Grape Pips, Dog Bones and Acorn Missiles

036


037

The Etruscan settlement at La Piana came to a violent end. Every year excavations at the site, near the Italian city of Siena, turn up new evidence that La Piana was attacked and destroyed toward the end of the third century B.C. The invaders flung golfball-size missiles through the walls of the Etruscan buildings; they stormed the settlement and hacked some of its inhabitants to death; and they set the village aflame, baking its mud walls in a great inferno.

038

Death and the Etruscans: It seems that these images have always been married in our minds. In the 1840s, for instance, the young explorer George Dennis traveled around modern Tuscany, the site of ancient Etruria, exposing himself to bandits, poisonous snakes and malarial swamps. He found the Etruscan sites themselves equally ominous: They were “ever wrapt in gloom …teeming with solemn memorials of a past, mysterious race.” Dennis concluded that the history of Etruria is written “in her sepulchres” and “on the painted walls of her tombs.”

But this powerful image of the Etruscans as dwellers of eternity may obscure the fact that this vibrant people, who carved such intricate sepulchres, also married, raised children, earned a livelihood and built communities. And that is precisely what our excavations at La Piana since 1982 have provided: a rare glimpse into the Etruscans’ daily lives.

So far, only a handful of Etruscan settlements have been excavated. The ones that have been found tend to be sites of very diverse character—like the seventh- to sixth-century B.C. settlements at Poggio Civitate di Murlo (where craftsmen produced fine luxury goods),¹ Lago dell’Accesa (a community of mine workers)² and Acquarossa (home to agricultural workers).³ None of these was a major center; all were within the political orbit of one of the chief Etruscan cities. Most of our knowledge about Etruscan living environments derives from archaeological excavations of such outlying settlements.

La Piana appears to have been primarily an agricultural settlement. The site rests on a promontory overlooking the river Merse’s flood plains, which the Etruscan inhabitants probably drained to create agricultural land suitable for farming. Black-gloss potsherds of the Campana type (above), many inscribed with Etruscan characters or names, and a few painted sherds of Volterran style date the site to the fourth to third centuries B.C.—a period of expanding settlement of northern Etruria.⁴

Our excavations at La Piana have uncovered an orthogonal (grid-shaped) complex of structures. This orderly arrangement suggests that the settlement did not arise haphazardly over a long period; rather, the site was settled at a single point in time and for a specific purpose, probably for farming or animal husbandry.

The first and most extensive area of the site to be opened, Field A, has yielded a large building complex with dry-laid foundation walls about a yard wide. This 25-foot-wide rectangular structure, Building A, contains at least nine rooms extending about 240 feet, flanked on either side by more rooms or pavements and drainage surfaces. To the southwest, in Field B, lies another structure of slenderer proportions, with walls only half as wide but built in the same style as Building A. Between the two structures runs a cobbled pavement, which may be a road or a courtyard.

Enough is preserved of the structures to allow us to understand how they were built. First, the Etruscan workers laid fieldstone foundation walls, without the use of mortar. These walls supported upright timbers between which wattles were woven, packed with unbaked clay and plastered over (this is called a graticcio, or wattle-and-daub, construction); some of this material was preserved by the fire that destroyed the site in antiquity. The building’s floors were made of packed clay, and its timber roof was covered with baked roof tiles.

Although the Etruscans had plenty of stone and were skilled in using it to build defensive walls and drains, they reserved stone houses for the dead. This is one reason that so few Etruscan living environments have been uncovered, particularly in the major urban centers.

The activities that took place in some of Building A’s rooms can be determined from the objects found 039in them. One room was used to store some of the site’s agricultural produce; it contained at least 12 orci, or coarse storage jars, their upper bodies broken and scattered but their lower bodies resting on the packed clay floor. The soil within these vessels has yielded samples of grape pips (seeds), millet and barley.⁵ These were no doubt some of the crops the inhabitants had planted in the rich alluvial soil below the site. The presence of grape pips here indicates that the Etruscans were eating grapes, not merely using them to make the wine for which the region is still famous. In the same room were several stones that appear to have served as grinders. One large rectangular slab of vesicular (course-grained) basalt may have been used to grind nuts or other coarse materials; two others, of a finer stone, are shaped like bicycle seats and were worked on both faces.

Another room housed one of the most domestic of all activities, weaving. It contained spindle whorls, loom weights and traces of a loom frame that seems to have once rested against a wall. Near the loom lay a child-size cup or bowl; its original contents, a kind of thick porridge or cereal, were still stuck to the inside. Not far from the bowl, all in a cluster as if still strung together, were seven black beads of glass paste (above)—perhaps a child’s toy. In this room, a young woman may have worked away at her loom while her child played gleefully on the floor beside her—an image of domestic tranquillity juxtaposed to activities of more industrial character.

Two other rooms in Building A contain stone-lined drains that cut through the foundation walls and lead away from the building. Whatever work took place in these rooms produced unpleasant residues that had to be channeled away from the living areas.

