Visibility and Memory on the San Giuliano Landscape

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Etruscan Centralization to Medieval Marginalization: Shifts in Settlement and Mortuary Traditions at San Giuliano, Italy" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

At the height of its occupation during the Etruscan period, inhabitants at the San Giuliano plateau in northern Lazio, Italy, constructed hundreds of rock-cut tombs in the surrounding escarpment, effectively creating a “city of the dead” adjacent to their city of the living. Intervisibility between the necropolis and plateau would place inhabitants of San Giuliano in constant visual contact with the deceased, functioning to incorporate shared understandings of cosmogony, the afterlife, and the mythic identities of the dead via memory into their daily lives. This paper examines conceptions of memory and social organization at San Giuliano through viewshed analysis between the necropolis and habitation area. Substantial changes to the vegetation and geology of the San Giuliano landscape since the Etruscan period make modern assessments of intervisibility unfeasible. However, viewshed analysis in ArcGIS makes reconstructing intervisibility possible. Total and cumulative viewshed models revealed statistically significant visibility between the necropolis and eastern edge of the plateau. Furthermore, multiple viewshed analysis from clusters of tombs separated by location, style, and chronology reveals significant changes in intervisibility after the fifth century, evidencing ripples in San Giuliano social organization that correlate with regional shifts in Southern Etrurian economics and trade networks.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Etruscan Centralization to Medieval Marginalization: Shifts in Settlement and Mortuary Traditions at San Giuliano, Italy

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32751