Tomb Plundering in Late Antique Italy

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Fears of tomb desecration, plundering, robbing, and looting have been present in societies throughout history. In ancient Greece and Rome, tombs were protected by law, and any kind of tomb violation was considered sacrilege. However, by the late Roman Empire, the social practice of tomb plundering had become a common occurrence. Despite archaeological evidence of its frequency, ancient tomb robbing has attracted little scholarly interest and legal and historical documents have rarely discussed the pilfering of tombs and subsequent appropriation of tomb decor for building purposes in late antiquity. Drawing on archaeological, literary, legal, and epigraphic sources, Tomb Plundering in Late Antique Italy investigates when, where, and why tomb plundering became a widespread phenomenon. It also addresses who was responsible and how broader historical and urban transformations led to the more frequent destruction of older tomb monuments in late Roman Italy. Both the social practice of tomb robbing and the associated appropriation of funerary material for new construction were an important part of recycling processes during the transition from classical antiquity to the Middle Ages. By exploring how people engaged and interacted with their material past, Cristina Murer presents new perspectives on late antique society, thereby broadening ongoing debates about transformations during this pivotal period.

Cristina E. Murer is Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Tübingen. She has conducted research at various institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Oxford Centre for Late Antiquity. From 2018 to 2022, she led the SNF-Ambizione project "Plundering, Reusing, and Transforming the Past" at the University of Bern.