Etruscan temple discovered in Tuscania – History Blog

The foundations of a previously unknown Etruscan temple have been discovered in the ancient city of Tuscania, near Viterbo, about 60 miles northwest of Rome. The temple was found in the Etruscan necropolis of Sasso Pinzuto.

The necropolis, associated with the adjacent Etruscan settlement on Colle San Pietro, consists of more than 120 tombs and chambers carved out of volcanic tuff dating from the first half of the 7th century BC to the Hellenistic period (3rd-2nd centuries BC). It has been excavated sporadically since the 1830s, yielding numerous funerary objects, mainly pottery.

Colored clay panels dating to the second quarter of the 6th century BC, decorated with reliefs depicting rituals and ceremonies of the Etruscan elite, have also been found, often broken and piled in ditches surrounding tombs. Archaeologists have long believed that these clay panels were architectural features that once decorated religious buildings, but no remains of such structures have been found until now.

Specifically, a square foundation in tuff was found for a rectangular building measuring 6.2 x 7.1 meters, oriented north-northeast, facing the road that leads to the city of Colle San Pietro. The exploration of this building, which dominates the surrounding area, will allow information to be obtained about the funerary cult that was characteristic of Tuscany during the Archaic period. It was probably a cult building, technically known as an oikos, the house of the gods (oikos in Greek actually means “house”).

The building is located on a tongue-shaped plot of land with an area of ​​less than 1,000 square meters, consisting of at least three mounds with rubble cut into the tuff and integrated into a square structure. To the north of the largest mound, with a diameter of more than ten meters, there are nine small pits in the tuff, used for burials and sacrifices: it is in this excavation area that the building was found.

The current excavation of the cemetery aims to deepen the knowledge of Etruscan Tuscany, focusing on how the interaction of monumental architecture and small tombs explains the social structure of the settlement’s earliest period (the Orientalizing and Archaic periods, 7th-5th centuries BC).