Prologue
“Bring some for the rest of us too, Marcus!” Paul called out.
I stood by the water tank that filled most of the rear of one of our trucks. When my canteen was full I drank greedily and poured the rest over the towel I had wrapped around my head as protection from the relentless sun before refilling it and clipping it to my belt. If my professor hadn’t insisted I’d do more field work I could have been sitting comfortably back in Florence studying the artifacts as they arrived rather there than camping out here in the dirt.
Grabbing an already filled 6-gallon water jug, I trudged back to where the rest of the team was busy with trowels, scraping off layer after layer of soil, occasionally calling out when they found something, which usually turned out to be just a stone or twig.
The dig site was neatly arranged into squares following the gentle slope of a hill, and, of course, we Americans had been given the lowest parts once it was clear that the richer finds were to be found near the top.
We had just started on a new square and didn’t expect to find anything interesting until a foot deeper, but you could never be too careful. There had already been some spectacular finds, although we wouldn’t know how spectacular until we got results from the lab on exact dates.
I went from person to person, filling canteens as they took the chance for a short break.
“Think we’ll ever find where the people buried here lived?” Paul wondered as he wiped the sweat from his forehead.
It was an enigma. The Etruscans normally placed their cemeteries next to their settlements, but we had found no indication of any homes here, just dozens of funerary urns down here and the Italians were busy digging out the larger tombs found higher up by ground penetrating radar.
“My guess is lower down in the valley, but why the people here decided to keep their graves far from home is something we might never find out,” Jacob replied. It was a likely theory. The view from up here into the surrounding valleys was spectacular, only marred by the scar of the new road winding up until it ended just before the dig site.
“Maybe they wanted to hide them? Note how there is a distinct layer of soil as if the people who did this covered all the graves and planted grass on top” I said. It was a heretical view. Normally people wanted to visit the graves of their ancestors rather than hide them, but then why place the grave field in such a remote spot?
“Break over, back to work! We only have one month before the bulldozers come,” I clapped my hands to gain attention as I went to pick up a bucket of soil Paul had dug up and headed over to the sieve. For this task at least, I was happy about the sunny weather. It was easy to shake the dry soil through the sieve into a wheelbarrow below, leaving only fragments the diggers had missed.
An hour later I took a short break to head up to the Italians. Several graduate students were down on their knees, brushing away the last layer of dust covering a small pile of cracked pottery. One of them placed a ruler next to the pile and picked up his camera to take pictures from several angles.
Professor Pellegrini put on thin gloves, carefully picked up a dark grey pottery shard from the pile and turned it around in his hand. “This seems to be part of the handle of a storage vessel. Based on the amount of grit in the clay, I’d say very early buccero, or maybe just an unskilled craftsman. Could be mid-7th century.”
“But further down we only found simpler impasto funerary urns. Has this place been used for such a long time, or is this place just from the culture shift as Hellenistic influences showed up and they learned to make better pottery?” That would be a lucky find indeed.
“The graves here must belong to an elite given how they differ from those below. We’ll find out more this evening as we are ready to open up the first sarcophagus.” Our gazes were drawn to a dark tunnel leading down into the ground. There had been some kind of mausoleum above, but it had collapsed, leaving only piles of unevenly cut stones. ”Think you could lend us Jacob?”
”Sure, he’ll be happy to be part of the great moment.” Jacob spent a lot of time in the gym and with his black, curly hair he could have stood model for the heroic images found on some of the pottery. The opposite of Paul who was lanky with long blonde hair in a ponytail.
When I returned, my team had finally reached down to the layer of the graves. This time Paul got lucky first and switched to a fine brush as he reverently revealed first the roof and then the rest of a miniature terracotta house that looked completely unbroken, still containing the ashes of the deceased. I kept taking pictures as he revealed more and more.
”Is that a loom?” Paul said frowning as he tried to make sense of the faded painting on the side of the house.
”It would fit the pattern of craftsmen buried here,” I replied. ”Get ready to pack it up, we’ll find out more when it can be cleaned up back at the university.”
By the time the sun started to set and the light got too dim, we had finished for the day and headed down to the campsite where the cooks had grilled skewered meat served with lots of mixed salad and white bread. The crew still largely separated into two groups: our people from Amherst chatting in English while the larger group from Florence stuck to Italian even if the official language was English since my university paid for most of the dig, and the Italians knew English even if they didn’t use it unless they had to.
I called out to Jacob, telling him that Pellegrino wanted him in the tomb. ”They need some muscle?” he asked, flexing his biceps.
We headed up to the tomb where the glow from electric lights put inside made the tunnel look like a gateway into another realm. The passage sloped down steeply but was only five meters long, crudely carved into the soft rock.
It was the first time Jacob was down there and he looked around with wide eyes. ”And all of this will be gone in a month? 2600 years of history down the drain, all for the sake of progress,” he sighed.
The chamber inside measured four by five meters and contained two sarcophagi, one on each side while the back wall had a largely intact painting of of several men hunting with large dogs, and what interested me was the inscription below. It wasn’t long, but we had so few examples of Etruscan writing that could be connected to a specific subject.
The sarcophagi were simple blocks of marble, but on their lids were carved images of a woman on the left and a man on the right, fragments of paint suggesting they had once been richly colored.
”Originally there were support beams along the middle,” Pellegrino indicated a row of holes to Jacob, ”but those dried out and broke long ago. We sent them to the lab for a more exact dating of the tomb. We’re just lucky it was solidly built and didn’t collapse without them.”
”Now for the hard work. Those lids must weigh two hundred kilos and must be lifted with utmost care.”
Jacob and three of the Italians got together, trying the lid for grips. ”I think we can do it with some of the carrying straps we use for the crates. Lift one end at a time and put a strap under the lid, then the four of us can carry it over to those trestles.” Jacob said. “Getting the sarcophagi out of the tomb later on will be harder.”
When the lid was securely placed on trestles, we finally got a chance to look inside.
”Why would anyone put a dog in such an elaborate coffin?” Jacob wondered.
”Why would they have the picture of a man on the outside?” Pellegrino added.
”And why would anyone bury a dog together with a spear and shield?” I completed the questions.
”The professor gave strict instructions. No one says a word of this to outsiders,” I told the group as we gathered outside our tents later that evening. We had taken lots of photographs before Pellegrino put a wooden lid on the sarcophagus. He hesitated to touch anything until he had an idea of what was going on.
The rumors had spread quickly in the camp, and I used my portable computer to display the photos to the others. The other body in the tomb was a normal woman, it was just the partly decayed, partly mummified remains of a huge dog that defied expectations.
Everyone had their own just-so story to explain the dog, from the clearly impossible that there had been a human buried with the dog and that his skeleton had somehow dissolved, to the amusing idea that whoever was supposed to be buried there had faked his death and put the dog there instead as some kind of joke.
I kept quiet, as the idea I had come up with was too ludicrous to be taken seriously without lots of evidence, but that inscription was intriguing. Did it say ”Man and dog” or ”Man-dog”, or did the word better translate as ”wolf”? Only when most of the people had left for the night did I reveal my theory to Paul and Jacob, but even my friends laughed at the idea of werewolves being real.
