Roman Funerary Practices

My interest in Roman funerary practices started when I studied at the French School of Archaeology and History in Rome. While at the School, I had the opportunity to dig on the etrusco-Roman site of Musarna when the first Roman tombs were discovered. The directors of the excavation, Henri Broise and Vincent Jolivet, decided to entrust me this sector and I directed the excavation of the Roman imperial necropolis between 1997 and 2003. Since then I have studied the data with a team of collaborators from France and Italy. A volume presenting the results will be published in the Spring of 2009 by the Ecole française de Rome.

The Musarna project (Read more...)

I hope to resume excavation at Musarna in the Summer of 2010. The results from the Roman necroplis confirmed the advantage of rural sites over urban ones where extensive excavation is rarely possible. It was thus possible to explore the whole necropolis which was mainly used from the second half of the second century to the end of the third, with some sporadic burials from the fourth and fifth centuries on the margins. The goal of a new excavation would be to find the burials of the first centuries BCE and CE, a period that has been very little documented so far. Two areas need to be explored: the East-West road leading from the northern gate to the via Cassia (so far only a few tombs have been recorded on the sides of the road just outside the gate) and the area in front of the southern gate where one fossa with five cinerary urns has been unearthed (one urn contained a coin of Augustus).

Aerial view of the site of Musarna a. Northern gate; b. Southern gate; c. Hill with hellenistic hypogea; d-e. Imperial necropolis.

With this new excavation, it should be possible to complete the recovery of all the available evidence on burial at Musarna from the fourth century BCE.

A database on funerary behavior in Italy during the Roman Empire

My current research project is a comparison of funerary behavior in Italy during the Roman Empire. The reading of excavation report of cemeteries can easily convey the two totally opposite impressions that Roman burial customs are the same all around the empire or that they vary a lot regionally, and even locally. We now have enough data available for attempting a statistical analysis looking for patterns of funerry behavior and comparing them accross necropolises. Hence the project I have formed to constitute a database of excavated tombs in Italy during the first three centuries of the Roman Empire. The analysis will focus on 1) the relation between the objects and the body laid in the tomb, 2) the assemblage of the objects, and 3)  the morphology of the tomb itself, with the goal of determining patterns of funerary behavior and understanding how they vary.