Le Necropoli di Poseidonia-Paestum. Santa Venera (Scavo 1976)

The two groups of tombs analyzed add another piece to the knowledge of the necropolis installed in the suburban areas of Poseidonia-Paestum. The first nucleus shows how the oldest tombs are not aggregated but distributed in two distinct groups and confirming that the southern chora of Poseidonia in the Archaic pe-riod was occupied by sporadic and small cores of burials very different -in number and density- from the necropolis installed in the northern peri-urban area. The interruption of the burials -in the first quarter of the 5th century BC- seems to correspond to the increase of the tombs a few hundred meters away in the necropolis of the Barlotti-Venosa area. The end of the use of this necropolis corresponds to the beginning of the occupation of the second nucleus analyzed in this book. The installation of this second burial area is connected to a radical social change: if the tombs of the first nucleus and those in the Barlotti-Venosa area suggest the idea of human groups that do not need to use a particular structure of the sepulcher, or objects to emphasize the role played by politai in life, the subsequent ones contrast the sobriety of the funerary objects with a complex and varied system of signs. Throughout the 4th century B.C. the tombs of the analyzed necropolis tend to evoke the roles of the oikos, distinguishing the genre: the men are reserved the weapons laid with the vases, at the women belong to the jewels associated with the vessels of the female world. At the end of the 4th century, and more and more evident in the first decades of the III century. BC, next to an enlargement of the vascular morphological heritage, with the introduction of new ceramic forms borrowed from both the Sicilia and the Lazio and Campania areas, the ritual tends to generalize, indicating no longer the genres, but differentiating only for age classes. These slow but evident transformations seem to encode a further variation of the social structures of the community outlining the presence of a new elite who, while maintaining a link with tradition, assumes in-novative forms of behavior, probably mediated by increasingly intense contacts with the Roman world.