In summer 2025, archaeologists working at San Giuliano, near Barbarano Romano in central Italy, opened an Etruscan tomb that had remained sealed for more than 2,600 years. Two carved stone beds held the remains of four people. Around them lay more than a hundred objects, including seventy-four ceramic vessels, iron spear points, bronze ornaments and silver hair accessories. The burial dated to the seventh century BCE, when these tomb designs and funerary customs were taking shape in Etruria.
The blocking stone had kept looters out, allowing the archaeologists to document the burial and the positions of its offerings. Hundreds of other tomb chambers cut into the surrounding hills had already been opened and stripped. Here, the positions of bodies, offerings and carved features could be studied together, providing evidence for funerary practices that would be difficult to recover from objects removed from their setting.
The discovery has sometimes been confused with two other San Giuliano excavations. The tomb opened in 2024 had been looted but yielded gold-plated hair ornaments. The sealed 2025 chamber held four individuals. In 2026, excavators found another intact chamber containing thirteen pottery vessels. Published accounts of the 2025 excavation do not support claims that it contained a single woman, engraved bronze mirrors or an amber necklace.
The Etruscans and the Burial Landscape at San Giuliano
San Giuliano stands among the hills of northern Lazio, about seventy kilometres northwest of Rome. In antiquity, this was part of Etruria, the homeland of communities linked by language and many artistic and religious traditions before Roman conquest. Etruria was never one kingdom under a single ruler. Tarquinia, Cerveteri and Vulci, among other cities, followed their own political paths, with different resources, connections and relationships to the coast. San Giuliano belonged to the same cultural world, but an inland community need not have shared every practice of its wealthier coastal neighbours.
Archaeologists know much of Etruscan society through its dead. Rock-cut tombs have survived where timber houses, furnishings and most written records have disappeared. The Etruscans adapted the Greek alphabet to write their language. We can read the letters, although the meanings of many words and texts remain uncertain. Brief inscriptions preserve names, family relationships and dedications. Burials offer a different record: the arrangement of rooms and objects shows what mourners chose to provide. Neither kind of evidence can tell us precisely what every Etruscan thought awaited the dead.
Some Etruscan tombs were cut into volcanic bedrock; others were enclosed beneath mounds of earth and stone called tumuli. Inside, tomb builders sometimes carved house-like details, including roof beams, beds and spaces for offerings. At later sites, painted Etruscan tombs portray musicians, dancers and people reclining to dine. The paintings reflect ideals of family, ritual and remembrance; they cannot reconstruct every action at a funeral. An Oxford study of Etruscan banquet imagery follows changes in banquet imagery over several centuries. Paintings at Tarquinia provide comparisons, although they cannot establish what happened at San Giuliano in the seventh century BCE.
The San Giuliano Archaeological Research Project (SGARP) has worked systematically in the area since 2016. Its survey identified more than six hundred chamber tombs that had previously been looted around the plateau thought to contain the ancient settlement. The project also studies the settlement’s development, its transformation under Roman rule and the medieval castle later built on the hill. According to the excavators’ published field report, mapping, ground survey and geophysical investigation gradually drew attention to a possible road through the cemetery.
A Funerary Road and Two Tombs Facing One Another
Between 2016 and 2018, surveyors saw that several facades faced west, away from the settlement. They may have been directed toward a route approaching the burial ground instead. In 2019, a geophysical survey found a long anomaly in ground conductivity. The reading fitted a possible depression cut into bedrock and subsequently filled with stone and soil. Because such fill often retains more moisture than solid rock, it can produce a different electrical response.
Excavations begun in 2022 uncovered a linear cut leading toward the monumental Cuccumella tumulus on the Caiolo plateau. The excavators identified it as a funerary road giving access to tombs, perhaps also used for processions and other ceremonies. It was a cut through the bedrock, without evidence of Roman-style paving. The identification depended on how the cut followed the landscape and related to the entrances of nearby tombs. The unusual orientation that surveyors had noticed made sense once the ground between the monuments had been examined.
In 2024, excavation revealed a circular tumulus about nine metres in diameter, carved into the bedrock. Robbers had reached its chamber, but pottery, bronze garment fasteners and two finely decorated gold-plated bronze hair spirals remained. The team named it the Tomb of the Golden Spirals. The ornaments belong to this looted 2024 burial, not the intact grave discovered in 2025. Although theft had disrupted the assemblage, the remaining finds and their locations still helped establish the burial’s date and the construction of its monument.
