The present volume is the first to appear in the series Corollaria Crustumina that aims at publishing doctoral theses, conference proceedings and specialist studies on the Latin settlement of Crustumerium near Rome. It is dedicated to a conference entitled “In Search of the Identity of Crustumerium” that was held on the 5th of March, 2008, in Rome. Although the collection of papers presented in this volume appears almost five years after the conference, the editors are of the opinion that publishing the extended papers in book form is nonetheless worthwhile as the papers demarcate a specific phase in the archaeological investigations of Crustumerium.

This PhD thesis sheds light on the obscure funerary record in Central Italy during the 7th and 6th century BC, to which only a small number of graves has been ascribed because these tombs generally contained very few or no grave gifts. However, recent excavations near Crustumerium have yielded a fairly large number of tombs dating to this period. The study of the Crustumerian funerary archive has revealed several remarkable changes in the funerary rituals after the end of the 7th century BC.

Conceived as a companion to the 2016 exhibition “Crustumerium, Death and Afterlife at the Gates of Rome” in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptoteket of Copenhagen, this book tells the multi-faceted story of an ancient Latin settlement located at only a few kilometers from Rome on the basis of years of painstaking interdisciplinary archaeological research. Following a historical and landscape archaeological introduction, the spotlight is on Crustumerium’s exceptional funerary record that is being meticulously excavated and safeguarded for the future by an international team of field archaeologists and restorers, allowing the reader an exceptional insight in the long journey from discovery in the field to showcase in the museum.

This volume is the second of the series Corollaria Crustumina aimed at the publication of conference proceedings, doctoral theses and specialist studies concerning the Latin settlement of Crustumerium (Rome) and Italian protohistory. It contains multidisciplinary papers of an international group of archaeologists discussing new fieldwork data and theories of broad relevance to Italian archaeology and with specific relevance to the study of Crustumerium’s settlement, cemeteries and material culture in light of the site’s cultural identity.

This volume is the third in the series Corollaria Crustumina aimed at the publication of conference proceedings, doctoral theses and specialist studies concerning the Latin settlement of Crustumerium (Rome) and its place in central Italian protohistory. It contains the dissertation that Jorn Seubers wrote and defended at the University of Groningen as part of the project “The People and the State. Material culture, social structure and political centralisation in central Italy (800-450 BC)”. This detailed study of Crustumerium’s urban and rural settlement dynamics, for which the author assembled all data from previous work while adding new landscape archaeological studies and sophisticated territorial and data analyses, elaborates a new scenario on the relation between the urban core and its countryside.

This volume is the fourth in the series Corollaria Crustumina and deals with the results of the project The People and the State, Material culture, social structure, and political centralisation in Central Italy (800-450 BC). This project of the Groningen Institute of Archaeology, carried out between 2010 and 2015 in close collaboration with the Archaeological Service of Rome, deals with the changing socio-political situation at ancient Crustumerium resulting from Rome’s rise to power.
The volume brings together data from the domains of geology, geoarchaeology, urban and rural settlement archaeology, funerary archaeology, material culture studies as well as osteological and isotope analyses. On the basis of these data, a relationship is established between changes in material culture on the one hand and developments in social structure and political centralisation in Central Italy on the other in the period between 850 and 450 BC.