Image
Image
What I did last summer: time travel
Digging up ancient history in Tuscany
Story and art by
Cecilia Demolli ’26
From the eighth to about the fifth century BCE—before their territory, language, and culture were absorbed by the surging Roman empire—people known as the Etruscans lived in what is now the Tuscany region of Italy. Since 1966, a succession of classicists and anthropologists have been literally uncovering clues about the Etruscans’ lives at an archaeological site called Poggio Civitate.
Each year, students apply to the Poggio Civitate Archaeological Field School and join the dig for the month of July. Here, Cecilia “Ceci” Demolli ’26 shares photos and insights from her two summers there (so far).
The way to Poggio Civitate
To get to Poggio Civitate, first fly to Rome or Florence, then grab a train to Siena, and then take a bus for the remaining 16 miles (25 kilometers). There are buses every weekday, but if you end up coming on a Sunday, you have to take a 30-minute taxi ride through the countryside. The view on the last part of your journey is through these stunning fields of sunflowers.
I grew up in Italy, and my whole family’s Italian. My family moved to Massachusetts when I was 8 years old, and I decided to come to UMass for college. Now, my mom and my little brother live in Italy, so I see them first, and then my parents drive me to Poggio Civitate. I have an easier travel day than most of my friends do!
On the students’ first day, Tony [Professor of Classics Anthony Tuck] shows us where some clay was being laid out to dry when a fire took place in the ancient workshop. One of the workers, as they ran from the flames, put their hand on the clay, so now we have this handprint. Tony lets all the students put their hands on it, and it’s just such a crazy feeling to put your hand on the same material [that someone else touched] thousands of years ago. I had been there for only a day, and I was so shocked that they trusted me to hold this. I could drop it and it would shatter! But right away, you understand the responsibility that’s given to you, and we all share that together.
Once we arrive and get settled, our daily routine starts at about 6:30 in the morning. We get to see the sunrise a lot of the time. Part of the hike up to the dig site is on the side of a road, but there aren’t a lot of cars going by. It’s really peaceful. I’m not someone who normally wakes up that early, ever. But you really end up liking it somehow.
I’d never been to Tuscany except to drive through on my way to other places. I wasn’t very familiar with Tuscany and Tuscan culture. The past two summers, I have learned so much about it and come to love it. Every little region of Italy is so different from the others and has its own traditions and history.
Photo: Anthony Tuck
I wanted to capture a little bit of my morning walk to the site. After this, the road turns, and we grab the path to go up the hill. This is a little past halfway on my walk.
You can see my hiking pants, too, and steel-toed boots. This year, I feel like I was a lot more prepared. I definitely don’t bring my nicest clothes because everything’s going to get dirty and sweaty and gross.
We hike up to the site, excavate all day until about 3:30 p.m., then have the afternoon and evening free. In my second year with the program, I comanaged a trench with another student, so I was responsible for more documentation, writing daily notes in the trench book, drawing graphs of the trenches, counting objects, taking elevations, spending time in the magazzino [the program laboratory, where conservation, data entry, photography, and cataloging happen], and having meetings with upper staff. So, there is more to do after the excavation time is done and before the whole group has dinner together back at the villa at 8 p.m.
In the trenches
When we bring the wheelbarrows full of supplies up the hill on the first day, it’s a lot of work, and it’s the first time that the new students are doing the hike. A lot of the time, they get very worried! We have to reassure them that it’s not like this every day—it’s so much easier when you’re not pushing up a wheelbarrow.
Here are some of my fellow second-years uncovering an extending wall. They’re getting around all the rocks and exposing them. You can see the strings that designate each numbered trench. Each trench has a letter and a number: I was in T108. Each trench gets different loci assigned as you excavate, and each feature, as it’s found, gets its own locus. Each stratigraphical layer does, too.
You do have to be careful not to trip on the lines! I tripped on one and fell face-first in the trench. It was not fun!
Everyone brings their own trowel and clippers to the dig. We have some on-site, but everyone’s told to bring them, too, because we can always use a few more. The first time I traveled to the site, I was worried that the TSA [Transportation Security Administration] was going to stop me in the airport because of the trowel in my bag! Fortunately, I got through just fine.
We found some terra-cotta in that layer after the first or second day, and you can see the hand picks we used after getting through the top layers of soil. When we get deeper and have to be more careful about getting around the objects, we start using trowels instead.
As you can see, the terra-cotta is very abraded—it’s been tumbled around in the soil. I like to think about it like sea glass; it goes from having sharp edges to being a bit more rounded.
That’s me on the left, then my friends Magda in the middle and Charlotte on the right. We would always nap on this dirt pile because it was perfectly in the shade at lunchtime, and when we were done eating, we would just go over here and take a quick nap.
