The Etruscans

Today we visited some underground caves in Orvieto. First with our guide, who is a freelance archaeologist working with several universities, we visited a private cellar where we saw several Etruscan artifacts. 

Our guide showed us several different rooms in the cellar, one of which was a sort of garbage room where he said he found a lot of bits of pottery. When he took us into the room with many of the artifacts he had collected, he pointed out that many of the bowls that he found weren’t broken. He explained that there were several reasons for this. One of these reasons was that the inside of the bowl could get scraped up by utensils, he mentioned that sometimes they would scratch designs and letters into the bowls but this could make the bowls leak. Pictured below are some of the artifacts we saw.

After we visited the private cellar we went on the Orvieto underground tour where we visited two caves underneath the city. The first one was where olive oil was made. The huge press, pictured below, was used to grind the olives up into a sort of paste during the first step of the process. The second cave had tons of holes in the wall where the pigeons lived that the Etruscans raised for food.

The article that I read for the day was about the Etruscans. It went through the history of the Etruscans and how we don’t know very much about them since most of the structures they built were made of wood and mud, which has long since deteriorated. Most of what we have learned about this civilization comes from these caves since they have been able to withstand the test of time.