Fra Cerveteri e Tarquinia. Ideologia funeraria e cultura epigrafica nella media e tarda età repubblicana

The analysis of continuity-discontinuity in the field of funerary practices of the Hellenistic age and in particular of the persistence of use and ritual of burial within hypogeum accompanied by inscribed markers (cippus) beyond the limits of full Romanization, already conducted on the case of the Banditaccia necropolis in Cerveteri, is now undertaken in relation to the Monterozzi necropolis in Tarquinia, in order to establish possible aspects of convergence in community behavior in relation to Romanization. The western sector of the Tarquinia necropolis is shown to be intensely occupied in the Hellenistic period, perhaps with forms of planning the creation of new hypogea; at the turn of the 1st century B.C., in the midst of Romanization, forms of persistence or reoccupation of hypogea appear with Etruscan funerary rituals and use of funerary cippus inscribed in Latin, but substantially Roman material culture, exactly as in Cerveteri. These episodes, which are not uncommon, are physically thickened in homogeneous cores, as shown by the chronological and topographical analysis of the sample necropolis of the Fondo Scataglini. Detailed analysis of the types of the Latin inscribed cippus and the materials of the supports, coupled with that of the categories of the patrons as reflected in the epigraphic text, shows that there are internal articulations related to the social categories but also to the chronology of the cippus and that a basic serialization can be established between types and materials in use, where most of the Latin inscribed cippus. The type of the slab cippus is then analyzed in detail, showing that these are in fact not cippus but actual slabs, in one case avowedly placed to close a loculus, and that in all likelihood the appearance of this type of monument prefigures the adoption of a funerary custom, that of incineration, closer to the use of Roman elites.