To put it mildly, the sheep-herding, pre-Roman tribes of southeastern Italy, sometimes known as the Iapygians, did not always get along with the ancient Greeks then establishing colonies alongside them at the heel of Italy’s boot-shaped peninsula. These Indo-European peoples, for example, managed to kill Archidamus III, the king of Sparta, in 338 BCE—after the ruler touched ground with a fleet and mercenary army hellbent on defending the ancient Greek colony of Tarentum.
But archaeologists have now discovered a tomb in what was once the ancient city of Manduria, home to the Iapygian tribe known as the Messapians, that very much complicates these centuries of hostility between the Greeks and Italy’s more established residents. Researchers with the region’s superintendent of archaeology, fine arts, and landscape announced that they have uncovered a tomb within the ruins of Manduria that apparently belonged to a local priestess who worshipped Demeter (“Demetra” in Italian), an ancient Greek goddess of the harvest.
Someone, in other words, was worshiping an Olympian deity—one with cultural ties to health, agriculture, and the underworld—around the same time and in the same city where Archidamus III was ultimately defeated and killed.
“The first epigraphical and iconographic interpretations suggest that the burial may have belonged to a female figure holding important priestly functions related to the cult of Demetra,”
