Dr. Catherine Lomas

Well, you have to think that these tombs, and therefore the paintings, would have been visible during the funerary ceremony.

They would have been visible to the community, and probably they were also made during the funerary ceremony.

Yeah, we have certain clues.

There are certain things that suggest that the paintings themselves were executed during the ceremony.

So you would have had the artist, you know, inside the tomb painting them.

So the painting is not just a decoration of the tomb.

It's actually part of the funerary ceremony.

It's part of funerary ideology.

Well, yes.

I mean, you must remember that the city in the 4th century BC did not just have a Lucanian population.

The Greeks were there.

And the connection, the interaction between the Greeks, the Lucanians, and other populations, it was crucial to then define this new language, this new artistic language.

So yeah, definitely, there was influence.

But they still preserved specific features that speak this different Lucanian language.

Well, the Lucanians, unlike the Greeks or the Romans, have not left us any literary texts, for example.

We have some inscriptions, but these tombs, these paintings are sort of visual book, and they offer us some very important glimpses in the life and culture of the Lucanians.

So yes, the material culture is absolutely key to understand this population.