The following summer, the archaeologists investigated a second mound across the suspected road. Its entrance faced east, toward the west-facing tomb explored in 2024. A descending passage known as a dromos led more than three metres down to a large stone slab sealing the chamber. Other doorstones in the necropolis had often been broken or moved by tomb robbers; this one was still largely in place. Before opening the entrance, the team passed a camera inside. The camera footage helped conservators prepare to protect fragile objects before the chamber was exposed.
The opposing entrances and the road between them suggest that movement through the cemetery mattered to its design. People may have followed that route to visit graves, stop at monuments and leave offerings, although the order of any ceremonies is unknown. The arrangement of mounds, passages and the road can be measured and compared. The field documentation gives the measured orientations and depth of the entrance, allowing the ritual interpretation to rest on the landscape rather than on a reconstructed procession for which no direct record survives.
Four People on Two Stone Beds
Inside were two substantial funerary beds, positioned on opposite sides of the chamber. Each had been carved from nenfro, a volcanic stone different from the surrounding tuff, and placed on rectangular supports. Two round headrests were shaped into each bed. Four individuals could be laid there, and four sets of remains were found. Initial examination suggested an adult man and woman on each bed, but the bones and other evidence must be studied further before that identification can be treated as established.
The objects placed beside the bodies provide clues about the burials, although they do not establish the occupants’ sex or roles. A spear point might reflect a convention associated with male burial; it cannot determine a skeleton’s biological sex. Silver hair ornaments may occur more often in graves interpreted as female without identifying the individual beside whom they were placed. When preservation allows, osteology can assess skeletal characteristics, ancient DNA may supply genetic evidence, and isotope analysis may help investigate diet or movement. The excavation team has not presented these possible investigations as completed answers to questions still under study.
These beds differ from many later chambers at San Giuliano, where platforms for the dead were carved directly into the surrounding rock. The chamber roof was shaped like a hut, with curved sides meeting at a central ridge. Together, the bed design and roof suggest the middle or later part of the seventh century BCE. They also make the tomb evidence for changing Etruscan ideas about buildings: a place constructed for the dead retained features that referred to the homes of the living.
Iron spear points were found beside the outer edges of the beds. Bronze fibulae, pins that fastened cloaks or other garments, lay with the burials; some had elongated catch plates to hold the point securely. Silver hair spools appeared near the individuals tentatively identified as women. Finds near the head of the southern bed included a spindle whorl, which weights a spindle as fibres are twisted into thread, and a small object of pasta vitrea, an early glass-like material. The 2025 project announcement introduced the principal finds, while the field report records their locations and more detailed descriptions.
The spindle whorl might have been the deceased’s possession, represented household work, served as a gendered offering or carried several meanings at once. In a prosperous household, textile production might involve people with very different responsibilities. The whorl cannot prove either that a woman spent her life confined to spinning or that she directed a commercial operation. It establishes that someone selected a textile tool for this burial. Comparisons with other graves are needed to understand that choice.
The sealed chamber was not wholly undisturbed by nature. Water had entered it at times, leaving clay sediment on pottery and causing some vessels to tilt or move. The excavators therefore had to reconstruct parts of the original arrangement instead of assuming that every object still occupied its place on the day of burial. Water, decaying organic matter and the collapse of materials that no longer survive can change a grave without anyone ever reopening its door.
Seventy-Four Vessels and the Funeral Banquet
Pottery formed the largest part of the assemblage: seventy-four vessels, chiefly of the middle or later seventh century BCE. They included jars, pitchers, bowls, cups, plates, chalices, containers for perfume and small incense burners. Some were relatively plain local wares; others bore elaborate decoration. Two red vessels decorated in white showed water birds, probably swans. Their imagery gave rise to the name Tomb of the Bird Vases, or Tomba dei Vasi con Uccelli Dipinti.
The vessel shapes point to different uses. An oinochoe was a pouring jug, often used for wine; a kantharos was a drinking cup with large handles; and an aryballos commonly held perfumed oil. The grave also contained bucchero, the polished black pottery characteristic of Etruscan workshops and produced locally rather than imported from Greece. Other examples belonged to Italo-Geometric and Etrusco-Corinthian traditions. Their shapes and decoration show how local makers adopted and adapted artistic practices circulating through the Mediterranean.
