Two monumental temples, the tempio grande and the tempio nuovo, were built in the centre of the Etruscan city of Vulci around 500 BC. Modern stratigraphic excavations at the tempio nuovo from 2021 onwards make it possible to draw a detailed picture of the building, its construction and previous structures at this part of the city. On the one hand, it was necessary to deal with existing constructions when clearing the site. With a constructing area of over 1000 m², decisions had to be made on how to treat the pasts of areas of probably very different character. Older buildings, for example, had to be taken down and the ground levelled. On the other hand, during the construction of the foundations and the podium for the tempio nuovo, various archaeological materials were deposited in the backfill between the walls, ranging from ceramics, animal bones, iron and bronze fragments to building materials such as stones, wall plaster and possibly the remains of walls made of clay and roof tiles. The chronological spectrum of these finds ranges from the Late Bronze Age to the Late Archaic period.

In our contribution, we would like to focus primarily on the movable artefacts from the backfill of the temple. Using selected case studies, we want to show the potential of a detailed quantitative and qualitative taphonomic analysis of this material for the reconstruction of different (ritual) practices, the handling of different pasts and different lived spaces and their history in general. In their capacity as filling material, objects are relocated, removed from their previous or original spatial contexts and associated objects, and sacredly charged and recontextualised independently of their primary function. The objects were therefore recycled not only as building material for the construction of the temple, but in a certain sense also symbolically.

A preliminary examination of the archaeological finds and their contexts allows an initial categorisation of the material: a large part of the backfill was originally part of earlier buildings, although it is not always possible to distinguish between sacred and profane. Another part can be associated with ritual practices, whereby a distinction must be made between actions directly related to the construction of the temple and the relocation of the material remains of older ritual practices. Finally, there are also objects that defy specific interpretations and must be considered generally as residual material. In this way, it is possible to generate insights not only into the construction process of the temple, but also into architectural structures and practices and thus into how this central area of the Etruscan Vulci was lived and re-lived over time.