Recherche par auteur > Limina Valentina

This paper focuses on the funerary spaces of ager Volaterranus from a diachronic perspective. The aim is to demonstrate how borders between spaces for life and spaces for death are blurred. Resources and productive activities - from agriculture to manufacturing, quarrying to commercial, etc.- were mainly managed in non-urban areas. Thus, it is evident that the role of individual funerary monuments and family tombs in these zones outside the city should be understood in a complex system where space perception and control dynamics could be crucial to reassessing their symbolical power. Sharing death life with family members in the same hypogeum was a common trend in Volterran necropolis until the 1st century AD (at least). In the 5th century AD, more and more 'Christianized' spaces impacted the previous system of funeral practices, symbology and landscape experience. Apart from family tombs in the long-lasting city necropoleis not far away from the urban walls, individual funerary monuments were spread outside the city and throughout the ager. The analysis of archaeological traces and iconography of locally produced funerary urns reflect the eventuality of patronage ties between elite families and artistic ateliers, whose location remains still unknown. Through integrating toponyms and epigraphy related to funerary spaces in the ager, the paper reconstructs the role of individual funerary monuments within the local ownership system, the productive landscape and the local elites' power strategies. Thus, thanks to a diachronic approach, the 'liminal' ontology of funerary spaces could be evaluated within the dynamics of identity formation and change within the complex human-environmental interactions over the longue durée.