Using AI, Scientists Recreate the Sights and Sounds of 2,500-Year-Old Tombs

The Etruscan painted tombs of Tarquinia, Italy, dating from around the 7th to the 1st century BCE, have long been celebrated for their vivid iconography and remarkable state of preservation. Now, archaeologists have used AI to examine how sight and sound may have affected Etruscan mourners of the time.

Focusing on two 5th-century BCE painted tombs at Tarquinia, the Tomba del Gallo and the Tomba dei Demoni Azzurri (“Tomb of the Blue Demon”), as case studies, researchers used acoustic science and AI modeling to recreate each tomb’s distinct experiential strategy. Their findings suggest that these tombs were intended not simply to house the dead but to affect the living through an immersive environment.

“Etruscan tomb architecture was structurally designed in a manner that produce[d] somatic and affective responses,” say archaeologists Maurizio Forte of Duke University and Jacqueline Ortoleva of the University of Oxford, who coauthored a study recently published in August in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory.

To prove their point, Forte and Otoleva attempted to reproduce the aural and visual conditions of the tombs in their day. An acoustic survey involved playing recorded handclaps at different locations and measuring how they reverberated through each tomb. To mimic the visual experience of a 5th-century audience, the team used AI to map movement routes through the tombs while imagining how they may have looked in candlelight.

“The dromos (entrance passage), with its narrowing walls and descending axis, created a liminal transition that physically oriented the body before it entered the chamber,” the authors write, “We suggest that [the tombs’] images were not purely commemorative but instead had the potential to activate the sensorium of those present.”

“For example,” they continue, “Torch light flickering across painted dancers created movement; incense and the smell of libations layered the olfactory register onto the visual. Sound—lamentation, music, the movement of offerings—completed what we might now call an immersive environment.”

According to Forte and Otoliva, while the two tombs were built in the same general period, they may have induced different feelings in their visitors. While the Tomba del Gallo seems to have prioritized a calm experience, the Tomb of the Blue Demon likely precipitated feelings of disembodiment and disorientation. They note that it’s unclear whether the tomb builders intentionally designed these effects or whether they emerged from the space and materials at hand.

What remains, however, is the builders’ deliberation in constructing emotive and sensory experience. “The implications of the present study extend well beyond Tarquinia,” Forte and Otoliva conclude. “If Etruscan funerary architects were deliberately engineering spatial geometry, pictorial content, and acoustic experiences inside the tomb space, then we must fundamentally reconsider the category of ‘funerary architecture’ across the ancient Mediterranean and beyond.”