When you first start digging, your arms get so tired, especially because that first week there’s a lot of pickaxing and shoveling. But then after that, it’s more your legs, because you can’t sit down fully in the trench, so you get used to squatting.
Here’s my bucket of pottery after one particularly big day. We don’t often use buckets unless there are a lot of pieces. This was what I brought down to the magazzino that day.
On the site, we’ve collected a lot of milk boxes and these Dinki boxes—Dinki is a kind of cheese spread we’re often given with lunch. We reuse those containers to hold special finds. If it was a big day for special finds, we would have three or four of the Dinkies and maybe three to five of the milk boxes, which everyone just calls lattes (since that means “milk” in Italian).
Findings
Welcome to the very tiny, very beautiful town of Murlo. From this entrance arch, you can see all of the fields extending outside of it. I think only around 25 people live there year-round, but it’s where the magazzino and the museum are located.
The magazzino is the name for our laboratory or research station, where we bring all the finds from the site and where they are cataloged and processed. The conservation work happens there, too. During my first summer, we were assigned to go once a week as part of learning about the Poggio Civitate site. My second year, I would usually go there every day after excavation to bring down all the finds of the day.
Here’s another view of Murlo—you can almost see the whole town. Really, you go down that street, take a right, take another right, and you basically end up back where you were. It's circular, a walled city.
The beautiful museum in Murlo displays mostly things from the site but also from the area. It’s run by locals who work closely with Tony. Murlo is about a 15-minute walk from the larger town of Vescovado, where the students and staff in the program stay together in a villa.
One of these doors on this street belongs to the only restaurant in town. It’s run by two women who make really good food that’s a very healthy spin on the traditional food of the region.
Here we are in the museum in Murlo, and this is the “cowboy of Murlo.” It’s a kind of icon that’s only been found in this very particular site of Poggio Civitate. It’s clear there’s some kind of influence from abroad because it doesn’t resemble anything you’d see on the Italian peninsula at this time. It looks more characteristic of Africa. His beard evokes an ancient Egyptian, and he’s got kind of like a cowboy hat. He’s become the town’s mascot now; you can see him painted on school buses.
Here, objects are assembled the way we believe they were displayed in the archaic building. You can see in the center another rendering of the cowboy. This summer, we found what we think is a fragment of the cowboy’s skirt.
The tiling you see for the roof is the exact technique used in Italy today. There’s debate about when that style began, and our findings would actually place it much earlier than some other sources.
These faces in the lower part of the photo are part of the drainage system—water would flow out of the spouts. Even those are detailed with flowers and faces. This type of architecture is very, very impressive for that time (between 400 and 700 BCE).
The gorgon is another bit of iconography associated with the Etruscans, and here’s an example. These are often seen in Greek and Roman sites as well.
A lot of people from very different professions are also working on the dig. This year, we had an architect come—he normally works as a modern architect, but he loves to do work for the dig in the summer and help create maps of the buildings. This summer, it was so helpful because there were new buildings discovered that needed mapping.
There’s also a computer science professor from UMass [Cole Reilly ’19 ’21MS], who comes every summer with a student, and together they work on digitizing records but also on creating 3D computer models of the site.
We also have a retired conservator from the British Museum who has been involved with the site for a long time, so we’re getting to meet conservators and architects and understand how it all fits together. There are a lot of opportunities to take part in different projects in each field. If a student is drawn to something other than excavation and wants to work on a particular project in the magazzino for some time, they’re encouraged to.
I really like excavating, so usually you’ll find me on the hill. But I was lucky enough to help Rex Wallace with a project. He’s a linguist and a professor emeritus studying the alphabet of the Etruscans. We find sigla—inscriptions and markings in the Etruscan language—on ceramics at the site, and the professor is working to understand them. I helped by gathering photos to create a catalog of all the sigla from the site, and I’m continuing to work on this project with him and Tony.
After I started working on the sigla project, it brought a different excitement to the excavating work as well. When I would see a tile, I would be so much more aware that there could be markings on it.
We often take weekend excursions to towns in the area, and Tony brought us to Florence as well. We visited the National Archaeological Museum there and saw this piece—a kind of vessel that is super rare. When we are digging up shards of pottery at our site, we don’t find stuff this big or this decorated—or this well-preserved. Most of what we find is for domestic use. We all like to joke that the people at the site made pretty bad pottery! But it served their purposes.
I’ve also learned about conservation and the process of gluing things back together. The conservators taught us about the kinds of materials they use and the chemistry of mixing the right compounds for that work. We also started to get a sense of the information that needs to go on each plaque and how you would group objects together to help tell the story to visitors in the museum.
