Crustumerium Burial Grounds Publication Forum
The Crustumerium Burial Grounds Publication Forum is a digital publication platform in the format of a journal in which the tombs from the burial grounds of Crustumerium appear as individual papers in separate edited volumes.
The project was started in April 2023 by Prof Peter Attema of the Groningen Institute of Archaeology and Dr Barbara Belelli Marchesini of the Sapienza University of Rome in collaboration with the University of Groningen Press and the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (KNIR). The latter institution accommodates the project and kindly makes its facilities available for the project’s team.
The current focus is on the Monte Del Bufalo burial ground, which has been selected because of its outstanding wealth of funerary data, making it a rare opportunity to examine the development of mortuary practices between the ninth and early fifth century BC.
In preparing a tomb for publication, a standardised description of the tomb is made, which includes its relative location in the burial ground, dating, typology, and gender attribution(s) of the deceased. This is followed by detailed descriptions of the grave gifts and a report on the disposition and nature of the skeletal remains by physical anthropologist Walter Pantano.
Special attention is paid to the material characteristics of the ceramic and metal objects and the way these items were manufactured.
The Crustumerium Burial Grounds Publication Forum is intended to meet the academic challenge of making data from funerary contexts available to the scholarly community in Open Access. Comprehensively excavated burial grounds constitute one of the most informative spheres in archaeology but are seldom fully published. Modern digital infrastructure now allows the publication of extensive data of funerary complexes – as is the case with the Crustumerium burial grounds – gradually and at a relatively low cost.
The project is carried out under the auspices of the Soprintendenza Speciale di Roma.
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