News & Events

UNC Asheville to Host Talk on Ancient Italian Excavation Site

February 9, 2010

UNC Asheville will host a talk on “The Etruscan Sanctuary at Cetamura del Chianti, Italy,” by internationally known scholar Nancy T. de Grummond, at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 17, in UNC Asheville’s Ramsey Library, Whitman Room. De Grummond is an expert on Etruscology, the study of the ancient Etruscan civilization, which existed prior to the founding of Rome. De Grummond will speak about the Cetamura excavation site and the newly discovered sacred area there. The site of former Etruscan, Roman and Medieval settlements, Cetamura affords many pictures of antiquity, from everyday early Etruscan rural life to the spread of Roman culture with its heated bathing complex. This event is free and open to the public.

De Grummond has been director of excavations at Cetamura since 1983, and serves as the M. Lynette Thompson Professor of Classics at Florida State University and director of the university’s archeology program in Italy. She is also co-director of the American-Ukrainian Scythian Kurhan Project. A widely published author, her most recent publication is the book “Etruscan Myth, Sacred History and Legend.”

For more information contact Laurel Taylor, UNC Asheville lecturer in classics and president of the WNC Chapter of the Archaeological Institute of America, at 828/251-6290.