Ancient Greek vases from Athens to Vulci and beyond... A view from American Museum’s Collections

Reknown for its vast and rich necropolis, the Etruscan site of Vulci (Lazio, Italy), subjected to Rome at the beginning of the 3^rd century BC, is of first importance in the Western Mediterranean during Antiquity even if it is very little evoked by ancient literary sources. Indeed, its archaeological evidence reveals the power, splendor and cultural openness of the aristocracies of Southern Etruria. The establishment of the unpublished corpus of archaeological material scattered in the european antiquities market in the 19^th century coming from the commercial excavations of the Eastern necropolis of the site by Alexandrine and Lucien Bonaparte, conducted from 1828 to 1846, offers an original point of view on the cultural history of the site. Reassessing its role in cross-cultural transfers of the Orientalising and Archaic Mediterranean is the main issue of this research at the crossroads of the History of archeology, the study of patrimonial translocations as well as Greek and pre-Roman archaeology. Thanks to a multidisciplinary approach that combines history of collections, stylistic, typo-chronological and contextual research of the identified remains, this work intends to rethink the economical and cultural dynamics at work in the Etruscan city between the 7^th and 5^th centuries BC. While presenting this ongoing project, this paper will focus on the study of some Greek vases now preserved in the American museum collections (New York, Yale, Indianapolis...) in order to assess one of a recent ‘Paradigm Shift’ in Classical Scholarship, i.e. the meaning and use of allogenic imagery into Etruscan culture.