Beneath the City: Micromorphological Insights into Etruscan Urban Life, Infrastructure, and Ritual Practices from Tarquinia, Central Italy

During the late Bronze and Early Iron Age, population dynamics in central Italy gave rise to nucleated settlements that went on to become some of western Europe’s earliest and most powerful cities. Between 1000 and 500 BCE, these centres transformed from village agglomerations into organised urban settlements as part of a regional political system. While the key archaeological features and architectural transformations that characterise this period are well established, site formation processes and the intra-settlement spaces and activities underpinning them are less defined, especially for the earliest phases. To gain new insights on the transformation into urban settlements in a Mediterranean context, this research systematically investigates – for the first time – the micromorphology of archaeological sediments of an urban settlement of the first half of the first millennium BCE. Here we present a micro-contextual analysis from Tarquinia (central Italy), one of the most important sites for understanding central Mediterranean urbanisation and community formation, a prominent pre-Roman city and centre of the Etruscan religion and political activity. On-going excavations have unravelled an extensive part of the city and yielded important evidence of ritual activity around the so-called ‘monumental complex’ (1st millennium BCE). Targeting 4 areas with high preservation of deposits of the city’s early formative processes, this work integrates archaeological soil micromorphology, physico-chemical and geochemical analyses to reconstruct the depositional and post-depositional processes of the archaeological layers across the ‘monumental complex’ of Tarquinia. This study sheds new light on fills of earthen pits, linking them to the dumping of occupational and production debris and accumulation of animal penning residues. It also adds detailed insights into the composition of traffic surfaces and highlights the integration of ritual spaces within urban formation processes. Results demonstrate the variability of sedimentary microfacies that can occur in protohistoric sites of Central Italy and adds significant micro-contextual evidence to the understanding of urban, ritual, and socio-economic across Etruscan settlements, ultimately highlighting the critical role of archaeological sediments in tracing shifting phases of use at the emergence of early urbanisation in the Mediterranean region.