Excavations in the late 19th and early 20th century in the cemetery of the Etruscan city of Vetulonia unearthed many opulent ‘princely graves’ dating to the Orientalizing period (end of the 8th – beginning of the 6th century BC). However, the cemetery has never been the subject of a comprehensive investigation. This volume offers for the first time an overall picture of the research history, the funeral customs and the material culture of Orientalizing Vetulonia. The study is aimed at recontextualizing the grave complexes and is based on the unpublished original documentation and on the corpus of finds. New insights on the social development of Vetulonia are offered, in particular on the emergence the ‘gentilician’ society and the phenomenon of the ‘princely graves’.

Since its discovery in the 1960s, the Macchiabate necropolis of Francavilla Marittima in northern Calabria has been a key archaeological site when it comes to the encounter between the Greeks and the indigenous Iron Age cultures in southern Italy in the 8th century BC. 40 years after the end of the first excavation by the Italian archaeologist P. Zancani Montuoro, the University of Basel resumed the exploration of the burial ground with the aim of embedding the old excavations into a new basis and to shed new light on the beginning of the cultural exchange between the indigenous and the Greek actors of the migration process. In this volume, the results of the excavations from 2009 to 2016 are presented and located in terms of cultural history.