The Fondazione Luigi Rovati has been collaborating with Duke University for the Project Vulci 3000. The project is focused on the study and interpretation of urban transformations in the transition between Etruscan and Roman cities, their public spaces, and specifically on the unique case study of Vulci (Viterbo, Italy), a still intact and non-investigated archaeological deposit with over 1,500 years of continuous occupation.

Using archaeological excavations and large-scale remote sensing explorations, the project analyzes and tracks the social and political evolution of Vulci into an Iron Age settlement, then a monumental city-state, and finally into a Roman city, and address core research questions around urban development and transformation, cultural identity, public and private space, and production.

In the last 150 years of archaeological investigations in Vulci, Duke University is the first research institution authorized to dig the urban area stratigraphically and extensively by scientific methods and cutting-edge technologies (multispectral drones, 3D real time data capturing, rover-robots, geophysical prospections). Vulci is the ideal case study because the site is preserved by a public archaeological park (200 hectares; the Vulci Archaeological Park) with no modern infrastructures and with total archaeological visibility.

The project features a collaboration among Duke University, the University of Gothenburg (Sweden, Dept. of Historical Studies), and the HERCULES lab of the University of Evora (Portugal). Duke is a national leader in the digital humanities and classical studies; the University of Gothenburg has a long tradition (started from Kristian Kristiansen) of research work in Italy on pre-Roman sites and environmental studies; and the HERCULES lab is a top research facility in Europe in archaeometry, with special emphasis on integrating methods of the physical sciences and materials in interdisciplinary approaches. The area of excavation is about 500 square meters and it is investigated and contextualized in relation to the digital maps of the site produced by remote sensing technologies and multispectral drones. In fact, the combination of impacting methods, such as stratigraphic excavation (by “single context method”), with non-invasive technologies, such as remote sensing tools, is the best strategy for producing a holistic interpretation of the site and for a large-scale spatial analysis of the urban context.