National Archaeological Museum of Pontecagnano “Gli Etruschi di frontiera”

The National Archaeological Museum of Pontecagnano, named ‘Gli Etruschi di Frontiera‘ (The Frontier Etruscans), opened in 2007 in a purpose-designed building, houses the finds from the Etruscan-Campanian centre of Pontecagnano. It is a heritage of inestimable value, the largest part of which consists of finds from the more than 9,000 burials excavated in the necropolises of Pontecagnano over the last fifty years.

The visit follows a chronological layout, with sections illustrating the different eras, from the Eneolithic period to the Roman Age, and offers visitors in-depth looks at the city and its urban development, the necropolises, the sanctuaries and the craft productions. Along the exhibition route, a highlight is the section dedicated to the aristocracies of the Orientalising period (late 8th – late 7th century BC), to whom some burials can be attributed that, for the composition and quality of their grave goods, have been described as ‘princely’.

Sections of the exhibition route:
1. Prehistory – The Copper Age (3500-2300 BC)
2. The Early Iron Age (9th-8th century BC)
3. The city of the princes – The Orientalising period (last quarter of the 8th-7th century BC)
4. The Archaic city (6th century BC)
5. The Classical and Hellenistic age (5th-4th century BC)
6. The Roman age (3rd century BC – 5th century AD)

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A bit of history

Together with Capua, Pontecagnano was the most important city for the Etruscans in Campania. It was built in a strategic position on a small hill, with its port on a lagoon. It was founded in the Early Iron Age (late 10th century BC) by people of Villanovan culture coming from southern Etruria. Many extraordinary finds have been brought to light over the years: vast necropolises, parts of the settlement and of the craftsmen’s quarter, the southern sanctuary dedicated to the chthonic deities, the southern sanctuary dedicated to Apollo. The initial phase, characterised mainly by farming, was followed by its transformation, already complete in the 8th century BC, into a great trading emporium, open to exchanges and contacts with the Greek-Eastern world and the indigenous world of the hinterland. The most significant period for Pontecagnano is  the Orientalising period (from around 720 BC), when funerary custom involved the adoption of the trench grave, and it is precisely from the necropolis in the Sant’Antonio district that the clear signs come of the existence in Pontecagnano of an elite, which entrusted its needs for social, economic and, even before that, cultural self-representation to rich “princely” grave goods, in which the rite of cremation, with the ashes placed in large metal cauldrons, is a clear ideological reference and a learned allusion to heroic ritual.  This climate is sumptuously exemplified by two splendid Orientalising tombs (tombs 926 and 928), datable to the first half of the 7th century BC, found in 1966 near Piazza Risorgimento. They are two male tombs built using travertine slabs set vertically to form a sort of rectangular enclosure, inside which a niche had been created, marking off the space, where the prestige goods most intimately connected with the social status of the deceased laid there were placed.  The very rich grave goods – including the metal cauldron for the ashes of the deceased – comprised precious metal tableware, personal ornaments (silver fibulae), tools for handling fire and cooking meat (spits, firedogs and tongs), iron axes, weapons and pottery. These tools, which point to the sphere of sacrifice, had been laid in the trench enclosure. Greater homogeneity, on the other hand, seems to characterise the social fabric of Pontecagnano between the last decades of the Orientalising phase and the Archaic period (late 7th-6th century BC), although there is no lack of examples of rich burial complexes.

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