The excavation is on a hill in Chianti that overlooks the surrounding patchwork of vineyards, olive groves, and forest. The hill can be divided into three terraces, and we are digging on the upper two. The middle terrace contained a crevice that leads into a limestone cavern below, which is now covered with earth. The upper terrace contains a well that has been filled in, and although past excavations have dug within the well, they have only reached the strata from the medieval period. Given the Etruscans penchant to throw things into wells, there is much left to be discovered there, but there is not enough funding for the machinery and experts to dig below the water table.
The site was established in the Paleolithic period, as evidenced by the tools found there. The Etruscans turned the site into an artisan's workshop and sanctuary, likely because of the crevice on the middle terrace that leads into the caves below. The Etruscans were pantheists and believed that the gods informed and charged each object and event. Their religion was much more mystical than the Greeks and Romans, and their priests read the future and the will of the gods through lightning, portents, and the entrails of sacrifices made to the gods of the sky, earth, and underworld.
Sites where crevices or caves gave access to spaces below the earth were conducive for sacrifices to the underworld gods, who were often variations of sky and earth gods. Additionally, the mystical foundations of Etruscan religion made these sites important. Roman writers record that the Etruscans learned their religion from a child named Tages who resembled a withered old man. The child came from and returned to the space below the earth. Since Tages's revelations laid the foundation of much of Etruscan religion (much of it also stemming from Greek mythology), Etruscans priest tried since then to further uncover the spiritual underpinnings of the physical world through divination and other practices of revelation. In Tarquinia, past excavations have found a child burial beside a crevice in the earth that became an important sanctuary for the founding of the city at Tarquinia. As forensic evidence has shown, the child was an epileptic and likely suffered hallucinations; we can likely assume that he was considered prophetic and revelatory like Tages. Whether the Etruscans were returning the child to the crevice in the manner of Tages after its untimely death, or whether they sacrificed the child is unknown, but the practice of human sacrifice seems to have been a part, though rare, of Etruscan religion and culture.
At Cetamura, the site where we are digging, Etruscan artisans created votive pottery and figure that pilgrims or passthroughs bought and dedicated to the gods of the sanctuary at the crevice. There was a small habitation site around the sanctuary, which does not seem to be urban or aristocratic. A few years ago, the dig team found pottery with inscriptions that revealed the names of the gods to which the sanctuary was devoted. These gods are rare and obscure, and the only other evidence that we have of them are a few bronze mirrors identify them with inscriptions. The gods are represented as wild and prophetic, often with bare chests, long hair, and their heads thrown back, howling at the sky. In one mirror, one the gods is show examining a severed human leg in the process of divination, a curious scene.
Last year, during the excavations of the what was thought to be trash pits between the middle and upper terraces, the dig team found a slew of bones. Some were common: cow, sheep, pig, but other bones, such as those from dogs, puppies, and suckling pigs, serve as evidence that animal sacrifices were made at the site and that the supposed trash pits were actually the depositories of the sacrificed animals. The lab results also revealed that one of the bones was a human tibia. Given that this leg was found with the other remains of sacrifices, it support the conclusion that Etruscan priests who were dedicated to the site's gods may have used human sacrifices and body parts for divination, just as the bronze mirror shows. This year's team is itching to get more out the depositories and are currently removing the wall of an ancient Roman bath complex that stands above them to find what lies below.
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