Tombarelle (Cinigiano, GR), parte I: la survey, lo scavo, le ceramiche di età tardo-repubblicana e primo-imperiale

In the period 2009-2014 the Roman Peasant Project (RPP) excavated a sample of eight rural sites, previously identified through systematic field surveys, in the territory of Cinigiano in the interior of southern Tuscany. Through an integrated approach combining geophysics, excavation, material culture study, bioarchaeology and archaeometry, the project aimed at investigating the Roman rural non-elites, their economies and life-style. In 2014, a large surface site, locally known with the evocative toponym Tombarelle, was partially excavated and despite its controversial interpretation, yielded rich evidence for a variety of human activities carried out over a long period encompassing the second half of the 1st century BC and the central centuries of the Middle Ages. The site provided a series of ceramic-rich deposits illustrating its intermittent prolonged occupation and shedding light on production, integration with local, regional and overseas markets as well as on culinary habits. Given the complexity of the site, its diachrony and the significant amount of materials, we decided to disseminate the results in two different articles. This first paper focuses on the site’s locale, field survey, excavation and late-republican to early-imperial pottery, whereas the late antique and medieval ceramics will be the subject of a following contribution. In the first part of this paper we intend to point out the challenges of comparing field walking survey and excavation datasets at Tombarelle and the reductiveness of interpretative categories simply based on the ploughsoil evidence. Indeed, Tombarelle is a quintessential example of the complexity of defining, through test-excavation, the real typology of a site interpreted as a ‘village’ in field survey. The second part will focus on the ceramics from two main excavated areas, whose chronologies cover Caesar’s years through to the Augustan/Tiberian period. Despite the limited extension of excavated areas and unresolved interpretative issues, pottery offers a large amount of information and represents a unique tool to look at the local community’s daily life. Ceramics will be discussed through different perspectives: typological, contextual and functional. Through these three different approaches, we aim to illuminate several aspects such as chronology, production and consumption, local culinary strategies and processes of formation of ceramic assemblages.