The efforts of the 2016 field season at Poggio Civitate and Vescovado di Murlo were committed to further exploring the architectural features revealed in Vescovado during the previous season of work while also controlling stratigraphic and chronological data related to the Early Phase Orientalizing Complex Building 4 (henceforth EPOC4) structure revealed in 2015 on Poggio Civitate.

Upon Poggio Civitate, excavation centered on two areas of EPOC4, the central area of the building’s back room as well as the space immediately within the structure’s open porch. The excavation beneath of EPOC4’s interior chamber clarified the construction process the building’s floor and explained how the builders accounted for the variation in elevation between the building’s northern and southern foundation walls. By infilling the southern portion of the building’s floor, allowing the southern wall to serve both as a foundation and retaining wall, the structure’s builders levelled the floor’s surface with a wedge-shaped deposit added to the void between bedrock upon which the northern wall was constructed and the southern wall. Therefore, we now conclude that materials recovered within this fill are associated with the period of construction of EPOC4. As was tentatively suggested in our 2015 report, we remain convinced that this deposit, consisting of a few intact vessels and a number of shards of hand-made vessels, points to a date around the first quarter of the 7th century for the building’s construction.

Excavation in the area of EPOC4’s porch revealed that a grouping of stones within the foundation walls of EPOC4 arranged in a linear fashion and made visible in the previous year’s excavation were in fact the foundation walls of a later structure. Architecturally akin to the non-elite domestic structures revealed in 2013 several meters to the west, we posit that this structure was simply one of several such domiciles constructed in this area during the years of the latter half of the 7th century BCE, most of which have been lost to the erosion characteristic of this portion of the hill.

Beneath the floor of EPOC4, excavation revealed traces of considerable burned soil and high volumes of slag. Although the area of excavation was insufficient to reveal any additional traces of architecture, the evidence for activity revealed in this area perhaps explains why EPOC4 was built in its location rather than upon an area with a more even ground line.

Excavation in Vescovado di Murlo revealed a continuation of the wall revealed in 2015. This wall runs another several meters to the west before terminating in a short turn to the north. However, the wall is now understood to have been constructed within a significant fossa. The wall is built to the northern side of the fossa, creating a somewhat more level pathway on the wall’s exterior, southern face. We now postulate that the wall served both as a retaining wall for a terrace rising to the north while also very likely serving a defensive purpose as well. To date, nearly all ceramic evidence recovered within the fossa points to a date around the first quarter of the 4th century BCE for the event that resulted in the demolition and burial of both the fossa and its associated wall.