Falerii (Civita Castellana, VT): Gli scavi nell'abitato 1992-2005. Le indagini in località Scasato (1992)

The city of Falerii has been studied extensively (although not systematically) over the last 150 years. Since 1992, as a result of private and public interventions in the modern urban structure, a series of excavations have been carried out in Civita Castellana under the supervision of the Soprintendenza. A joint 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, with a detailed publication plan. Since then, the various contexts investigated between 1992 and 2016 have been systematically studied, shedding new light on extremely relevant sectors of the pre-Roman city of Falerii-Civita Castellana between the Iron Age and the Middle Ages. This paper is the second in the series and deals with an extensive excavation carried out in 1992 in the eastern sector of the Civita Castellana plateau, in the locality Scasato, where the two sacred areas known in the literature as Scasato I and Scasato II were discovered between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. The excavation took place a few metres north of the area where the decorations of the so-called Tempio dell’Apollo were found. A complex stratigraphy was revealed, dating from the 7th century BC to the 11th century AD. This is the first time that a large sector (about 1000 sqm) of the urban area of Falerii has been studied and analysed. Three are the main results of the analysis. The first is the understanding of part of the 7th century BC settlement, characterised by elite houses and infant burials. The second is the possibility of beginning to glimpse the details, connected both to burials and daily life, of the moment when the area was substantially reoccupied, possibly from the 5th century BC onwards. This is a crucial point in view of the neighbouring church of Santa Maria dell’Arco, where in recent years it was proposed to recognise the first bishopric of Civita Castellana. The third, and perhaps more relevant for the present and future archaeological investigations at Falerii, has to do with the way in which the archaeological context was found. As a consequence of the continuous use of the plots of land for different purposes (housing, production areas, cemetery, quarry....) from the 7th century BC to the present, the studied context clearly shows that there are two moments in which the stratigraphy is strongly and coherently informative: a part of the lower layers, associated with the earliest occupation of the 7th century BC, and the more recent ones, which can be dated to the Middle Ages and which unfortunately were not fully investigated during the 1992 excavation. All the other materials were found in underground structures (cisterns, wells, cuniculi...), used as fillings in the water drainage system of the ancient Faliscan city. In this respect, they provide indirect information on the type of structures/use of the area in the centuries between the 5th and the late 2nd century BC and they fully confirm the presence of sacred building(s) in the neighbouring plots, decorated with rich systems of terracotta decorations.