No drains, however, have been found in connection with the most puzzling finds at La Piana. Tremendous quantities of animal bones were strewn across the cobbled pavement between La Piana’s two main buildings. These bones are all waste parts from young animals, including several toes of a fetal pig. Sheep and goat bones predominate, followed by pig bones and then, oddly, dog bones. Did the Etruscans eat dogs? In addition, fragments of turtle—the lower carapace only, which would not have been used as an ornament—were found mingled with those of cattle. Given this odd assemblage of animals—turtles, dogs, pigs, cows, horse, fowl, sheep and deer—and the fact that the bones are all from waste parts, this could not have been a stockyard for live animals. So what was it?

If the cobbled pavement was used as a dump area for a butchery, the Etruscan inhabitants would have found some way to drain the refuse away from the site. Simply to discard animal bones in a central enclosed space would have been revoltingly unsanitary. The excavated channels for rainwater runoff between the pavement and the walls of the building would have held the solid material close to the structure, however, rather than washing it away from the settlement—not a salubrious scheme.

Where did all these animals come from? Were the 040local inhabitants raising or hunting all these species? And how long did it take to accumulate all those bones? Either La Piana was a central butchering area, the Chicago of the mid-Italian peninsula, or the concentration of bones resulted from the circumstances of the destruction of the site (or both). The settlement may have been under siege for a long period, forcing the inhabitants to bring their animals into the habitation area. Perhaps the attackers rounded up and slaughtered every creature they came across, dumping the remains unceremoniously in the town square.

The animal bones are found in greatest concentration around a very distinctive architectural feature that we are still in the process of exploring: an enormous cistern.^a The relation between the animal bones and the cistern, however, remains a mystery—one we hope to solve with further excavation.

This rock-lined circular pit overfills a room near the western end of Building A. Below ground level, the cistern is constructed of two concentric dry-laid fieldstone walls separated by a 3-foot-wide band of dense red clay. The cistern’s circular outer wall bulges out beyond the exterior walls of Building A—that is, the diameter of the cistern’s outer wall is almost 30 feet, about 5 feet wider than the building that encloses it.

The cistern’s unusual configuration raises questions about how it fit with Building A. For example, was the cistern walled above ground? The outer of the cistern’s two circular walls resembles, and is almost as thick as, the exterior foundation walls of Building A. So the cistern’s outer wall might also have served as the foundation of a wattle-and-daub structure forming the exterior wall of the building at this point. The cistern’s wall would thus have broken the plane of both the north and south facades of Building A, forming a partially convex outer wall to the room containing the cistern.

The cistern was probably also roofed. The dense red clay between the two circular walls shows no evidence of having been paved; without a roof, it would have been very messy after a rainstorm. The rather delicate structural features of the cistern would also have deteriorated quickly if exposed to the elements. Moreover, in the center of the cistern we found a formation of baked bricks that appear to have been part of some construction. They form a kind of pillar, about 041two bricks wide, that rises upward from the center of the basin; this may have been a central post that supported a conical roof. The exact form of the cistern’s roofing, however, will remain uncertain until we can excavate to the bottom of the central vat, where the tiles of the roof would have fallen.

Our cistern was probably filled by rainwater. There are two main kinds of roofs that allow water to be channeled into cisterns. One is called a compluviate roof, in which specially shaped roof tiles serve to channel rainwater through a hole in the roof’s center down into the basin below. The other, a displuviate roof, has tiles that shed water away from the building into channels that direct the water back into the central basin (rather like a gutter).

Compluviate roofs are known from the Etruscan world.⁶ In fact, the Roman atrium roof form that the first-century B.C. Roman architect Vitruvius calls Tuscan derives from Etruscan compluviate roofs.⁷ The tiles used for them are lozenge-shaped.⁸ But none of these distinctive tiles has been found at La Piana.⁹

There is evidence, however, that the cistern’s roof was conical and displuviate. On the exterior of the cistern are gravelly pavements of densely packed limestone. The pavement on the southern side is coated with cobbles. These pavements lie over the edge of the outer cistern wall and angle downward away from the building. If they are man-made, they represent a deliberate effort to create a surface on the edge of the cistern to channel the water outward.

Although we have not excavated very deeply into the cistern, its surface features suggest how it was constructed. The Etruscans began by making a circular cut, about 30 feet in diameter, into the limestone bedrock; then they dug down to create a cylindrical shaft of an as-yet unknown depth. They lined this shaft with a wall of fieldstones to a thickness of about 2.5 feet. They built a second concentric wall of fieldstones, about 2 feet wide this time, about a yard inside the first, and filled the intervening cylindrical space with red clay. The inner wall, the outer wall and the red clay were probably built up together gradually, with the red clay tamped down as each course of stones was laid. The clay served as the waterproofing element, keeping the water from seeping out but also keeping polluting elements from seeping in; the facing of stones on either side of the clay kept it in place. Perhaps the bottom, too, was packed with clay and paved with a surface of wall rocks. The paved bottom would have supported a central pillar of low-fired bricks, which held up the peak of the roof. The surface of the ground around the exterior was then packed with limestone gravel and a cobbled pavement.

