Falerii (Civita Castellana, VT): gli scavi nell'abitato 1992-2005. Le indagini nel giardino di Palazzo Feroldi Antonisi De Rosa (1999)

The city of Falerii has been widely (although non‐systematically) investigated over the last 150 years. Since 1992, as a consequence of private and public interventions on the modern urban structure, a series of excavations has been carried out at Civita Castellana, under the supervision of the Soprintendenza. A shared research project between the Soprintendenza Archeologia del Lazio e dell’Etruria Meridionale and the Dipartimento di Scienze dell’Antichità (Insegnamento di Etruscologia e Antichità Italiche, Sapienza Università di Roma) was launched in 2016 and a thorough publication plan was designed on that occasion. Since then, the several contexts investigated between 1992 and 2016 have been systematically studied, shedding new light to extremely relevant sectors of the preRoman city of Falerii-Civita Castellana between the Iron Age and the Middle Ages. This paper is the first contribution of the series and deals with an extremely interesting context discovered in 1999 in the western sector of the Civita Castellana plateau. The several thousand shards recovered on that occasion testify on the one hand the dumping activity of multifunctional pottery workshops of the 4th-3rd c. BC that produced small votive terracottas, red‐figure vases, plastic vases, and black‐gloss pottery, and on the other hand the presence of a new sacred area in the SW sector of the ancient city. On a wider scale the possibility to study simultaneously a great quantity of shards coming from a productive context and pertaining to different classes of materials, according to modern typological approaches, can help to shed light also on the necessity to introduce a reflection on the ways in which modern classifications relates to ancient productive systems.