Archeologists conducting preventative excavations ahead of an industrial expansion in southern Italy have discovered a well-preserved, 2,500-year-old necropolis. The news was first reported at a press conference held on July 15 by the Superintendency of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape for the Metropolitan Area of Naples (Soprintendenza ABAP Napoli), which supervised the excavation.
The cemetery, which was unearthed beneath the historic Garofalo pasta factory in Gragnano, near Naples, dates to the Archaic period (8th–6th centuries BCE), when the surrounding region of Campania was a cosmopolitan mix of native, Greek, and Etruscan cultures. Containing 85 graves, it appears to have been, at least in part, a burial site for a wealthy 6th-century elite.
Among the items recovered from the graves were decorated pottery, jewelry, and weapons, as well as imported goods such as Egyptian scarabs from Naukratis, a Greek trading settlement in the Nile Delta, and silver and bronze artifacts of Etruscan facture. Several individuals had been interred within burial cists made of volcanic tuff. Preserved inside these sealed graves were a variety of organic materials—among them fabrics, wooden objects, and woven baskets—usually lost to decomposition.
The find not only sheds light on exchange networks connecting Campania with Greece, Egypt, Etruria and the eastern Mediterranean, but is an important source of information about burial customs and everyday life in pre-Roman Campania.
“The discovery of the Via dei Pastai necropolis in Gragnano is the result of a successful public-private collaboration,” said Luigi La Rocca, the head of the Department for the Protection of Cultural Heritage at the Ministry of Culture. “Moreover, the excavation results—extraordinary for the quality of the artifacts found and the state of preservation, even of organic materials—provide new information on settlement development between the Sorrento Peninsula and the Sarno Valley during the Archaic period.”
The excavation area has now been documented and is expected to be covered up again, but research on the recovered material by a multidisciplinary team of archeologists, bioarcheologists, and archaeometric analysts will continue. Of particular interest are the human remains, which are anticipated to provide information on the diet and living conditions of the area’s inhabitants at the time.