A similar construction has been found at Tarquinia.¹⁰ Excavators at Tarquinia, however, have tentatively labeled it a mundus—a ritual pit connected with the founding rites of the city and symbolic of a bond with the underworld—rather than a cistern.¹¹ One problem with our identification of this structure as a cistern is that, without mortar, its facing stones would not have been structurally stable to any great depth. Perhaps our cistern was not La Piana’s main water source in time of siege but only a relatively shallow vat. Or maybe it served some industrial purpose. The proximity of all those animal bones may yet shed light on its use, which may in turn illuminate the main purpose of the settlement of La Piana.

The idyllic scene of a woman weaving at a loom with her child playing at her feet may have been abruptly shattered one day in the late third century B.C. Near the glass paste beads and the child’s bowl we found two ribs, a hip and a femur (thigh bone), which physical anthropologist Marshall Becker has tentatively suggested might be those of a female.

For years we thought these were isolated finds, perhaps even dragged to the site by dogs. But now more bones have turned up. In a room just to the southwest, near an area of intense and repeated burning that may have been a hearth, three human bone fragments were found. The most gruesome is a juvenile femur that shows hack marks with no signs of healing: These blows either caused death or were delivered after the child had died—grisly evidence of a violent death. Nearby were found two fragments of a hand, a carpal (wrist) bone and a lunate caupal bone (the bone that joins the thumb and the wrist), both of which may be from the same person. The carpal bone is poorly preserved, but the lunate caupal bone provides some interesting information. It is robust in form and thus probably masculine; its ridged surface indicates that the man had well-developed wrist muscles, which would result from strain put on the thumb while it was held up. This man might well have been an archer or a potter. These 042fragments, however, may have been dragged to the site by animals, as commonly happens with bones from the extremities of unburied bodies.¹²

Other clues also suggest that the settlement at La Piana witnessed a violent demise. There was extensive burning, which actually preserved elements of the architecture by firing some of the unbaked clay of the walls. Around the periphery of the site, we found quantities of flint flakes and other worked stone fragments, the by-products of stone tool or weapon production.

Most telling of all, however, were the weapons of the attackers. Resting on top of the wall enclosing the cistern, we found a lead ball almost two inches in diameter that had penetrated deep into the wall’s fabric. This lead ball was a heavy and destructive missile, intended to damage roofs and structures rather than individuals; because of its weight, it was probably hurled by some sort of catapult. Near it were found two other missiles, very similar in size and shape but made of stone and therefore not as effective because they are not as heavy. Several lead “acorn” missiles, called glandes, which are sling-hurled projectiles intended to maim or kill people,¹³ have been found in and around Building A, and many more have turned up in the flat plains below La Piana.

Who were these invaders? La Piana must have 043fallen before the end of the third century B.C., since the site is completely lacking in ceramics from the second century.¹⁴ The date of the destruction does not automatically identify the attackers, however. Nor do the weapons shed much light on the problem; acorn-shaped glandes, made of lead or clay, were commonly hurled by foot soldiers all over the ancient lands of the Mediterranean since Neolithic times.¹⁵ Many examples bear inscriptions that help us identify them: the names of the tribes or peoples who hurled them, symbols of an aggressive character, and even obscenities.¹⁶ Our missiles bear only a few diagonal slash marks.

We currently blame the Celts, also called the Gauls, a people who spread across the Rhine River and settled much of western Europe in the latter part of the first millennium B.C. The Celts invaded Tuscany in 225 B.C., only to be defeated by the Romans near Talamone. Our identification of La Piana’s invaders as Celtic is supported by a coin found ground into the surface of the ancient road at the base of the hill. It is made of a silver-like metal, decorated on only one side with a circle of 11 raised dots around an indistinguishable motif. The coin has been tentatively identified as Celtic.¹⁷ We also know that Celtic tribes ambushed the Roman army at Fiesole, near Florence, in 225 B.C.¹⁸ After their victory, they headed southeast as far as Chiusi, then southwest to their ultimate defeat on the Tyrrhenian coast at Talamone.¹⁹ Their exact movements are not known,²⁰ but the destruction of La Piana may serve to document the route taken by the Celts after their victory at Fiesole.

Our grisly finds may not only give us a privileged view of life and death in the ancient Etruscan world; they may also help scholars to nail down a pivotal historical moment.

The Etruscan settlement at La Piana came to a violent end. Every year excavations at the site, near the Italian city of Siena, turn up new evidence that La Piana was attacked and destroyed toward the end of the third century B.C. The invaders flung golfball-size missiles through the walls of the Etruscan buildings; they stormed the settlement and hacked some of its inhabitants to death; and they set the village aflame, baking its mud walls in a great inferno. 038 Death and the Etruscans: It seems that these images have always been married in our minds. In […]