This was from an older trench that opened a few seasons ago. They were finding tons of stuff—you can see big pieces of animal bone. To me, this looks like a big week’s worth of material.
After excavation, the students go back to the house where we all stay. But the supervisors and professors go to the magazzino and lay out all the finds. The next day, students who are assigned would come and brush all the pieces (you can’t put them in water, as they might dissolve) looking for anything special like a marking or decoration or a hint of a vessel’s profile.
The next step after that is to sort them into all the different categories and then draw them if they’re diagnostic. A piece that is diagnostic can give us an idea of the size or shape of a vessel, like a pottery base, a handle, or the rim, rather than a shard without those clues.
The artifacts all get sorted and bagged based on the locus where they were found and what type of pottery they are. Bulk pottery is separate from diagnostic pieces. All the bases from one locus go together, all the rims from that locus go together, and so forth. Once all that information has been recorded, the pieces go into boxes where they can be pulled for further study or eventually be repatriated back to the site.
A trench book has an introduction, a smaller version of the locus drawing, and daily entries from each day of work in that trench. At the end, there’s a summary and a table with numbers and details of everything that was found in each locus. Since most trenches have upwards of 10 loci, a lot of work goes into the trench books.
I always wanted to be an archaeologist, but this experience has given me more direction and showed me what academia, archaeology, and classics settings are like, so I can think about what I want to do within that field.
We didn’t expect to dig in this area, so the trees are still there, but we were following some new findings and expanded from the original trenches. This was taken very early in the morning on the final day, when we were basically done excavating, and all the second-years were taking final photos of our trenches.
Vita Italiana
Everyone from the field school would get together at the end of the day at the place where we were staying and have dinner together. We would eat on these really big wooden tables in the courtyard. Students would rotate through the job of helping the cook set up and with whatever they needed to prepare, contributing to support the whole crew of about 50 people. We eat a lot of pasta, but the cook makes different variations.
Grappa is a really funny and grumpy cat who lives at the villa where we all stay. He’s named after the Italian liquor, and he’s a character everyone knows and loves at the dig. Grappa has a very particular meowing sound—it’s kind of scary, maybe more of a growl. He pretends he doesn’t love all the attention he gets from students.
My friends and I call this “secret lake.” It’s a secluded place a pretty long walk from Murlo and even further from Vescovado, where we stay. We walk to the next town, and then take a little road in the woods, which turns into a path, and you end up here. It’s so nice and peaceful, and you can swim. When my family came to pick me up at the end of the session, I ended up taking them to see this lake.
One morning, we woke up to go excavate, and from this window in the common area, you could see the pool, and right behind it the church of the town, and I snapped this photo. It’s funny, the bell in the church rings every hour, but it’s three minutes late. I have really come to love all these little features, these characters, in this tiny town.
A group of second- and third-year students at the field school in 2024; Cecilia is shown at left.
About the Poggio Civitate archaeological excavations
Anthony “Tony” Tuck first joined the excavation at Poggio Civitate as a student in 1989, and by the time he became a classics professor at UMass in 2006, he had risen to lead the project. The dig has become an important teaching ground for UMass students, introducing them to all aspects of the profession—from excavating and cataloging artifacts to conservation, analysis, and public interpretation. Dozens of alumni who experienced the field school have found careers not just within the field, but at the site itself.
Tuck emphasizes that students come to the field school from many academic disciplines. “My team consists not only of archaeologists but also forensic anthropologists, geologists, paleobotanists, chemists, and data scientists. It’s interdisciplinary in the truest sense of the word.” And the work benefits from that diversity. Tuck says, “We’re talking about an ancient community that was as complicated and as nuanced and varied as we are ourselves. So the wider the range of perspectives that we bring, the more likely it is that we’ll actually be able to see and dignify those ancient perspectives as well.”
All these interpretive lenses are brought to bear in what Tuck calls “the storytelling dimension” of his work. “We take materials and organize them to make a coherent narrative that lets us see the lived experiences of people who are otherwise lost to history.”
It’s rewarding, too, to accompany many students in their first experience abroad, in an unfamiliar space that can at first feel intimidating. Tuck says he loves to witness “that sudden realization that there’s so much to explore and so much to learn, but it’s not threatening. It doesn’t compromise their sense of who they are. It just enlarges their world in such a meaningful way.”
One stratigraphic layer of earth at a time, one student at a time, Tuck and the field school continue to steward history, building on years of discoveries to enrich our understanding of ancient Etruscan lives.
We’re on the lookout
Share your most intriguing nooks, niches, coordinates, or curiosities on campus or anywhere in the region. Email magazine@umass.edu and we’ll investigate!