NARCE
Italy.
A Faliscan city on a triangular
plateau on the right bank of the gorge of the Treia ca.
9.6 km S of Falerii Veteres. The Mola di Magliano joins
the Treia at the N point of the site; the nearest town is
Calcata, just N of this junction. The site is the center of
extensive tomb fields. The tomb contents are like material from Falerii. The earliest graves, cremation burials
of the early 7th c., contain vases of dark impasto; the
ash urn is ovoid, never the characteristic biconical Villanovan shape. Cremation and inhumation graves of the
orientalizing period produced wheel-made pottery, a characteristic red-slipped ware, local painted ware, and imported vases as well as many bronzes. This was Narce's great period. The rare burials of the 6th and 5th c. are usually chamber tombs, sometimes with a framed doorway carved in the cliff face. A few Attic black- and red-figure vases were found in these. Faliscan red-figure pots of the 4th c. are very rare, and there is nothing later.
Material from the tombs is in the Museo di Villa
Giulia at Rome and in the University Museum at Philadelphia.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A. Della Seta,
Museo di Villa Giulia
(1918) 88-103; E. H. Dohan,
Italic Tomb Groups in the
University Museum [University of Pennsylvania] (1942)
7-80; J. M. Davison,
Seven Italic Tomb Groups from
Narce (1972).
E. RICHARDSON
