Field director Emanuele Mariotti unambiguously calls it “the find of the century” — the most significant discovery in Mediterranean archaeology thus far in the 21st century, and maybe in the last century, too.
In the autumn of 2022, his team excavating at the ancient thermal baths at San Casciano dei Bagni, Italy, revealed to the public the spectacular relics they’d pulled from the mud. Scholars and armchair archaeologists alike were gobsmacked, both by the abundance of artifacts — more than two dozen bronze statues and busts — and by their remarkable states of preservation, thanks to their long sleep under a blanket of airtight muck.
The artistic value of the bronzes is indisputable, but what makes San Casciano so important, Mariotti says, is that the objects and the broader site being excavated are exactly as they were left when the site was systematically closed around the turn of the fifth century C.E. “Museums are full of beautiful objects,” he says. “But sometimes they don’t tell the story, the relationships between those objects.” Thanks to this intact historical context, the story emerging here promises to shed new light on the end of the Etruscan period, a turning point in history as dominion over the central Italian peninsula transitioned from the Etruscans to the Romans.
Archaeologists have also recovered bronze anatomical figures of feet, hands, ears, internal organs and viscera, even a uterus. It’s these peculiar finds that help to verify that San Casciano was more than just a place where worshippers petitioned the gods.
