Archaeologists have discovered the ruins of a monumental temple in Vulci, an ancient Etruscan city in Italy.
The corner of the newly-discovered temple (left) under excavation and the larger Tempio Grande (right) in Vulci, Italy. Image credit: Mariachiara Franceschini.
The Vulci were a tribe or people who gave their name to their city and were one of the legendary twelve peoples of the Etruscan civilization.
First excavated in the 1950s, the ruins of the city are about 16 km from the Tyrrhenian Sea between the villages of Canino and Montalto di Castro in the Italian province of Viterbo.
Vulci grew out of a number of small villages in the 8th century BCE. It flourished in the 6th-4th centuries BCE, largely as a result of trade, the extraction of minerals, and the manufacture of bronze objects such as jugs and tripods.
The newly-discovered monumental temple was built at the end of the sixth or the beginning of the fifth century BCE.
The original building was about 45 m long and 35 m wide, and is situated to the west of the Tempio Grande, a large temple discovered in the 1950s.
“The new temple is roughly the same size and on a similar alignment as the neighboring Tempio Grande, and was built at roughly the same Archaic time,” said Dr. Mariachiara Franceschini, an archeologist at the University of Freiburg.
“This duplication of monumental buildings in an Etruscan city is rare, and indicates an exceptional finding,” added Dr. Paul Pasieka, an archeologist at the University of Mainz.
The new Etruscan temple was discovered as part of the Vulci Cityscape project, which was launched in 2020 and aimed to investigate the settlement strategies and urbanistic structures of Vulci.
“We studied the entire northern area of Vulci, that’s 22.5 ha, using geophysical prospecting and ground penetrating radar,” Dr. Pasieka said.
“We discovered remains from the city’s origins that had previously been overlooked in Vulci and are now better able to understand the dynamics of settlement and the road system, besides identifying different functional areas in the city.”
“Our knowledge about the appearance and organization of Etruscan cities has been limited until now,” Dr. Franceschini said.
“The intact strata of the temple are offering us insights into more than a thousand years of development of one of the most important Etruscan cities.”
