Another 7th century B.C. chariot burial of the Piceni people has been discovered in Corinaldo, a town in the province of Ancona in central Italy’s Le Marche region. Like its predecessor, this burial was found inside a circular ring ditch 100 feet in diameter, and contained more than 150 artifacts. Objects packed into the rectangular pit include a two-wheeled iron chariot, a bronze helmet, a large bronze cauldron, ceramic pottery for serving food and drink, finely decorated bronze vessels and banquet utensils including a bundle of skewers and an iron axe used to prepare meat.

The first chariot burial from the first half of the 7th century B.C. was uncovered in 2018 at the site of a planned new sports complex. The excavation revealed a large necropolis with Roman-era and three ring ditches that pre-date the Romans by centuries. The ring ditch indicated a tumulus once stood on the spot. Within its 100-foot diameter was a rectangular grave crammed to the gills with precious grave goods, including a bronze helmet, a bundle of iron skewers, more than a hundred ceramic vessels and an iron-wheeled chariot. The burial mound and enormous wealth of the grave’s contents identified the deceased as a member of the aristocratic elite of the Piceni people, earning him the monicker “the Prince of Corinaldo.”

The Prince of Corinaldo’s bronze helmet was found flattened and in fragments. It took four years of painstaking conservation to piece it back together so it could go on public display looking like an actual helmet instead of a frisbee. The helmet in the newly-discovered grave is in much better condition, its brim and base still intact. The dome has collapsed (or been destroyed), but its pieces are in situ and will come together again more easily than the squashed example.

The collection of archaeological findings suggests a connection with the Etruscan culture, with which the Picene aristocracy maintained exchanges and relations during that historical period.

The artifacts found, such as banquet utensils and vessels for food and drink, offer a fascinating window into the life and customs of high-ranking figures in ancient Picene society.

The foundations of a previously unknown Etruscan temple have been found in Tuscania, an ancient city near Viterbo, about 60 miles northwest of Rome. The temple was discovered in the Etruscan necropolis of Sasso Pinzuto.

Associated with the Etruscan settlement on the adjacent Colle San Pietro, the necropolis consists of more than 120 tumulus and chamber tombs carved out of the volcanic tufa that date from the first half of the 7th century B.C. to the Hellenistic period (3rd-2nd century B.C.). It has been explored off and on since the 1830s, and many funerary offerings, mainly pottery vessels, have been unearthed.

Polychrome clay slabs dating to the second quarter of the 6th century B.C. decorated with molded reliefs depicting ceremonies and celebrations of the Etruscan elites have also been found, often broken and piled in the ditches surrounding burial mounds. Archaeologists have long thought the slabs were architectural features that once adorned cult buildings, but the remains of no such structures have been found. Until now.

Specifically, the tuffaceous opus quadratum foundations of a building with a rectangular plan, measuring 6.2 x 7.1 meters, oriented north-northeast and facing the access road to the urban area of Colle San Pietro, were discovered. Exploration of this building, located in a dominant position over the surrounding area, will enable the acquisition of information about funerary cults, characteristic of Tuscania in the Archaic period. It was probably a cult building, an oikos as it is called in technical terms, that is, the house of the deity (oikos in Greek, in fact, means “house”).

The building was found in a tongue of land just under 1,000 m² in size, housing at least three mounds with crepidines dug into the tufa and integrated in opus quadratum. North of the largest mound, with a diameter of more than ten meters, nine small pits in the tuff were intended for burials and cults: it is in this area of the excavation that the building was found.

The current excavation of the necropolis aims to deepen the knowledge of Etruscan Tuscania, focusing on how the interplay of monumental architecture and smaller burials explain the social structure of the settlement’s earliest periods (Orientalizing and Archaic, 7th-5th centuries B.C.).

The mystery of the pair of Early Bronze Age axeheads that were mailed anonymously to the National Museum of Ireland last month has been solved. The sender has come forward to tell his story. His name is Thomas Dunne, and he’s a farmer from County Westmeath. He found the axes on his land while looking for a lost piece of equipment.

Thomas Dunne said he had found the items by chance on his silage field at Banagher at the end of June. “I was cutting silage [grass fodder for beef cattle] one day and a bit of metal fell off a mower,” he told the Irish Times.

He said: “We started looking for it then because we thought it might go into the silage harvester and break it up. So, I got a man with a metal detector to look for it and that’s how it was found. It was in the side of a field underneath a row of beech trees; there would have been ancient forts on the land around here.”

At first Dunne thought they were horse plough fragments or some other kind of scrap metal and almost tossed them back in the ditch, but the person who was helping him out thought they might be archaeologically significant, so he decided to send them to the museum instead of throwing them in a ditch. He packed them up carefully in a oat bar box and send them anonymously because any archaeological finds made in Ireland are property of the state, and there are serious penalties for people who illicitly seek them out.

Dunne was not looking for archaeological objects, so he wasn’t actually breaking the law that requires written prior permission for metal detectorists or risk a large penalty of up to three months in prison or a $70,000 fine. He just figured discretion was the better part of valour and kept mum. He only found out their age and function when he read about his donation in the newspapers a week later.

National Museum archaeologists are now surveying the find site, logging everything they can find that might shed light on the Bronze Age people who created the handaxes 4,000 years ago.