Tarquinia. Scavi sistematici nell'abitato. La memoria e il presente nel pozzo sigillato del "complesso monumentale"

Volume V, Tome I of the Tarchna series — Tarquinia. Systematic Excavations in the Settlement: Memory and the Present in the Sealed Well of the “Monumental Complex” — authored by Giovanna Bagnasco Gianni, is structured into four chapters and an appendix by J. Alvino, devoted to alphabetic and non-alphabetic marks (sigla), classified according to the International Etruscan Sigla Project (IESP).
The fill of the well is interpreted as a genuine material archive, capable of linking a concrete, documentary history — composed of objects, inscriptions, and organic remains — to a broader system of representations and practices in which the city of Tarquinia engaged within the political, cultural, and economic networks of the Italic peninsula and the Mediterranean basin during the Hellenistic period.
Chapter One outlines the theoretical framework and methodological approach developed over the years by the Tarquinia Project, one of the most intense and methodologically complex phases of the entire excavation programme. The decision to treat the well’s fill as an autonomous unit reflects the methodological choice to consider it a deposit with internal coherence and an independent historical narrative. As an intact deposit, it is delimited by chronological parameters set by the materials and their internal associations, presented in an exemplary manner in the second tome edited by M. Marzullo.
Chapter Two focuses on the analysis and interpretation of the thirty-two textual inscriptions discovered, an epigraphic corpus of extraordinary richness and variety, remarkable for its quantity and formal, linguistic, and thematic quality. These concise, incisive texts are accompanied by sigla that convey visual messages parallel and complementary to the written content. Most inscriptions, found on impasto and black-gloss ceramics, exhibit a high level of symbolic codification.
Chapter Three presents the historical and artistic study of the figured terracotta plaque, recovered in fragments yet of outstanding formal and iconographic quality, depicting an attacking warrior. Stylistic analysis places it within the Early Hellenistic period, with clear references to both Greek and local models reinterpreted in an authentically Etruscan key. Its presence in the well is interpreted within the context of a ritual depositional event, alongside other materials associated with the act of decommissioning and sacralising a disused building, integrating its elements into a new material narrative. This stylistic evaluation is paired with a refined chronological assessment, also considering the plaque’s relationship to previously identified material assemblages.
Chapter Four achieves the primary aim of the first tome: to integrate data from ceramics, inscriptions, and terracottas into a broader historical reconstruction of the site, particularly the situation of the ‘monumental complex’ in the mid-2nd century BCE, when Tarquinia, while preserving a degree of cultural autonomy, was already embedded within the Roman political system. The sealed well deposit thus serves as a primary source for both the microhistory of the site and the macrohistory of the Mediterranean, in a period marked by the conclusion of the Second Punic War and the redefinition of alliances between Rome and the Etruscan cities.
Overall, the analysis correlates local ritual practices with major historical events — wars, alliances, and institutional transformations — making the well a privileged vantage point on the crisis and transformation of Etruscan culture, and on the dynamics of resistance, negotiation, and symbolic reinterpretation in the encounter with Rome.