A decorative style does not by itself identify where a pot was made. Etruscan craftspeople copied Greek designs, and pottery resembling Corinthian products could be manufactured far from Corinth. The excavators distinguish local bucchero from wares possibly imported from southern Italy or Greece, without assigning every vessel a definite origin. Fabric, clay composition, forming technique and shape need to be considered alongside decoration before a convincing route of trade can be proposed.
Some plates had pairs of holes that may have allowed them to hang in a home or inside the tomb. Groups of cups and pouring vessels stood on the chamber floor. Near the head of someone buried on the southern bed, an unadorned handmade cup had been placed inside a bronze bowl. The excavators have raised the possibility that this comparatively modest vessel was a family heirloom. Its history is unknown, but its position among more elaborate offerings makes the suggestion understandable.
The seventy-four pots appear to have been selected for a range of purposes, including storing liquids, pouring, drinking, serving and perhaps making offerings. Feasts in seventh-century Etruria helped establish and display family relationships and standing within a community, while food and drink could also enter ceremonies for the dead. The archaeological study of early Etruscan banquet iconography traces how Etruscan banquet imagery developed locally. These customs developed through cultural contact, but were not simply an Etruscan copy of a Greek ritual.
The vessels cannot tell us whether the mourners held a banquet at the graveside. Some may have come from the household, others may have been bought for burial, and some might have served a ceremony for which no written account survives. Chemical testing could eventually identify substances left inside particular pots, although even a residue cannot by itself reconstruct what the mourners did. The forms and arrangement give good grounds for associating drinking and offerings with the funeral; the ceremony itself remains beyond direct observation.
The painted water birds might have had religious significance. The excavators have suggested a possible link between swans and rebirth, but images of birds occur throughout ancient Mediterranean art and their meanings vary. In this case, the two painted amphorae remained within a large documented burial group. Their relationship to nearby vessels and other offerings may eventually help scholars assess what the birds meant to those who placed them there.
Bronze Mirrors, Jewellery and the Evidence for Women
Descriptions of the 2025 tomb have also confused its ornaments with Etruscan engraved bronze mirrors. The published excavation accounts record bronze dress fittings and silver hair spools, but do not list an engraved mirror among the chamber’s finds. Mirrors are important to the study of Etruscan burial customs, and an illustration of one can help explain that wider subject. It must not be labelled as something found in the intact San Giuliano tomb.
From roughly the sixth to the second centuries BCE, Etruscan artisans made mirrors with a cast bronze disc, polished on one face and often engraved on the other. Images included gods and episodes from mythology. The British Museum’s mirror from a tomb at Bolsena, dated about 330–300 BCE, depicts named divine figures. Another mirror in the Metropolitan Museum of Art carries figures usually identified through Greek and Etruscan myth. Both were made centuries after the San Giuliano burial. They illustrate later mirror traditions, not objects from this chamber.
Some Etruscan mirrors bear the word śuthina, generally understood to indicate that the object belonged to a tomb or was set apart for burial. An inscription of this kind suggests that an object acquired a specifically funerary status. It cannot establish that mirrors always came as wedding gifts, that every owner understood the writing, or that only women possessed them. The design of a mirror, its inscription and its actual burial context all contribute to its interpretation.
Etruscan women are often described as enjoying freedoms unfamiliar elsewhere in the ancient Mediterranean, but the evidence is less straightforward. Later paintings show women dining beside men, while the Greek historian Theopompus portrayed Etruscan women as extraordinarily independent and sexually unrestricted. His words survive through Athenaeus and reflect the judgement of an outsider using Greek expectations of respectable conduct. The surviving ancient passage tells us what Theopompus claimed, not how every Etruscan woman lived.
Inscriptions offer a less theatrical view. Women were recorded under their own names and through family relationships, and some naming formulas included maternal descent. A study of Etruscan funerary inscriptions demonstrates that naming practices differed among communities and periods. The research on women’s votive inscriptions also identifies women offering gifts at sanctuaries, though the surviving material is uneven across time. These records show women acting within family and religious life. They do not prove a common legal or social status for every Etruscan woman.
