Looters Can’t Steal Everything: Salvage Archaeology at the San Giuliano Necropolis

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.

The Etruscan cemetery around the San Giuliano Plateau has been looted extensively, but salvage excavations of several emptied tombs have yielded results that increase our understanding of the funerary landscape. In the 2018 and 2019 field seasons, two vertically adjacent tombs on a hillside were excavated down to bedrock, both of which revealed complex stratigraphy representing ancient activities related to tomb construction, landscape modification, and funerary ritual as well as post-abandonment damage. In this paper, the results of these two seasons of field work will be presented with special attention paid to the complex long-term formation processes that contributed to the current state of the site, now part of a regional nature park. Discoveries include a possible hillside pathway, evidence of stone quarrying, an intact exterior cremation grave, and direct evidence of looting practices. Although Etruscan cemeteries are often characterized in the literature by typological uniformity, these excavations suggest that variability may have been common in smaller, less elaborately decorated chamber tombs.

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): 32925