For decades, the painted tombs of Tarquinia, Italy, have been viewed as artwork depicting scenes of music, feasting, processions, and the afterlife that date back to the first millennium BCE.
A recent study took a different approach to interpreting these paintings by examining how the physical characteristics of these tombs might have affected the senses of the ancient people who visited them. Archaeologists Maurizio Forte of Duke University and Jacqueline Ortoleva of the University of Oxford used AI-assisted visual analysis, 3D architectural modeling, and acoustic surveys to reconstruct the physical experience of entering two tombs over 2,400 years old.
The researchers propose that these tombs not only served as burial sites but also as spaces that could shape visitors’ sensory experiences. Their findings, published in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, indicate that the two chambers could have produced contrasting sensory effects.
Modeling What Ancient Visitors Would Have Felt
Forte and Ortoleva prepared detailed three-dimensional models of both tombs and conducted acoustic surveys in order to gain an understanding of the sensory experience. To do this, they played recorded handclaps at different locations within each chamber and measured how the sound decayed and propagated through the space. The results indicated that low-frequency sounds under 1,000 Hz were particularly important in this environment. Forte and Ortoleva stated that people not only hear these sounds but also feel them in the body, where they can cause vibration, disorientation, and possibly alterations in cognitive state.
The team used AI models to identify features that may have attracted attention and to determine where rituals may have taken place. Lighting relied on candlelight, as torches would have produced unsafe amounts of smoke in these confined spaces.
A Calming Experience
Built between 450 and 400 BCE, the smaller Tomba del Gallo offers a striking contrast to the larger tomb. A steep stairway measuring 3.31 meters long and 2.5 meters wide descends to a burial chamber. The artists painted a banquet scene on one wall of the stairway corridor and musicians playing pipe instruments on the opposite wall.. This stairway leads directly into the main chamber.
In the main chamber, visitors naturally focus on the paintings and on points where the architecture changes. Areas of high curvature where the chamber walls meet function as visual focal points. Visitors may have used these areas for ritual offerings or performed ritual gestures there.
The acoustics in the Tomba del Gallo also suggest this function. The reverberation in the chamber is short and doesn’t allow sound to build up. Instead, it rises and moves away from the space. The researchers’ simulations link the combination of clear sightlines and short reverberation to alpha-band brain activity, often associated with relaxed alertness and focused visual attention. The researchers describe the result as a comparatively calm, focused experience that lets visitors concentrate on the paintings.
A Disorienting Descent Into the Afterlife
The second tomb, Tomba dei Demoni Azzurri, dates to the same period, between 450 and 420 BCE. The burial chamber is much larger, measuring 6.2 by 6.1 meters, almost four times as large as that of Tomba del Gallo.
One image in the tomb depicts a group of demons with a small boat carrying a woman and a smaller man. Etruscan iconography often associated demons with the afterlife.
Compared with the Tomba del Gallo, the acoustics in this chamber are considerably more intense. The reverberation is greater and lasts longer, particularly in the area near the banquet scene, and sound passes easily between the tomb and the outside area. Forte and Ortoleva state that the variety of reverberation times means both low-frequency sounds, such as drumbeats or handclaps, and high-frequency sounds such as voices would have echoed throughout the space, thus producing a far more powerful sonic environment than in the smaller tomb.
“Visual saliency analysis identifies the blue demon on the right wall as an extreme attentional attractor,” Forte and Ortoleva write. “The demon’s chromatic qualities, combined with its aggressive posture and spatial prominence in the center of the burial chamber’s right wall, produce an element of visual surprise. The visual gaze is arrested and attention seems to be forcibly captured. This is paralleled by the acoustics of the tomb.”
The combination of low-frequency vibration, loss of spatial orientation, and increasingly unintelligible speech may have left visitors feeling disembodied and disoriented. The team’s simulations link these effects to beta-band activity and transient gamma bursts, which are associated with heightened alertness and threat detection.
An Open Question
Together, the two tombs suggest that Etruscan mourners moved through carefully arranged environments of candlelight, painted figures, and resonant sound, with each tomb offering a distinct sensory experience. It remains unclear whether the tomb builders intentionally designed these effects or if they simply resulted from the available architecture and materials.
Austin Burgess is a writer and researcher with a background in sales, marketing, and data analytics. He holds an MBA, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, and a data analytics certification. His work focuses on breaking scientific developments, with an emphasis on emerging biology, cognitive neuroscience, and archaeological discoveries.