Etruscan Centralization to Medieval Marginalization: Shifts in Settlement and Mortuary Traditions at San Giuliano, Italy

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Etruscan Centralization to Medieval Marginalization: Shifts in Settlement and Mortuary Traditions at San Giuliano, Italy" at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

We present the first four seasons of archaeological work at San Giuliano, a multicomponent site in Lazio, Italy. Our research focuses on the Etruscan (late eighth to third centuries BC) and high medieval (ca. AD 800–1250) periods, which saw the most intensive habitation of the San Giuliano plateau and the construction of cemeteries with distinct burial traditions. Data are drawn from (1) single-burial trench tombs transitional between the Villanovan and Etruscan periods; (2) looted Etruscan rock-cut tombs, which show significant promise for recovery of artifacts and human bone; (3) regional road systems; and (4) a medieval fortified castle site atop the plateau, including a hall and a mortuary structure adjacent to a possible chapel. These analyses elucidate both the rise and fall of the Etruscan urban center and the medieval process of *incastellamento, or castle-building with relocation of populations to defensible hilltops, that reshaped the Italian landscape in the tenth to twelfth centuries. The multidisciplinary and international collaboration of the San Giuliano Archaeological Research Project (SGARP) reveals diachronic patterns in settlement and mortuary practice that have wider implications for north central Italy and the western Mediterranean more broadly.