Dissertation

Space, Body, and Mind : the Application of Cognitive Science to the Etruscan Tomb Space in Tarquinia and Orvieto

Ortoleva, Jacqueline K

2022

Overview

Etruscan painted tombs provide the earliest and most well-preserved corpus of figurative wall paintings in the ancient Mediterranean. Depictions of musicians, banqueters, and other images provide a vibrant array of social and performative events inside a small subset of chambered tombs in central Italy. In part, the rarity of tomb paintings in Etruria, along with their figurative nature, have contributed to a surplus of scholarship related to the tomb paintings themselves. Such perspectives tend to emphasise the presumed meaning of visual imagery inside the tomb, rather than how the tomb space was cognitively and somatically experienced during the interment. Consequently, crucial areas of the tomb, such as the dromos, have been minimised, and burial rites originally performed inside the painted tomb remain unclear. I argue that further clarifying sensory mechanisms underlying sight, sound, and space offers a novel way forward in confronting this reality. This thesis seeks to re-contextualize the Etruscan painted tomb with respect to the physical and cognitive experience of funerary ritual. Rather than singly assessing bodily movement or tomb paintings, the tomb is considered from an emic perspective, as a bounded space with unique visual, spatial, and acoustic properties. Fieldwork data involving sound propagation from 14 painted tombs in Tarquinia and Orvieto are presented along with intact photogrammetric and acoustic models illustrating the painted tomb as an intact navigable space. Such interpretation, when applied in conjunction with existing scholarship, provides a clearer understanding of the Etruscan painted tomb space whilst generating new avenues of research in pre-Roman archaeology. Perhaps most importantly, the Etruscan record is allowed to assume precedence over the words and materiality of another culture, language, author, or object.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Tombs