The Ritual Ecology of Metaponto, Tomb 126

In the late fifth century BCE, a child was buried just outside the Greek colonial polis of Metaponto in southern Italy (Pantanello, Tomb 126). Accompanying the child was a collection of grave goods: ceramic vases, a bronze mirror, and two surprising terracottas: a female bust and a pair of feet. Scorch marks on the grave goods suggest that the grave’s entire contents were burned in situ. Tomb 126 is unique – at Metaponto and when considered alongside inland native Italic sites and burials throughout the greater Greek world. Recent scholarship on anatomical votives and female busts found at South Italian sanctuaries raise questions about how terracotta can extend the human body beyond the limits of its flesh (Draycott and Graham 2017; Croissant 2009; 2017; Huysecom-Haxhi and Muller 2015). But though both scholarly conversations provide clues, neither explains why these votives would be included in a grave. So what happened here? How did these terracottas facilitate proper care for the dead, and what can they tell us about objects’ ritual efficacy in colonial Southern Italy?

This paper argues that the supposition that certain ritual cultivation facilitated latent capacities of particular objects to act on the world around them (in ways more contingent than a blanket notion of “agency”) allowed the culturally heterogeneous community living in Metaponto to adapt familiar objects to new functions. Drawing on archaeological records, ecocritical theory, and contemporary theoretical physics, this paper argues that the unique deposition of Tomb 126 reveals a “natural law” of funerary ritual ecology.