A person honoured with a rich tomb had opportunities very different from those of a poorer neighbour, a servant or an enslaved person who left few monuments. Recent scholarship on Etruscan women and funerary culture stresses how women’s experiences varied between places and generations. At San Giuliano, hair ornaments and the spindle whorl may have been placed with two individuals considered female. They contribute evidence about funerary choices, but reveal neither the individuals’ occupations nor their degree of authority in life.
Amber and the Trade Networks of Etruria
Amber has been another source of confusion in accounts of the discovery. Early descriptions linked the supposed occupant with a necklace from the Baltic, yet the published reports of the 2025 chamber do not establish such an object or a chemical identification of its origin. Beads and glass-like ornaments were reported. Finding a bead, proving that it is amber and tracing that amber to a geological source are separate tasks, each requiring its own evidence.
Amber did circulate through Etruscan trade networks, as finds at other sites demonstrate. Verucchio, an Iron Age centre in modern Emilia-Romagna, produced particularly elaborate amber ornaments. Research on Verucchio’s exchanges with central Europe and the Mediterranean discusses Baltic amber in a setting that also received imported metalwork and other goods. Materials could move across considerable distances through successive exchanges between communities. Their presence in an Italian grave does not imply that its owners dealt personally with merchants from the Baltic.
Physical and chemical examinations, including infrared spectroscopy, can help determine whether amber resembles material from a particular geological source. Tracking an individual piece after it entered circulation is much less certain. A bead may have passed through several workshops and hands, or travelled as a gift, long before burial. Studies of amber circulation around the western Adriatic describe routes linking northern Europe, the western Adriatic, the Italian peninsula and the wider Mediterranean, with centres such as Verucchio participating in those exchanges.
The pottery from San Giuliano provides direct evidence of cultural connections that the unverified amber necklace cannot. Some ceramics followed Greek or southern Italian shapes and decorative conventions. Such influence may come through imitation as well as trade; a Greek-looking pot need not have been made in Greece. The amber and gold necklace illustrated here belongs to the wider record of elite adornment. It was not recovered from the Tomb of the Bird Vases.
Clothing Fasteners, Textiles and the Limits of Reconstruction
Among the objects securely recovered were bronze fibulae. Like a safety pin, a fibula uses a pointed shaft and a catch to secure a piece of cloth. Changes in its form and ornament can help date a burial. Its position also provides clues about garments that have disappeared. A fastening near the shoulder may once have held a cloak, for instance, although decomposing fabric and movement within the grave prevent a complete reconstruction from the pin alone.
One fibula from the 2025 chamber still held textile traces within its corrosion. When iron or bronze corrodes, mineral products may retain impressions or tiny pieces of cloth that would otherwise rot away. Under magnification, such material can preserve evidence of the weave, fibre and direction of the thread. It gives archaeologists information about clothing actually present at burial, even though a fragment adhering to a pin cannot reveal an entire outfit.
The spindle whorl beside the southern bed is another clue to textile work, but its meaning depends on why it was buried. The object could have been used by the deceased, symbolised a valued household task or been selected by relatives as an offering. The field report preserves its precise position for comparison with whorls from other contexts. That recorded association is more useful than assigning all Etruscan women a single occupation simply because a spinning tool appears in one grave.
The finds from the two excavation seasons must remain distinct. The gold-plated hair spirals were recovered from the robbed 2024 grave. The intact chamber excavated in 2025 held silver hair spools, bronze ornaments and tools associated with textiles. The sixth-century fibula pictured below is a general illustration of this kind of fastening, rather than an artefact excavated by SGARP from the chamber.
A Funeral Bed Designed to Channel Liquid
The southern bed preserves a feature that may help explain a part of the funeral rite. Near its headrest, the excavators found a handmade cup inside a bronze bowl. Two shallow channels cut into the bed surface converged to form a V and led to a hole passing through the stone. A plate stood directly underneath to receive liquid from above. The bowl, sloping channels and lower vessel formed a physical arrangement that the excavators could document as a single group.
SGARP interprets the channels as part of a rite in which the dead were washed, anointed or otherwise treated with liquid. Water, oil or a perfumed substance might have been used, but the exact liquid has not been identified. The carved channels show the direction it could take; the cup and bowl suggest how it might have been poured; and the lower plate shows where it collected. Together, these details support a ritual explanation without telling us what words were spoken or exactly how the rite unfolded.
