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An Etruscan tomb with unique wall paintings has been discovered in the Monterozzi necropolis in Tarquinia, an Etruscan city just north of Rome. The chamber tomb dates to the 5th century B.C. and is the first tomb painted with a figurative frieze to be found in Tarquinia in a century. The paintings are also extraordinary for what they depict: dancing and an artisan workshop.
The tomb first came to light in 2022 when archaeologists with the Superintendence of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape of Southern Etruria were exploring cavities that had opened in an agricultural field near Tarquinia. Archaeospeleologists lowered themselves into the cavities to explore and found Etruscan chamber tombs. They had already been looted in antiquity, but one of tombs contained a hidden treasure: a second, deeper chamber tomb behind its collapsed left wall.
The chamber tomb was partially filled with soil and debris, but archaeologists could still see polychrome paintings on the wall. In 2023, the Superintendence funded a rescue excavation to uncover the tomb before looters descended upon it like locusts. They were able to remove the soil and debris and secure the structure of the tomb.
“After having restored access to the burial chamber – says Daniele Maras, the archaeologist responsible for the discovery, now director of the National Archaeological Museum of Florence – and once a metal door had been installed, the archaeological excavation demonstrated that all the material collected did not belong to the grave goods of the painted tomb, which dates back to the mid-fifth century BC, but had fallen from the upper one, more than a century older, from the end of the Orientalizing period”.
A unique situation, which put the team of archaeologists to the test, to unravel a complex sequence of natural phenomena and human interventions: the painted tomb had been dug deep in the subsoil of the necropolis, beneath an already existing tomb. An initial ancient intervention by desecrators, who had passed through a hole in the closing slab, had completely emptied the chamber of its grave goods, before the collapse of the upper chamber brought down vases and debris to fill the empty space. Only a few fragments of Attic red-figure pottery testify to the value of the missing grave goods from the more recent tomb.
The left wall is the best preserved. It contains scenes of four dancers, two men and two women, dancing energetically around a flautist. The paintings on the back wall were damaged by collapsing stone, but they appear to depict the figure of a woman and two young men. The right wall is thickly encrusted with chalky coatings, but even obscured the subject matter is striking. The painting depicts a metallurgical workshop in use. It may be a mythological reference to the god Sethlans, the Etruscan version of Vulcan/Hephaistos, but it more likely to be a representation of the deceased’s family business.
The painted walls are currently undergoing extensive conservation to enhance their visibility and strengthen the underlying structure. The team will construct a small guard house protecting access to the chamber that will guarantee the interior remains at a steady temperature and humidity even when it is open to the public. Meanwhile, samples collected from the paint will be analyzed and subjected to
advanced multispectral imaging, which should give researchers new insights into the original colors of the pigments.
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