Fabio Colivicchi, Alexandra Freitas, Sarah Karelsen, Haley Miller, Anton Strachan, Julianna Taylor
{"title":"The 2024 Field Season at Caere, Vigna Marini Vitalini: A New Etruscan Temple and Its Surroundings.","authors":"Fabio Colivicchi, Alexandra Freitas, Sarah Karelsen, Haley Miller, Anton Strachan, Julianna Taylor","doi":"10.1515/etst-2025-0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/etst-2025-0011","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The field known as the Vigna Marini Vitalini holds a special place in the archaeology of the city of Caere, beginning in the late 19th century, when a massive number of architectural terracottas were discovered there and eventually found their way to European and North American museums. In the summer of 2024, the Queen's University team opened a new trench in the area where the 19th-century excavations had taken place. The foundations of a temple came to light, along with a building with at least three rooms parallel to its southwest side. Based on the finds from the associated layers and a deposit of architectural terracottas, the temple can be dated to the early fifth century BCE. When the monumental structure was built, however, the area already had a long prior history. The Etruscan builders dug the foundation trenches into a beaten earth pavement that extends over a large area, suggesting that this had previously been an open space. The floor covers a filled quarry and traces of even earlier wooden structures. This new evidence shows that the history of this area was by no means a linear and planned development, and that there were multiple changes of destination and transformations of the urban landscape.</p>","PeriodicalId":521118,"journal":{"name":"Etruscan and Italic studies","volume":"28 1-2","pages":"158-193"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12645824/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145644670","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}