Affiliation: Rutgers University
Bice Peruzzi is an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University, after earning her Ph.D. at the University of Cincinnati. Her research focuses on the construction of cultural identity in pre-Roman Italy. Using artifacts –in particular local and imported pottery– as her main form of evidence, she aims to give a voice to individuals who would be otherwise mute, as they have left no written accounts and are only tangentially described in Greek and Roman sources. She has fieldwork experience in Italy (from Roman villas in Veneto, to Tarquinia’s necropolis, to Pompeii), in Greece, and in Turkey. She has published on Etruscans and Apulian tombs and on Corinthian pottery. Her current book project is a social biography of the inhabitants of Central Apulia.
Before the Roman conquest, Central Apulia was inhabited by a population traditionally known as the Peucetians. Although the Peucetians have left no written records and were largely ignored by ancient sources, the thousands of tombs excavated in Central Apulia speak of a society with a complex social hierarchy and long-range commercial contacts with Etruria, Greece, and other parts of Southern Italy. Perhaps unexpectedly, these graves also show that in the Classical and Hellenistic periods Peucetian women enjoyed a more emancipated existence than their Athenian counterparts. Besides objects related to what are traditionally understood as female roles (e.g., weaving, child rearing, performing libations) funerary assemblages dated between the 6th and 4th century BCE also included full banqueting sets, virtually identical to those found in male tombs. A few older women were even buried with spears, maybe to indicate their exceptional role in the community. This talk explores the relationship between the consumption of artifacts and the lives of Peucetian women in antiquity, and discusses more broadly about how our modern ideas about “female assemblages” are often in contrast with the reality of the archaeological record.
Tomb re-openings in the ancient Mediterranean have been generally treated as transgressive acts of violation against the memory of the deceased. From Elpinor’s lament in the Odyssey to the jurists in the Justinian Digest, the ancient sources are full of references to the widespread fear of having one’s tomb defaced or otherwise compromised.
Yet, in pre-Roman Apulia re-opening and re-using tombs seem to be a widespread and accepted phenomenon. For example, about a quarter of the tombs in the necropolis of Rutigliano-Purgatorio (a site about 15 miles from the modern town of Bari), show signs of having been reused, sometimes several times over the course of a century.
This talk analyzes the relationship between graves and collective memory, focusing on tomb violation in Central Apulian necropoleis in the 6th-4th centuries BCE. I argue that this practice, paired with the general lack of grave markers and post-depositional rites, ancient looting, and the unclear boundaries between settlements and necropoleis is part of complex local strategies where the local communities alternately rejected, incorporated, and reinvented memories of their own past to create a narrative about themselves and legitimize their place in the world
