that tombs with figured amber of the sixth to fourth centuries were female burials, with one anomaly: the man buried in Tomb 43 at Melfi-Pisciolo. All the others belonged to women and girls. Figured pendants, in almost every case, were found on the upper torso, once the elements of neck and chest adornments, or in the pelvic area, once girdle pendants.226 Many of the (well-published) fifth-century B.C. tombs with figured ambers from southern Italy are critical evidence for amber’s importance to the inhabitants and to the funeral customs of elite women of the populations, which reveals the continuation of certain late Bronze Age (indigenous) traditions and the impact of Magna Graecian and Etruscan culture in the interior through interaction with more recent settlers of the Tyrrhenian and Ionian coasts. The link between amber and ritual, elite status and salvation, is undeniable. Two exemplary tombs of elite Italic females might be singled out: the aforementioned late-sixth-century Tomb 102 from Braida di Vaglio, and the late-fifth-to-early-fourth-century Tomb 955 from Lavello-Casino. Both contain not only significant pieces of figured amber, but also gold (a grape-cluster necklace in Tomb 955) and a selection of vessels and utensils for Figure 47 Female Headpendant, Italic or Campanian, 500–480 B.C. Amber, H: banqueting, mixing and drinking wine (Italic and Greek 3 cm (11⁄5 in.), W: 2.6 cm (1 in.), D: 0.4 cm (1⁄10 in.). Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, 83.AO.202.12. Gift of Vasek Polak. See cat. no. 21. traditions are both represented), and roasting and eating meat.227 The contents reveal a climate welcoming the Nearly every subject represented in amber during this worship of Dionysos in Italy, and perhaps the impact of period has counterparts in other media found in Italy, Orphism. namely sculpture, vases, and gems, as well as in Greek, Dionysian subjects had come into prominence in figured Etruscan, and Italic architectural decoration. In some amber by the sixth century, satyrs first and then other cases, individual objects or monuments have been related imagery, and some ambers probably were prepared to ancestors or clan, as well as to place or cult.225 expressly for funeral rituals. They are powerful evidence Rather than coming from Etruria proper, almost all fifth- for the importance of the resurrection divinity in folk religion and cult in Italy.228 They, like the evidence of to-fourth-century B.C. ambers are documented as coming banquet practices and sacrifice in indigenous graves, from (or are believed to have been found in) areas with denote an afterlife condition of beatitude, and the significant Etruscan connections: at sites north of the Po; mysteries of Dionysos constituted one path to in Campania; on the Italian mid-Adriatic seacoast; farther salvation.229 Amber could have illuminated the way. inland in the Basilicata, Lucania, and Calabria; at Aleria (Corsica); and at Kompolje (Croatia). As is true for the Dionysos (figure 48) watched over Italy, as we hear from earlier figured ambers from nonpeninsular finds (at Novi the chorus in Sophocles’ Antigone: “God of many names … Pazar, most importantly), those from Aleria and Kompolje you who watch over far-famed Italy.”230 Dionysos, the god are closely related to Italian finds. Unfortunately, as is the not only of wine but of dance and drama, who promised case with the ambers from the eighth to sixth centuries, experiences outside the corporeal (ecstacies), was an only a few ambers of fifth-to-fourth-century date have obvious focus for individuals worried about the been included in the study or, in some cases, publication afterworld.231 By the fifth century B.C., as Susan Guettel of the graves’ skeletal material. None of the significant Cole has observed, “the rituals of his cult were clearly amber objects from chance finds, problematic associated with themes of life and death. Dionysus was a excavations, or illicit undertakings are able to yield god whose myths about a double birth, death and rebirth, information about the sex of the inhabitant(s) or other and a journey to the underworld made him a figure critical contextual information. The admirable exceptions, including many recent excavations in the Basilicata, show 70 INTRODUCTION