Dio è femmina. Rituale e culto nel suburbio di Ausculum tra Piceni e Romani.

In the summer of 2016 a series of preventive archaeological investigations due to the construction of a commercial and residential complex along the Via Piceno-Aprutina, about 4 km southeast of the center of Ascoli Piceno, led to the discovery of a large open area, bounded by rows of wooden palisades and next to the course of the Scodella stream. The area was characterized by an intense attendance that can be placed between the end of the IV and the beginning of the III century BC. The archaeological deposit is made up of pottery cores: black-glazed pots and achromatic bowl intentionally fractured around one or more whole and straight kneading pans. The picture is completed by a good number of miniaturistic pots, some spearheads and numerous loom weights. A short distance from the ceramic deposit, two distinct pits containing bone remains belonging respectively to a young pig and a calf, characterized by very special deposition methods. The site can be interpreted as a sacred area that has hosted religious rituals performed in the open air, probably in honor of a female deity connected with the cycle of the seasons and fertility. This is the first context of the genus stratigraphically excavated in the Piceno area, whose chronology, at the turn of the Roman «conquest», stimulates interesting food for thought.