CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

ETRUSCAN RELIGIOUS RITUALS:

THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE

Simona Rafanelli

A

s I begin this short route through the customs and ritual religious practices adopted
and implemented by the Etruscans, I would like to echo the words with which
Gregory Warden opened his contribution on “Remains of the Ritual at the Sanctuary of
Poggio Colla,” asserting that “Ritual is a physical manifestation of belief, but a ritual is
also an action,”^1 and more specifi cally, as he emphasized in 2011, it is a type of action by
its nature “performative, repetitive and reproducible,”^2 and for this reason permeated by
physicality and temporality, although its broader meaning, i.e. the intersection between
action and belief, cuts the bonds of time and space, managing to put the human element
in connection with the divine. What remains of this action, the material outcome of the
ritual, is indeed that “sacro detrito,” the “sacred debris,” on which the attention of scholars
has been more and more frequently focused, aroused by the growing accumulation of
data derived from surveys of excavations conducted in sacred spaces of the sanctuaries and
necropoleis of the Etruscans.^3

THE SACRED STRUCTURES: THE ALTARS

Located within funerary areas or sanctuary sites, the altar represents the center of the
sacrifi cial action, for it is in the killing, in the bloody violence, synthesized in the image
of the altar stained with blood^4 where, at the peak of religious exaltation and of the
sacredness of the ritual, the contact of man with divinity is resolved.
In accordance with what N. T. de Grummond has very recently observed, it is suffi cient
to cast a glance at the rapid succession of typological classifi cations of Etruscan sacred
structures developed in recent years,^5 to understand how the study of the documentation
fails to proceed in parallel with the fast-paced series of new discoveries.^6
The exploration of the large Etruscan cultic complexes and sanctuaries of Tarquinia
(Ara della Regina and La Civita: see Chapter 29) and of Pyrgi (monumental sanctuary
and southern area: see Chapter 30), alongside that of the sacred areas of smaller places,
identifi ed among the so-called “rural sanctuaries” or “boundary sanctuaries” like those
of Cetamura del Chianti and of Poggio Colla, has shown and continued to provide