Archeologia della morte a Mutina. Ricerche multidisciplinari per lo studio del paesaggio delle necropoli lungo la via Emilia

Mutina context, thanks to the investigations carried out along the Via Emilia, is a representative case study in order to understand the evolution of the ancient landscape and of the social composition, reflected in the organization of the funerary area. As a result of the multidisciplinary research methodology, new data about interaction hybridization and resilience processes, which affect the Mutina community, are coming up. The study of the funerary topography linked to the rituals and people’s personal stories (biological and epigraphic analyses), clearly shows the relationship between dead and living spaces; in particular, territorial hierarchies have been identified, with élite reserved zones, rituals shared by the community, while others were common through members of non-native cultures.
These researches have been associated with vegetation environment and landscape analysis, as well as stratigraphic and sedimentary evolution studies. The suburban funerary space in fact represents the area in which it is possible to recognize the depositional dynamics of the geological- environmental phenomena, mentioned in ancient sources and several times remarked by the city history’s literature, and on which recent researches are providing new important data.