“The Importance of Being Etruscan”: How Material Culture Shapes the Identity of Inhabitants and Visitors at Pyrgi, Ancient Port of Cerveteri (RM)

The site of Pyrgi, port of the ancient Etruscan city of Caere (Cerveteri - RM) and home to two different sacred areas, is a privileged observatory to investigate the role of material culture in depicting identity. The intense attendance of foreigners (such as Greeks or Phoenicians), witnessed by the inscriptions collected in the main sanctuaries - the so-called Monumental Sanctuary with temples A and B and the Southern Sanctuary - and the recovering of overseas manufacts in the residential area of the settlement are strictly interlaced with the strong presence of the Etruscan city authority. Thus, thorough the prevalent Etruscan material culture and by what the controversial historical sources told us about this site, Pyrgi has been defined as the very port-of-trade of Cerveteri (Michetti 2016; Michetti 2019), despite other coastal sites in the Etruscan territory that have been described as foreign foundations, such as Gravisca, a Greek emporion oversaw by the Etruscan city of Tarquinia (Fiorini 2017). The purpose of this paper is therefore to highlight how the evident Etruscan identity, substantiated by the wide adoption of local material culture and through the presence of sanctuaries built by the order of the political power residing in Cerveteri, is flanked by a mosaic of different elements that point to a much more heterogeneous cultural reality, suggested for example by the imported pottery inscribed by Greeks worshippers (Baglione et alii 2015) or the Phoenician text that characterised one of the three gold tablets placed on the entrance portal of the temple B by the tyrant of Cerveteri. The analysis of the indigenous coarse ware collected in the residential area and the study of particular local trends in the votive offerings system will be compared with other traces leading instead to the non-Etruscan attendees in order to examine the features of cultural exchange within a multicultural context.