The Etruscan town of Blera has a long tradition of Swedish archaeological research. Ever since the start of the Swedish excavations at San Giovenale and Luni sul Mignone in the 1950s, Swedish classical archaeologists have repeatedly visited and studied the sites and the landscape surrounding Blera. The town is located approximately 55 km north of Rome and is traditionally considered to have been founded towards the end of the 8th century BC. Unlike many other ancient towns in its vicinity, Blera has never been abandoned and it has retained its ancient name for more than 2,500 years, albeit in a somewhat corrupt form. Blera survived into the Roman period and gained the status of municipium after the Social War, (91–87 BC). During Late Antiquity, Blera was elevated to a diocese and remained so until the early High Middle Ages, when it was merged with the see of Toscanella (Tuscania).

The Petrolo plateau, located northwest of the medieval city centre, was the site of the Etruscan and later Roman town, but sometime during the early medieval period the settlement moved south. Today, Petrolo is mainly used for small-scale farming. The present project intends to study the ancient city plateau and surrounding landscape through a combination of non-invasive digital methods such as geophysical survey of the city plateau, LIDAR scanning of the slopes of the plateau, and SLAM technology on the necropoleis, in order to 3D map the chamber tombs there, which consist of complex corridors and hypogean spaces. Blera is a unique and particularly suitable object of study because the city can display a more or less unbroken timeline since its foundation as an Etruscan settlement in the 8th century BC up to today, although the settlement has “moved” from the ancient city plateau. The purpose of the project is to provide a deeper understanding of the structure and organization of Etruscan smaller towns and how these were affected by the later Roman expansion across Italy. Furthermore, it is intended to map and define different settlement phases on the city plateau, from the Villanovan period to the Early Middle Ages, as well as when and why the city centre moved. The project involves researchers from Lund University working at the Department of Archeology and Ancient History, DARKLab and HumLab, Istanbul University and the ISPC of the CNR (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche) and is financed with support from the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities, through Stiftelsen Enbom’s foundation.

blera.blogg.lu.se