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Located on a plateau overlooking Sicily's southern coast, Agrigento was founded as Akragas around 582 BC by a group of colonists from Gela, who themselves were the immediate descendants of Greeks from Rhodes and Crete. The area was inhabited much earlier; a female skull (that of the "girl of Mandrascava") found near Cannatello is half a million years old. A Mesolithic village at Point Bianca, farther down the coast toward Montechiaro Castle, dates from 6000 BC. Akragas was renamed Agrigentum by the Romans, and Girgenti by the Saracens, only to be christened Agrigento in 1927, but the place is the same.
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