 Hi everyone, thanks to the organizers for accepting our talk. And today I would like, I'm very glad that I came just right after Maria Liz, because we're going to talk about the same type of sides, rock up tombs, but from two completely different points of view that I think can complete each other. So why the title, Digging Where Nature has already dug, because the area that we're going to focus today is central Italy. And central Italy, in central Italy, nature really has dug a lot. So the landscape is really characterized by caves. There are at least 150 known caves that have wrong age archaeological prisons, most of which are burial sites. So there's plenty of these features in the landscape, but even though there are so many caves, there is also a parallel phenomenon, which is rock up tombs. So they are mostly present in, well, it's a much smaller phenomenon, and it's focused in the central area, central Tyrian area of Italy, which we could define as southern atria. I know that it's much, it's an earlier time, but geographically it's north of the Tiber River, so we can define it as southern Etruscan area. And there are almost 20 known rock up tombs sites in there. There are some also in southern Italy, in the Puglia region. And today we're going to also deal with a new site that has been recently discovered and we are going, we are investigated with my team, which is in southern Lazio, so it's far away from the other two concentration areas. So these rock up tombs are very typical shape. The shape is similar to what Maria Liz described before. So there's a corridor, it's an open corridor with two walls at the sides, it's called dramos. And then there's a small entrance that can be covered or open. And then there's the proper hypogeum structure, which is usually a burial chamber. So these have been divided by shape, so the chamber can be square shaped or can be round shaped. And, but basically it's almost the same. So these are very close to one another, those there doesn't seem to be a different treatment in the shape because these are also present in the same site. So there might be a quadangular or a round shape chamber in the same site. And these are from southern Italy. So what's the interesting aspect of this structure that have been universally interpreted like this at least for central Italy? We have the external part, the dramos, the corridor where offerings have mainly been found. So pods with, for example, seeds or animal offering or artifacts and so on. So some kind of preliminary ceremonial practice going on there. And inside the hypogeum we found the funerary area. So the human bones basically. So there is this kind of spatial distinction that it's very interesting to see that we found also in caves and some caves that are contemporary. So in the Bronze Age cave, for example, this is one that we are investigating in southern Nazi as well. And Dr. Angela Margherita, where we find in the entrance area, the one that is illuminated, we found some kind of preparatory ritual practices with herds and animal sacrifices and so on. Whereas in the darkest innermost part of the cave, we find only the burials, the human burials. And this is interesting because it shows how similarities, burial practices are to one another. Another interesting feature is that we often find some kind of division of separation between the world of the dead and the world of the living where there are stone walls or big slabs that close the chamber, the burial chamber. And that can be reopened every time that a new burial must be inserted because these are mostly multiple tombs, just not individual tombs. So it is a way probably to separate the world of the dead from the world of the living. And this again happens not just in rocker tombs but also in caves, in burial caves. Since the Neolithic, we see it in the Neolithic, we see it in the Copper Age and we also see it in the Bronze Age. This is the Nuke studies, the Nuke study that we are now really focusing on. It's in southern Naxu, so you see it's far away from the southern Traskan area. It's almost 200 kilometers away, 300 kilometers. And there are, it was first discovered in the 1980s but it was never systematically investigated. We went there just once in 2009 and then two years ago there was this campaign where we cleaned the area and tried to refind the places. So this is what we found. Two rocker tombs, that's before and after the cleaning, with this very typical shape. And this is the other one. There might be more than these but that's what we found so far. How can we tell that these are rocker tombs that are tombs because we didn't find any human bones actually. But the shape, the structure is so similar to those that we have found in the northern part of Lazio and southern Tuscany and in Puglia that there aren't really any other types of structures known for different purposes in this area. And also we found a lot of pottery fragments that are referred to that period to the Bronze Age. So we concluded that these must have been tombs. And the fact that we didn't find anything is really important to the site itself because it shows how many times it was reused, it interacted with people, with communities at different times. This type of rock is very, it was very often used for construction in the surroundings so it's called peperino rock and actually in Roman medieval period, this area was used as a quarry so we found the remains of a quarry and it's possible that other rocker tombs were destroyed by this phenomenon. Then at a later time that we cannot really locate now we found this cross, it's a cross of Jerusalem carved on top of one of these two rocker tombs that indicates the presence of probably an Eastern Christian cult that it's not surprising because even if it's rare to find something like this in this area of Italy, there's in a closed village which is called Grotta Ferrata, there's actually an Orthodox church that is really unique case in that area but could be related somehow. So this kind of cult existed at the time that we cannot really say. And then there was a frequent in occupation also during the time of the unification of Italy. In 1861 we found some coins and finally during World War II this area was used as a soldier shelter. We found several bullets from World War II, we found several remains from the Germany and the German and the Allied armies. So this is why I mean this landscape interacted so much for so long with human communities that we cannot really find any trace of the original occupation. So going back to concrete, going back to our first question, so why digging where nature has rained out? So these excavating and producing these rocker tombs requires a lot of energy expenditure because peperino rock in particular, it's not a soft rock to cut or to work. But at the same time, caves, natural caves that were used for the same purposes are very, very close to all these sites, especially in the southern Etruria area. So there are five kilometers away from these rocker tombs there are natural caves that are burial caves. And also in this area where we are digging, then we are investigating now. There are 20, 30 kilometers away, there are natural tombs and natural caves. So the question is why would you dig, why would you excavate and put so much effort when you could use caves? So the first hypothesis, most practical one that relates a bit with what Marianis was saying before that the geographical constraint might be that since the cultural roots of burrowing in caves was so strong that people didn't want to move so far away and they prefer to build their tombs maybe next to the villages that we don't know about, unfortunately. But really this is a bit stretched out as an hypothesis because caves are so close, especially in the Tuscany area that it's not really a valid explanation. So the other hypothesis is that there was a meaning to this high energy expenditure, some kind of will to signal the importance either of the buried or of the community that was burying the family or the person that was dead. So there is a very strong symbolic meaning behind the construction of these rocker tombs. And this is also demonstrated even though in Caledegro Tisciale we couldn't find any kind of remain in the few cases where those kind of tombs were untouched, we found very rich great goods inside the tombs basically. So this might indicate really a will to signal the importance either of the buried or of the community that wanted to give this message. And this is another case, a very striking case example that I chose to put in here even if it's not a rocker tomb, it's a proper cave, natural cave in southern Italy that was a burial cave, but there also were some rock cut areas. So the cave that was big enough was continue to be dug excavated and there were special burials put inside those artificially excavated little caves inside the caves and then they were covered with these kind of stone walls. So when it was excavated, the walls were removed and inside there were these untouched burials with swords, with metal work that is rare to find in burial caves. So this really indicates how much effort it was put maybe to signal the importance of the person buried and the strong symbolic importance of rock cut sites and rock cut tombs inside. Thank you.