level of smoothing is radically more refined, not only compared to the nearby latomie, but also with regard to typically ornamental elements.
Or, simply, the potential chronological difference has determined greater wear, due to atmospheric events, in the cart ruts that today manifests itself as an indication of apparently better care in smoothing.

In many cases, the latomie cut the cart ruts that continue their journey on the opposite side. In other cases, the grooves of the cart ruts seem to have been used as an incipit for the extraction of a block, since extraction silhouettes are found exactly in the center of a cart ruts.
Another academic thesis claims that the cart ruts were traced with a pickaxe and chisel in order to facilitate the flow of the carts. What would then have been the point of extracting blocks by cutting them in half? Or of ruining a groove to extract a single block? Wouldn't it have made more sense to gradually widen the quarry according to which the relative cart ruts would have been traced, so as to maintain the functionality of the cart ruts?

The impression is that the Siceliots exploited the cart ruts, evidently pre-existing, above all to identify the rock banks and exploit their furrows from an extractive point of view (essentially to shorten and make their work easier…)

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