An unlooted Etruscan chamber tomb is virtually never merely a burial; it is a time capsule designed both to repel moisture, gravity and human curiosity over centuries. Archeologists excavating the San Giuliano necropolis on the San Giuliano Plateau in central Italy discovered a chamber tomb in the rock-cut tomb of San Giuliano that had been unopened in some 2,600 years. The room had four skeletons on carved stone beds, placed so as to give the impression that this was a home. More than 100 grave goods (ceramic vessels, iron weapons, bronze ornaments, and fine silver hair spools) were stored around them, and preserved by the same closed doorway which had secured them since the seventh century B.C.
The architectural design of these Etruscan chamber tombs is both part architecture and part geology. Hewn out of stone and formed in the shape of small houses with pitched roofs, they are dependent on the hillside itself to give them strength and stability. That stability has not served well to guard against looting of contents in most of the San Giuliano necropolis. Since 2016 the San Giuliano Archaeological Research Project has recorded more than 600 tombs, and at the time of the find (all other chamber tombs in the region had been disturbed), every other tomb in the region had been disturbed.
The revelation in that contrast is the acute advantage of the discovery, the hermetic chamber offers to that science something which it has seldom been able to obtain, an undisturbed context. According to Davide Zori, this very closed burial chamber is a rarity in terms of Etruscan archaeology. He also mentioned that a chamber tomb of that age had never been dug up with modern archeological methods in the area.
There has been preliminary research that the four might have been two male-female couples but the material within a multi-person tomb might be deceptive when one assumes relationships based only on layout. The new bioarchaeology has demonstrated how frequently burials are not easy to label by families. Genetic studies performed at a Swedish Stone Age burial site, Ajvide, established that individuals buried together were often not parents and children, but second- or third-degree relatives. Surprisingly enough, as the analysis revealed, a lot of those buried together were second-degree or third-degree relatives, but not first-degree relatives.
The lesson is important in San Giuliano, where the goods and the bodies in the tomb came as a planned outfit. Weapons and hair spools are objects that signify gendered messages that were important to the individuals who organized the burial, but which do not readily translate into contemporary expectations regarding household units. The sealed chamber has provided, in its place, however, a unique opportunity to learn how a community was a reflection of identity – in terms of location, the selection of the material, and the handling of the choreography of the material left around the dead.
New tools are introduced in modern archaeology to that choreography. Examples of ancient DNA tests include teeth and bone tests, and have been applied to Ajvide to clarify who was related to who, as well as indicating that burial groupings went beyond nuclear families to some wider social connection. In the wider discipline, in the meantime, genetics are more and more combined with chemical traces in the remains, methods like strontium and oxygen isotope analyses, to differentiate between the place of residence and the place of burial of an individual, and to isolate continuity and mobility over a topography.
At San Giuliano the excavation is complete, but the closed room has just opened its mouth. The excavation of the tomb is finished, the SGARP team is doing it, yet the analysis and interpretation of the archaeological evidence provided by this marvel of a discovery has only started, Zori said.
The value of the chamber to the project and the town of Barbarano Romano is not at all in its beautiful objects alone, but in the whole system to which the objects belong: stone-cut buildings, closed doorposts, and an invitation to read an ancient society which does not suffer bother with the missing pages so often refolded in manuscripts.
