Living with an Etruscan Past: Medieval Use of Earlier Architecture and Artifacts at San Giuliano (Lazio Province, Italy)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 2: Crossing Boundaries, Materialities, and Identities" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Excavation and analysis of material culture is one way that scholars in the present endeavor to understand the people of the past. At the same time, we must consider that these people had encounters with their own archaeological history, made manifest in material objects, tombs, and architectural ruins of previous societies. In this paper, I explore how the medieval inhabitants of San Giuliano, a fortified castle site in Lazio province (Italy) dating to the tenth–thirteenth centuries, made use of the remnants of earlier cultures. I explore how San Giuliano’s medieval inhabitants reutilized numerous components of the earlier Etruscan occupation of the San Giuliano Plateau, dating to the sixth–third centuries BC and representing the last time that the plateau had seen extensive residential, civic-ceremonial, and mortuary activity prior to the medieval occupation. I focus primarily on the reutilization of constructed spaces both above and below ground, ranging from the medieval clearance and reuse of an Etruscan cuniculo (a subterranean water management tunnel) to the transformation of a crumbling Etruscan temple into a Christian chapel and associated cemetery. This research contributes to a burgeoning conversation regarding how people in the past understood, reused, and reshaped the material remains of their predecessors.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 2: Crossing Boundaries, Materialities, and Identities   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38003.0