The plate itself was unusual. Its underside was decorated with incised flowers and waves, and it did not match many of the paired vessels elsewhere in the grave. Its position below the bed’s outlet persuaded the excavators that it had been placed there deliberately. It may have been chosen for a particular ceremony, giving an ordinary vessel a specialised purpose. The plate’s documented position directly below the hole is the basis for that interpretation.
Etruscan burials elsewhere have yielded vessels used for eating and drinking, but the arrangement of bed channels and receiving plate had not previously been documented in San Giuliano’s necropolis. Here, archaeologists can propose a sequence grounded in material evidence: liquid prepared in a bowl, applied at the bed, guided along grooves and caught underneath. The excavators’ description of the bed and plate sets out this interpretation. This arrangement offers a specific procedure against which similar finds can be compared.
What Modern Excavation Can Establish
The value of an unlooted chamber lies in these surviving relationships, even when their meaning remains uncertain. A spear near the bed, a whorl by a headrest and a cup set inside a bowl can be mapped in three dimensions and considered alongside human bones, fabric traces, the pottery and the chamber itself. Sediment displaced by water must be included too. The tomb provides a record of both the burial and the changes that followed it, rather than an unquestionable picture of a single moment.
Documentation began before the stone door was opened. SGARP combined survey work and geophysical readings to trace the road and locate the mounds. A camera provided an initial view of the sealed burial, while careful excavation, conservation, three-dimensional mapping and soil sampling documented what followed. These methods preserve evidence that would vanish if objects were removed without recording their positions. A plain cup left in context may ultimately tell historians more than a finely worked ornament with no known findspot.
Further scientific analyses may answer some of the questions left open by the excavation. Ancient DNA could help examine whether the four people were biologically related. Isotopic work on bone or teeth may provide evidence about their diets or mobility, if preservation and local comparison samples permit it. Residues could reveal compounds once stored in the pots, while examination of ceramic fabrics may suggest places of manufacture. Each technique has limitations, and none of these possible results should be described as if the excavation team had already published them.
The recurring movement of water inside the 2025 tomb also limits what its contents can prove. Some vessels shifted under sediment, and archaeologists had to work out which positions most plausibly reflected the original arrangement. Calling a sealed chamber an untouched time capsule can conceal such processes. Its door prevented robbery, but could not stop groundwater, the decay of organic matter or gradual displacement. The field team explicitly documents this disturbance.
The Second Intact Tomb and the Finds on Display
In 2026, SGARP opened a second sealed chamber at San Giuliano. Smaller than the Tomb of the Bird Vases, it contained thirteen pottery vessels, among them jars, drinking wares and a perfume container. At least two people, perhaps three, had been buried there, and an iron spear point was recorded. Its roof again evoked a hut, and a funerary bed ran along the northern side. Accounts assigning these thirteen vessels to the 2025 chamber have conflated two separate discoveries.
The July 2026 Baylor report also describes cloth fragments retained by corrosion close to an iron pin in the new chamber. As in the earlier find, the fragments may help reconstruct aspects of Etruscan clothing. The research team can now compare two intact burial groups of approximately the same period, asking whether particular pots saw ordinary use before burial or were acquired for funerary purposes. Patterns shared between graves can offer a stronger basis for interpretation than an isolated object.
In June 2026, artefacts from the 2025 Tomb of the Painted Bird Vases went on display at the Museo delle Necropoli Rupestri in Barbarano Romano. The regional park’s announcement confirms the permanent display of the burial assemblage. Visitors can now examine the ceramics near the landscape in which they were discovered, although the chamber itself remains a protected archaeological site whose conservation presents a separate problem from museum access.
San Giuliano gives archaeologists three excavated tombs, two of them sealed, beside a road that linked their monuments within the same cemetery. Their architecture, drinking vessels, clothing ornaments and arrangements for ritual reveal how burial customs were changing in seventh-century Etruria. The strongest evidence comes from the recorded relationships between objects, human remains and architecture. That evidence tells us far more about the funerals than the mirrors and Baltic amber incorrectly assigned to the 2025 tomb.
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